Why is it that as a theoretical concept indexicality is quite dead while at the same time it keeps being at the core of so many practices using and looking at photographs? Is it possible that the introduction of digital processes to photography was much less of a rupture than post-photographic discourses often assume? And could it be that photography from its very beginnings was much less about depicting realities but rather about creating them? Some years ago, these and similar questions triggered what resulted in the international conference “After Post-Photography” that since 2015 takes place every spring in St Petersburg (http://after-post.photography/en/). The scope of the conference has always been wide – the lectures dealt with questions of photographic theory and of photographic optics, of the use of photography in politics and in private life, of studio production and archive practices, of pre-photographic processes and of what photography may be in a couple of years. If they had something in common it was their polite disbelief in that there could be something like a general and all encompassing definition of photography.

For the issue 37 of the “International Journal of Cultural Research” (https://www.culturalresearch.ru/en) we invite participants of past conferences and researchers from all disciplines to submit papers about new perspectives on what photography once was, currently is and one day in the future may become. Topics can include, but are not limited to

• looking back: revisiting the history of photography 
• social and anthropological meanings of photography 
• photography and memory 
• photography and the histories/politics of gaze/spectacle/vision 
• photography as agent and agency of collective and private histories 
• photography without referent: computer games, artificial reality, virtual reality 
• private photography: topoi, identities, practices 
• true/false witness: photography and the regimes of truth 
• the interdisciplinary field of photography studies and its actual problematics 
• hybrids of photographic and non-photographic practices 
• history and theory of photographic optics 
• history and theory of photo-chemistry.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words (English only!) to [email protected] until July 25, 2019. We will send you a note concerning the acceptance of your proposal until August 15, 2019. The manuscripts of at least 20.000 and no more than 40.000 characters should be submitted in either English or Russian until November 30, 2019. The “International Journal of Cultural Research” is a double-blind peer-reviewed online magazine indexed in the Russian РИНЦ and the Web of Science. It does have ISSN and DOI for the articles. The essays will be published in the language they were written, with abstracts in both languages.

Maria Gourieva // Friedrich Tietjen

• Deadline for abstracts: 25.07.2019
• Deadline for invitations: 15.08.2019
• Deadline for manuscripts: 30.11.2019