Affiliate Session of the Pacific Arts Association, to be held at the College Art Association Annual Conference, Washington, DC, 2/3-2/6, 2016

Photography In and Of the Pacific: Collecting the Past, Visualizing the Future

This session will consider the role of photography in Pacific visual culture, both of the past and the present. Although photography was a tool of colonial power, Oceanic people also used photography for their own purposes, both as individual portraits and as circulated images. In the present, a number of contemporary Oceania artists have used photography to speak back to histories of oppression and to visualize the future of Pacific culture. Papers may consider historical or contemporary photography, and might consider the following questions: what is significant about the photographic medium as a form of documentation for the Pacific? How does photography's ability to be collected and circulated impact Pacific visual culture production? How has photography, long a tool of colonial power, a potential conduit for decolonial articulations? Do Euroamerican photographic discourses of desire, intimacy, and truth impact the reception of contemporary photography from the Pacific?

Submit abstracts to the session chair by June 17, 2015: heather.waldroup@gmail.com