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Concerning Photography, Day 2: Material, Process and Magazine, Books

Conference, Lecture – Maitreyi Maheshwari, Mo White, Katrina Sluis, Dr Rowan Lear, Peter Ride, Diane Smyth, Derek Bishton, John Wyver, David Brittain, Jacqueline Ennis-Cole, Penny Slinger, Laura Smith

  • 1 December 2021
  • 10:30 – 7:40 pm
  • The second day of an online conference marking 50 years of The Photographers Gallery.
  • Online

10.30 Welcome by Jon Uriarte (Curator: Digital, The Photographers' Gallery)

Panel 3: Material, Process

10.45 Maitreyi Maheshwari (Chair) Introduces panel 3

10.50 Mo White, ‘The Use of Photography in Artists’ Slide-tape Works in the UK Since the 1970s’

11.05 Katrina Sluis, ‘Glimmering Screens, Institutional Dreams: Curating Post-Photography'

11.20 Questions from the audience chaired by Maitreyi Maheshwari

11.35 Break

11.50 Rowan Lear, ‘Honey on the Elbow: Sticky networks, invisible workers and planetary processing’

12.05 Peter Ride, ‘Stepping into Space: new media practice and independent photography galleries’

12.20 Questions from the audience and panel discussion, chaired by Maitreyi Maheshwari

12.45 End

Panel 4: Magazines, Books

14.00 Welcome back by Anna Dannemann (Senior Curator: Exhibitions at The Photographers' Gallery)

14.05 Diane Smyth (Chair) introduces Panel 4

14.10 Derek Bishton, ‘Ten.8 Photographic Magazine 1978–1992’

14.25 John Wyver, ‘Screening photography: BBC Television's Presentation of Photography, 1969–1988’

14.40 Questions from the audience chaired by Diane Smyth

14.55 Break

15.10 David Brittain, 'In-house publications of The Photographers' Gallery: 1970–80'

15.25 Jacqueline Ennis-Cole, ‘Photobooks 1980 – Black Women Photographers’

15.40 Questions from the audience and panel discussion, chaired by Diane Smyth

16.15 End

Keynote: 'Photography and Collage in the Art of Performance'

18:30 Welcome by Sarah Victoria Turner (Deputy Director, Paul Mellon Centre)

18:40 Keynote by Penny Slinger with Laura Smith as interlocutor

19.10 Questions from the audience moderated by Laura Smith

19.40 End

In partnership with:


About the speakers

  • Maitreyi Maheshwari headshot

    Maitreyi Maheshwari is the Head of Programme at FACT, a Liverpool based organisation for the support and exhibition of art and film that embraces new technology and explores digital culture. There she manages an ambitious artistic programme that connects with science and digital technologies, engaging people with some of the most pressing challenges of today. She was previously Programme Director at the Zabludowicz Collection in London and has also worked at Tate Modern and Artangel.

    Maitreyi has a degree in History of Art from Edinburgh University and a research masters in Humanities and Cultural Studies from the London Consortium, Birkbeck College.

  • Mo White headshot

    Mo White is an artist, writer and lecturer. Mo works in moving image and photographic media and has exhibited widely, including exhibitions in New York, Dublin, Athens, Belfast and Birmingham. Her research concerns gender, diasporic and queer identities and their effects on contemporary artists and art practices and she was awarded a PhD in 2007 for her research examining artists using the moving image in the UK since the 1970s and has since published on slide-tape, most recently in Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies (2020) Oxford University Press. Mo is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Loughborough University.

  • Katrina Sluis Headshot

    Katrina Sluis is Associate Professor and Head of Photography & Media Arts at the School of Art & Design, Australian National University. She was previously Senior Lecturer and founding Co-director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI), London South Bank University. From 2011–2019 she also held the inaugural post of Senior Curator (Digital Programmes) at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, where she is presently Adjunct Research Curator.

  • Rowan Lear Headshot

    Dr Rowan Lear is an artist and a Doctoral Researcher in Photographic History and Theory at the University of West London under the supervision of Professors Michelle Henning and Helen Hester. Informed by feminist new materialist, posthumanist and process philosophies, their thesis argues that photography has constituted a new kind of body. Rowan has delivered research papers at leading photography conferences in Europe, and has conducted research in archives and collections in the UK and North America. In 2018–19, Rowan organised Planetary Processing, a peer forum for experimental photographic artists at The Photographers’ Gallery.

  • Peter Ride headshot

    Dr Peter Ride is the Course Leader for the Masters in Museums, Galleries and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster. He has worked in a wide range of arts organisations including the National Museum of Photography, Film and TV, The Photographers’ Gallery, Cambridge Darkroom Gallery, The Arts Technology Centre (Artec), London and DA2 Digital Arts Development Agency. He is the Co-author, with Professor Andrew Dewdney, of The New Media Handbook (Routledge, 2006) and the Digital Media Handbook (Routledge, 2013) and he has published widely on new media projects in museums and galleries.

  • Diane Smyth Headshot

    Diane Smyth is a freelance arts journalist who contributes to publications such as The Guardian, The Observer, The FT Weekend Magazine, Creative Review, The Calvert Journal, Aperture, FOAM, IMA, Aesthetica and Apollo magazine. Prior to going freelance, she wrote and edited at BJP for 15 years. She has also curated exhibitions for institutions such as The Photographers’ Gallery and Lianzhou Foto Festival.

  • Derek Bishton headshot

    Derek Bishton was born in Birmingham and, although he admits to significant and long-established love affairs with Jamaica and the East End of London, he still lives part of the time in his home city. He’s a journalist, published author, photographer, publisher and internet pioneer. During the 70s and 80s he worked with scores of inner-city political groups and agencies as part of the Sidelines collective, a community design and photography resource he co-founded in 1977 with Brian Homer and John Reardon in Handsworth. They initiated many projects, including the formation of Ten.8 magazine in 1978. Bishton was a founder member of the editorial collective and continued his close association with the magazine until it closed in 1992. He edited many issues. In 1983 he helped his wife, Merrise Crooks, establish Handprint, a community publishing company specialising in adult literacy materials for African Caribbean students. From 1986–88 he was Director of the Aston Centre for the Arts Photography Gallery. In 1994 he joined the launch team of the UK’s first internet newspaper, Electronic Telegraph. In 2010 he won a UK Press Award for his work on the exposé of the MPs’ expenses scandal. He is now working on a book about his time in Handsworth.

  • John Wyver headshot

    John Wyver is a writer and producer with the independent production company Illuminations, specialising in documentaries about the arts and screen adaptations of performance. He is Director, Screen Productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he produces the RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon broadcasts and recordings.

    He is Professor of the Arts on Screen at the University of Westminster, and his publications include Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain (2007) and screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History (2019).

    For a number of years John was a Trustee of The Photographers’ Gallery and was Acting Chair when the gallery secured the site of its current home in Ramillies Street.

  • David Brittain headshot

    David Brittain has been engaged with photography as a writer, reviewer and editor of Creative Camera since 1980. He is a documentary maker, curator and academic researcher in the Media department of Manchester Metropolitan University. David wrote Inside Photography: Ten Interviews With Editors (2012), The Jet Age Compendium: Paolozzi at Ambit (2009), edited Creative Camera: 30 Years of Writing (2000) and has contributed many essays to journals and books including The Journal of Magazine Media (2020) and A Companion to Photography (2020). He is curator of the current Light Years exhibition series at The Photographers' Gallery.

  • Jacqueline Ennis-Cole headshot

    Jacqueline Ennis-Cole is a neuro-diverse Black female photographer, writer and researcher with a postgraduate interest in Black women in photography. In September 2022, she will begin an interdisciplinary PhD research-led and practice-led programme at UCL/The Slade focused on black women photographic practices from the 1980s onwards. Jacqueline graduated with distinction from UAL Wimbledon (MA in Drawing) and Kingston University (MA in Photography) and earned an MSc in Anthropology from Brunel University. Her undergraduate BA study at UCA Farnham involved weaving and textile design; and she achieved a BSc in Social Science from the Open University.

  • Penny Slinger (b. 1947, London, UK) is a British born, Los Angeles-based artist who has been exploring feminism, eroticism and mysticism in her art for over fifty years. Slinger found Surrealism in the 1960s and 1970s, using it to plumb the depths of the feminine psyche. She created three books of photographic collage: 50% The Visible Woman (1971), An Exorcism (1977) and Mountain Ecstasy (1979). She co-authored the best-selling book Sexual Secrets, The Alchemy of Ecstasy (1979).

    She continues to work in many mediums, including collage, photography, drawing, sculpture/assemblage, performance arts, film and video. Her work is shown internationally and is in museum collections. She is the subject of the documentary, Penny Slinger: Out of the Shadows (Kovitch, 2017). In 2019 she collaborated with Maria Grazia Chiuri to create the set design for Dior’s Autumn Winter 2019–2020 Haute Couture collection, Avenue Montaigne, Paris.

    She is represented by Blum and Poe Gallery, Los Angeles and Richard Saltoun Gallery, London.

  • Laura Smith is Curator at Whitechapel Gallery. Most recently she curated Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy (2021) and has previously produced exhibitions with Sol Calero (2021), Helen Cammock (2019) and Anna Maria Maiolino (2019). Prior to Whitechapel Laura was Curator at Tate where she curated exhibitions including Nashashibi/Skaer (2018), France-Lise McGurn (2017), Rebecca Warren (2017), Liliane Lijn (2015), Lucy Stein (2015), Claude Cahun (2014) and Linder (2013) as well as group shows such as Virginia Woolf: an exhibition inspired by her writings (2018) and Turner Prize 2016. Laura writes extensively on modern and contemporary art, recently contributing to Oxford University Press' Virginia Woolf Reader, as well as monographs on Lisa Brice and Pia Arke.