Photographic Objecthood: Construction, Presence, and the Sculptural Encounter

This session will form a dialogic introduction to the broad themes of the symposium through an ‘in conversation’ exchange between artist-academic Fiona Crisp, and art historian-artist Hilde Van Gelder.

Taking as their starting point the 1988 exhibition, Another Objectivity, where curators Jean-François Chevrier and James Lingwood exhibited artists who were using photography to ‘construct’ spatial, sculptural and phenomenological experience, Crisp and Van Gelder will together explore how they themselves have approached ideas of photographic objecthood through their respective creative and critical practices over the subsequent decades.

Throughout this time, Crisp has worked with photography as, what she terms, an unstable and equivocal phenomenon to manifest ‘impossible space’. Within quasi-architectural installations, she places viewers in spatial and haptic relation to both photographic and filmic objects as a way of creating affective connection to sites or ideas that might be considered radically remote.

Recently, Van Gelder has developed from a photography theoretician into an ecologically conscious practitioner. Experimenting with home-made botanical emulsions for toning cyanotypes, she explores the regenerative potential of photographic objects that are shaped through the resilience of environmental art research. She defines these photographs in terms of ‘weak images’.

Through the specifics of practice and critical enquiry, the conversation aims to surface some of the urgencies that have shaped and continue to shape our experience of photographic presence such as the self-reflexivity of photography engaging with its own material, chemical and conceptual conditions, the ontological tension between the photograph presenting or re-presenting and the agency of the viewer.

Fiona Crisp has collaborated with the Henry Moore Institute to develop this symposium. She is an artist and Professor of Contemporary Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle where she founded and co-leads the Cultural Negotiation of Science research group. Her Leverhulme-funded Fellowship, Material Sight used non-documentary photography and moving image to interrogate extremes of visual and imaginative representation in fundamental science and technology.  A survey exhibition, Weighting Time, charting thirty years of Crisp’s practice, was shown across The Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art and Sunderland Museums in 2023 and in November 2025, her second monograph, Wrongfooting, was published. Crisp’s work is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London and is held in several major collections including the Tate, Arts Council, British Council and National Trust.

Hilde Van Gelder has been invited by Fiona Crisp to engage in conversation in the context of this symposium. She is a professor of Art History in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), where she is at present Chair of the Research Unit Archaeology, Art History, and Musicology. She is director of the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art and Visual Culture. In the wake of her Ground Sea project, she has developed a practice as an environmental art researcher. She creates an experimental body of artworks that aims to be as regenerative and harmless as is possible today. Van Gelder’s works seek to intervene with resilience and explore the force of the defenceless. Her writing with images − especially tinted blueprints but also photographs printed on recycled paper with recycled inks, sourced and found footage or slowly created oil paintings – investigates how visual art can be an operative force for both re-legitimating and imagining fundamental rights today.

This paper examines the ontology of the photographic image through the time-based media practice of Sigurður Guðjónsson (b.1975, Reykjavik), situating his work within a broader epistemological inquiry into the visualisation of the invisible.

Guðjónsson’s installations – such as Perpetual Motion (Venice Biennale, 2022) – construct immersive environments where lens, material, and projection apparatus merge into a single sensorial field. The magnified drift of metallic dust, oscillating between image and matter, foregrounds a mode of photographic objecthood that resists representation in favour of phenomenological presence. His work transforms processes of observation into experiential fields, where the boundaries between image, object, and observer are subtly dissolved.

Guðjónsson’s practice thus mirrors the imaging strategies of astrophysics, where unseen cosmic phenomena like dark matter are rendered perceptible through speculative acts of imaging. Both spheres are concerned with how unseen forces become perceptible through mediation, modelling, and light. Guðjónsson’s aesthetic language, grounded in vibration, reflection, and the temporal expansion of image sequences, evokes a sense of material consciousness that is at once mechanical and elemental.

Drawing on Jean-François Chevrier’s concept of the tableau as “constructive realism” and Karen Barad’s “agential realism”, the paper argues that Guðjónsson’s installations articulate an ontological encounter with the photographic image as a constitutive experience rather than a representation. In the post-digital era of dematerialised images and AI-mediated vision, Guðjónsson’s works reinstate the photograph’s capacity for mass, scale, and presence – a sculptural agency that invites the viewer’s embodied participation in the act of seeing and, ultimately, in the speculative construction of the invisible.

Dr Elisaveta Ernst is an art and image historian specialising in the history and theory of photography. She works as a postdoctoral researcher and research coordinator at the Centre for Advanced Studies inherit. heritage in transformation, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research focuses on the epistemology and aesthetics of image-based knowledge production in art and science. Her current project, Imaging the Invisible: Epistemological Critique and Exoplanetary Heritage in the Context of the Dark Universe, investigates the visual construction of scientific invisibilities through artistic and astrophysical imaging practices. She received the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Emerging Scholars (2024) from the Institute of Art and Visual History, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, for her doctoral dissertation on the journalistic travel photography and the political aesthetics of the documentary in the 1930s. Recent monograph: The Hashem el Madani Collection in the Arab Image Foundation: Postcolonial Discourses on Commercial Studio Photography in Lebanon, 1950-1980 (2022).

This paper examines the spatial and sensorial potential of photography in the context of its digital circulation, exploring – through critical theory and case-studies – how social media photography sets unprecedented configurations of subjectivities, affects, and performativity. Building on Hansen’s notion of the digital-facial image as an ‘interface of affect’, it investigates how the photographic image – dematerialised in the online sphere – retains a socio-sculptural agency grounded in affective encounters, simultaneous sharing, and embodied spectatorship.

Considering social media photography as a form of mediated liveness, embedded theatricality readdresses co-presence through visual interaction and rituality through repetition and virality. In this framework, theatre stages become ubiquitous places inhabited by phantasmatic subjectivities and disembodied architectures, where homepages operate as the latest agorà and oral heritage of Western culture – functioning as tableaux that demand bodily attention.

Using archaeology as an expanded and trans-temporal methodology, this intervention focuses on the drifting trace-intangible, erasable, forwardable-woven into a temporality ‘out of joint; (Steyerl, 2011). Depositing within the ‘dispersions’ of historical coherence (Foucault, 1969), such traces appear as polycentric and un-archivable, enabling non-hegemonic perspectives on archives and reimagining objecthood as mutable rather than fixed.

Acting as a networked flux of information that generates affect through feedbacking of reactions, the photographic image moves beyond representation and works as an ‘anchor’ of its own ‘identicality’ (Jones, 1996).

These new temporal economies-where presence is reimagined through embodied digitalities-rethink the photographic image surface as a site of performative objecthood that actively sculpts networks, time, attention, spectatorship and selfhood within late-capitalist data culture.

Maria Luigia Gioffrè is an artist-researcher; PhD candidate 2024-27 in Theatre of Reality: Performative Arts and New Media at Accademia Nazionale d-Arte Drammatica Silvio d’Amico, Rome, with a fellowship from Albertina Academy of Fine Arts and Turin National Theatre; visiting PhD (2025/26) at Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp and University of Applied Arts, Vienna. In 2017 she obtained her MA in Contemporary Photography: Practices and Philosophies at Central Saint Martins, UAL, London. As an artist she presented in spaces including: Tate Modern Exchange (UK, 2018); Venice Biennale Teatro (IT, 2023); Fondazne Imago Mundi (IT, 2024); Great North Museum (UK, 2025); Museo Nazionale della Scienza e Tecnologia (IT, 2025). She is founder of In-ruins, an archaeology and art research platform supported by UCL, she collaborates as an artist with Contested Desires, supported in the UK by D6.

In the age of AI, the photographic object, regardless of its physicality and specificity of scale, no longer stands before us in its traditional sense. In dialogue with Victor Burgin’s Return to Benjamin, this paper rereads photographic objecthood as programmed absence and argues that the image no longer refers to the world but to the protocols that produce it under digital capitalism. Aura re-emerges not as mystical unique residue but as the machine’s hallucination of authenticity. The photograph becomes a sculptural event only insofar as it manifests this logic of disappearance.

This condition is made visible in Jooyoung Oh’s Aura Restoration Index commissioned for the opening of Photography Seoul Museum of Art. Aura Restoration Index revisited and repaired over 2,000 photographic archives within the collection of the museum. However, AI trained on Western datasets “repairs” the Korean archival photographs by statistically overwriting their difference. What appears as restoration is epistemic violence – the automation of care that performs cultural erasure through aesthetic averaging. Oh’s installation exposes how algorithmic universalism re-enacts colonial authority within the circuitry of computational vision. Photography acquires sculptural presence only through enacting its own vanishing, making visible the disappearance that defines it.

To ‘stay with’ such photographs is no longer to confront a stable object but to inhabit its code, where absence has become operational and memory programmable. Through Burgin and Oh, this paper proposes programmed absence as the contemporary form of photographic objecthood: presence as simulation, materiality as ideology.

Xiangyin Gu is a PhD candidate in Photography at the Royal College of Art, London. Born in mainland China and educated across East Asia and the UK, his research investigates how psychoanalytic theory – particularly Freud’s model of memory and the unconscious – can illuminate the temporalities of familial archives and their entanglement with political history. Working between photography, memory studies, and critical theory, Gu examines what he terms the gap between the affective and the political – the zone where personal memory and collective ideology converge. His current work reconsiders photographic objecthood through this lens, articulating programmed absence as its contemporary condition.

Hill’s research focuses on the importance of the photographic as our first point of contact with outer space and what might be learnt from overlooked perspectives in the field of astronomical imaging. She is currently looking at this via the Harvard Plate Stacks – the world’s largest collection of glass astronomical plates and a leading repository of materials that document the work of hundreds of women working in the field of astronomy in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

The plates are taken as a site for reflecting on photographic objecthood: their materiality, chemistry, scale, translucency, and fragility structured an encounter with the cosmos from the late 19^th century until the arrival of CCDs in the mid-1970s. Hill examines how the act of ‘looking down’ through silver gelatin suspended on glass, undertaken by the ‘women computers’ constituted an embodied, durational form of observation – one that allowed for an intimacy with the cosmos.

In particular, Hill considers the element of silver – which originates in supernova explosions and is the primary light sensitive material in analogue photography – to speculate on the potential of intersubjective space opened through the specific materiality and discovery techniques practised using the astronomical glass plates.

By situating these historical acts of looking within contemporary debates on phenomenology and materiality, I consider how both the agency of the observer and the observed, past and present, completes the photographic event.

Julie F. Hill’s research-based practice works with photography and sculpture to explore conceptions of deep space and cosmological time. Currently she is undertaking a year-long research and development period with the Harvard Plate Stacks that will dee her create work in response to the collection. Exhibitions include: Against Space, curated by Valerie Olson, The Beale Centre for Art & Technology, California (2025-26); The Book of Sand, H S Projects (2024-); Seeing Stars, The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, Leeds, UK (2022); Sustainable Futures: Outer Space, Land Art Agency residency (2021); The AI Gallery, National Gallery (2021); The Space Out of Time, Capture Photography Festival, Vancouver, CA (2019) and Single-Shot, Tate Britain, London and touring (2007-11). She won the Annie Maunder Prize for Image Innovation (2020) and was longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize in 2025.

Sean Ketteringham is Assistant Curator at Henry Moore Institute and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre. Prior to joining the Institute, his previous curatorial work included projects with Flat Time House, the National Trust, and the Courtauld Collection of works on paper. His first book, Architectures of Identity: Imperial Decline and the Homes of English Modernism, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

A conversation between artist Nat Faulkner and critic Michael Kurtz, who has written about Faulkner’s work and contemporary photography more broadly.

Faulkner prints analogue exposures across multiple sheets before mounting them in altered configurations on wood and metal panels to create large unframed pictures which hang on the wall. His works disrupt the distinction made in the symposium open call, investigating the materiality of photography but also engaging with the relationship between pictorial space and the viewer’s space which has long interested Jean-François Chevrier and Michael Fried.

In their conversation, Kurtz and Faulkner will introduce Faulkner’s practice, discuss its relationship to the tableau form, and explore the ways in which it might stage interactions between pictorial objecthood and sculptural physicality.

Nat Faulkner is a photographer and sculptor based in London. As winner of the 2024 Frieze London Emerging Artist Award, he will have his first solo institutional show at Camden Art Centre in January 2025. Previous exhibitions include Steady State, ZERO…, Milan (2025); Compression, Matthew Brown, New York (2025); Albedo, Brunette Coleman, London (2024).

Since completing a Master’s in History of Photography at Birkbeck in 2023, Michael Kurtz has written regularly about contemporary art for Art Monthly, ArtReview, and e-flux. He has published articles on photography in Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics and Ukrainian Photographies, and in 2023 won the International Award for Art Criticism. He is currently a Creative Mediator of Manifesta 16 Ruhr.

The Czech photographer Jan Svoboda (1934-90) developed a practice that radically redefined photography’s ontological status within the context of postwar Czechoslovakia. Rejecting its prevailing role as a documentary medium, Svoboda treated the photograph as an autonomous, singular, and unrepeatable object – a work of art that disclosed being and existence through its material presence. Working primarily through still lifes, he constructed images from minimal subjects – fruits, small ordinary objects, fragments of furniture or walls – where light and surface became active agents of meaning. Svoboda’s large-format gelatin silver prints, mounted on rigid backing boards and suspended slightly away from the wall without glass, demanded a spatial and phenomenological encounter: the photograph as a sculptural presence.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, Svoboda turned reflexively toward the medium itself, photographing, among others things, the residues and tools of photographic production. His images of film rolls, destroyed photographs, reverse sides of prints, and reproductions of his own works explore photography’s self-reflexive materiality—the photograph depicting its own conditions of making and being. This dialogue extended to his friendships with Czech sculptors Zdeněk Palcr and Stanislav Kolíbal, for whom he photographed artworks and whose minimalist and phenomenological thinking informed his vision of photography.

By reimagining photographic practice as an encounter between image, surface, and viewer, Svoboda’s work anticipates critical questions about photographic objecthood, presence, and self-reflexivity that have gained renewed urgency in the age of dematerialised digital images. His practice exemplifies how a photograph can present rather than represent, offering a model of visual thought rooted in embodied perception and sculptural immediacy.

Katarína Mašterová, PhD, is an art historian and researcher at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Her main areas of interest include twentieth-century Czech photography, photographic archives, photographic reproductions of artworks, and the material turn in photography. She is currently a co-researcher on the project Matrix of Photomechanical Reproductions: A History of Remote Access to Art, and previously served as principal investigator on a project evaluating Josef Sudek’s commercial photography. She has curated exhibitions and authored several publications. She also teaches a course on the history of applied photography at the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague.

In Photography, Encore (2014), David Campany asks whether “subject matter might be part of the photographic apparatus.” Drawing on Baudrillard’s claim that ‘the magic of photography is that it is the object which does all the work,’ this presentation explores photographic objecthood across pre- and post-pandemic, and post-AI conditions. It considers photographs as complex, performative convergences of apparatus, material and subject, extending Campany’s provocation to include the viewer as part of the apparatus through which images are encountered.

Two bodies of my work frame the discussion: Rezension – Skulptur, Objekt, Apparat (Memmingen Kunsthalle, 2019) and Event Horizons (2022-ongoing). The former engages with Gothic limewood sculptures photographed using large, multi-lensed camera-sculptures, each designed to scrutinise a single sculpture from multiple angles. Complicating ideas of reproducibility and authorship, and positioning the camera itself as sculpture, the resulting installation of cameras, negative photographs and religious figured formed a spatial choreography that invited the viewer to inhabit the relational field between image and object.

Event Horizons, conceived during COVID-19 lockdowns, extends this inquiry through AI-generated gaming landscapes photographed with a large-format 10×8 camera, pointed at a flat, 4K screen. The negatives were processed using home-brewed chemistry made from household and garden materials, where nature becomes collaborator rather than extractive source, its residues and imperfections retained as indexes of the hands-on process.

Engaging with James Elkins’ What Photography Is and new materialist thought, the presentation resists resolution, foregrounding photography as an entangled and complex assemblage of human, non-human and material processes.

Martin Newth is Head of the School of Fine Art, and Professor of Art and Education at The Glasgow School of Art. He studied at Newcastle University and the Slade School of Art. His photographs, films and installations have been exhibited internationally, including at the Xiamen Art Museum, MEWO Kunsthalle, Axel Lapp Projects, Focal Point Gallery, Open Eye Gallery, and Kuanda Museum of Fine Arts. Previously, he held leadership roles at UAL and the RCA. His research also includes collaborations through the cross-European network, PNG, which explores how social and global conditions shape artistic production and pedagogy.

This paper explores photography as an unstable, ‘live’ space of encounter, displacement, and re-embodiment, focusing on three works from Robertson’s exhibition Echo at Danielle Arnaud Gallery (2024): Lucent, Shaft, and Orange Sound (For Lauretta Vinciarelli).

Robertson proposes Lucent and Shaft as ‘live’ photographs. In Lucent, projection translates Liz Deschenes’ sculptural photogram Stereograph #36 (an embodiment of moonlight), dematerialising it back into light – the projection plays back a one-to-one video recording of the sculpture as it reflected ambient sunlight. Shaft rematerialises a fragment of Louise Lawler’s Untitled (Night) as a floor-based, elongated rhomboid of tufted carpet. The yarn re-embodies the grain of Lawler’s silver gelatin print, retracing a shaft of light cast across the floor in a photograph Lawler made in Donald Judd’s MOMA retrospective, at night. Extending these displacements, the resulting sculptural photograph reflects shifting ambient light. Robertson explores how these works and their engagement with light and the photographic index complicate Judd’s notion of the specific object. Her photograph Orange Sound (For Lauretta Vinciarelli), derived from a reflection of her body in a watercolour by Lauretta Vinciarelli (an architect who collaborated with Judd), extends this discussion of photography’s potential to embody spatial and temporal complexity.

Looking back to Another Objectivity, an exhibition that stimulated her early photographic work – she discusses Hannah Collins’ use of staging as a precursor to her explorations of how structures of the photographic can activate and represent embodied perceptual processes, and how amid today’s dematerialised images this has new import.

Helen Robertson is a London based artist and Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins. An interrogation of performativity in relation to site, architecture, context, body and audience underpins her practice and its history. Her work has ben shown nationally and internationally including Hayward Gallery, London, Stadthaus Ulm Germany, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol. Recent exhibitions include Echo, a site responsive installation at Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London 2024. Recent writing includes IN A CLEARING performingspace.org and Architectures of Resonance and Relation (forthcoming RA Discourses publication). She is a member of Outside Architecture artist-led curatorial group.

helenrobertson.net

In 1989, Chevrier and Lingwood proposed Another Objectivity as an alternative to existing theorisations which focused upon either modernist medium specificity or postmodern denials of the real. Instead, as Chevrier put it in his essay of the same year, The Adventures of the Picture Form, or, The Forme-Tableau in Contemporary Art, “objectivity is not a question of truth or neutrality but of distance – the measured distance between the image and the world it depicts”.

This paper will consider the role of distance within photographic objecthood in Catherine Opie’s Untitled (Monument/Monumental) (2020) and Wendel A. White’s Manifest: Thirteen Colonies (2024). Both series were made as a result of physical travelling, and the works draw upon the visual presentation of distance and proximity, blur and focus, in order to consider the role of objecthood within collective memory, the construction of histories, and forms of protest. Further, the works’ physical drawing in and pushing back of the viewer offers a self-reflexive awareness of the ‘measured distance’ so valued in Chevrier’s definition of objectivity.

Wells will compare these approaches to that of Berndt and Hilla Becher, whose work was included in Another Objectivity and which Blake Stimson has argued ‘deploys the original Enlightenment promise of the aesthetic’ (Tate Papers, 2004). By considering the contemporary technological context which Claire Bishop suggests has prompted a return to pre-Enlightenment modes of ‘oscillating focus’, I will suggest ways in which the distance of photographic objecthood has itself been adjusted by smartphone technology.

Rachel Wells is Senior Ruskin Tutor, History and Theory of Art at the Ruskin School of Art, and Tutor in Fine Art at Worcester College, University of Oxford. She received her MA and PhD from the Courtauld, where she was Henry Moore Foundation Post-Doctoral Research Fellow. Her book Scale in Contemporary Sculpture (Ashgate, 2013) was published in paperback by Routledge in 2016. She has also written for Tate, Art History and The Oxford Art Journal. Wells’ research focuses upon contemporary art, with a particular emphasis upon how uses of scale and distance relate to questions of recognition, interpretation and memorialisation.

This paper examines the Duchampian infra-thin as a route into perceiving and encountering photographic objecthood, exploring a range of contemporary practices emerging from vapours, thermal and unorthodox-light sensitive processes which illuminate subtle and complex materialities. An encounter with matter, including attention to its contexts, poetics and sensitivities, the paper will argue, enables new conceptions of the image as a network of complex matterings which must precede and complicate our understanding of technical images.

This paper connects research from Levin and Ruelfs’ Mining Photography (2022) to Weizman and Fuller’s Investigative Aesthetics (2021), to show how the frameworks of image production are now tangibly enlarged and extended beyond conventional horizons. Beyond straightforwardly representational images, Levin and Ruelfs suggest, might lie an image that reflexively reckons with its own entanglements and in turn points to histories inscribed from the very first stages of an images process; observing a capacity within recalibrated imaging technologies, Weizman and Fuller describe the capacities for an image which not only depicts but senses at new frequencies, hiding often in plain sight. What unifies these concerns is the necessity of observing the infra-thin to make such histories and sensitivities legible.

As these theoretical frameworks find their way into contemporary art, the paper draws upon recent works by artists and photographers including Hanako Murakami, Laure Winants and Agata Madejska to show that the image becomes a tangible web of poetic proximities and concrete information, contained somewhere between “the sound of detonation and the appearance of a bullet hole”.

Duncan Wooldridge is an artist, writer and curator. He is the author of To Be Determined: Photography and the Future (SPBH/Mack, 2021), and the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Global Photographies (Routledge 2025) with Lucy Soutter. He is a Reader in Photography at the School of Digital Arts, Manchester Metropolitan University.