Call for Papers: Images through words: the ethics of “reading”
A panel at the 2025 Association for Art History Annual Conference, 9–11 April 2025, University of York.
The Association for Art History 2025 conference will be held in partnership with the History of Art department at the University of York, in their jubilee year. You can find all the details here:https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference/2025-annual-conference/
Panel convenors:
Tilo Reifenstein, York St John University, t.reifenstein@yorksj.ac.uk
Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani, York St John University, k.lignoutsamantani@yorksj.ac.uk [Visual Ethics Network co-organiser]
The relationship of images and ethics is often mediated, intensified or otherwise altered by words. In a photographic context, Clive Scott (1999) has problematized the relationship between images and language. Susan Sontag (2004, p.80) argued that the photograph’s inability to “make us understand” runs counter to “narratives”. Yet, the writing of history, too, as Hayden White (1973, 2022) explored, emplots events into narrative representations of reality through rhetorical devices. Related questions of power that accompany image-and-text dynamics are weighted in Saidiya Hartman's (2008) and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s (2019) approaches to the archive as a space that facilitates history. By embarking on this interdisciplinary context, this session seeks paper contributions that explore how the coexistence of words and works harbours the ethics of writing and “reading”.
Whether spoken or written, fragmentary or longform, poetic or “factual”, the occurrence of the verbal next to/around/about/in the work impacts our encounter with it. What are the ethical ramifications of this image-and-text relation, or with the "imagetext" as per WTJ Mitchell (1994)? How do viewers' ethical perceptions shift when they become readers? How do titles participate in the ethics of the work and how should we problematize cases where the language provision is beyond the creator’s remit? Finally, from an art-historiographic perspective, how does our writing practice meddle (with) the ethical dimensions of the work? From photography scholarship to postcolonial studies and from queer theories to contemporary discussions of ekphrasis, this panel will consider such questions of power, agency and translation positioned at the crossroads of words and images.
To offer a paper:
Please email your paper proposals direct to the session convenor(s).
You need to provide a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 20-minute paper (unless otherwise specified), your name and institutional affiliation (if any).
Please make sure the title is concise and reflects the contents of the paper because the title is what appears online, in social media and in the digital programme.
You should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within two weeks.
Deadline for submissions: 1 November 2024