Workshop at Nürnberg-Erlangen University, November 19-20, 2026
Keynote Lecture by Prof. Vikki Bell (London)
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the family photograph felt essential to a critical understanding of photography and society at large, from the early daguerreotypes that revolutionized the self-expression of ordinary citizens to the amateur snapshots that filled living rooms and photo albums. In recent years, the place of the family photo has been reconfigured both by wider cultural and academic developments. Digitization has had a drastic impact on how we take, view, and archive photographs: moving from analogue snapshots to selfies, from discrete artefacts to an excess of digital files, and from bound albums to social media platforms.
For a long time, photography studies took the family in family photography as a given, thereby excluding what did not fit the frames of nuclear, biological, and heteronormative conceptions of kinship. Critical approaches that include affect theory, new materialism, and ethnography therefore have the potential to change what we understand as family photography. Moving beyond a focus on European and North American subjects also offers the opportunity to practice methodologies that help to decolonize established histories and ways of knowing.
The Family Photo Workshop will take place on November 19.-20., 2026, in Erlangen. It is organized by Dr. Anna Corrigan (University of Cambridge) and Dr. Alexander Dunst (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg), in cooperation with The Global Sentimentality Project at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and the Centre for Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge.
You can find the program here.
To sign up for the workshop, please write to alexander.dunst@fau.de or ac919@cam.ac.uk