№ 1(58) 2025: Photographs as things. Researching the materiality of the photographic
Guest editors:
Olga Boytsova, PhD in History, Secretary of the Editorial Board of the journal ‘Anthropological Forum’
Maria Gourieva, PhD in Philosophy, Associate Professor, International School of Arts and Cultural Heritage, European University at St. Petersburg
Historically, comprehension of photography as cultural phenomenon pays main attention to the image. Throughout the twentieth century, theory of photography has focused on the problems of photographic indexicality, photographic authenticity, and the semiotics of the photographic image. The physical characteristics of photographs and their material properties as objects have long remained on the periphery of researchers’ interest.
It was only at the end of the twentieth century that the materiality of photography began to attract the attention of theoreticians. Drawing on cultural anthropology and following the ‘new materialities’, theory of photography in the early twenty-first century turns to photography as a phenomenon directly related to physical and chemical processes and substances. Photographs in this perspective can be considered material objects with which people interact in time and space, living them bodily and affectively. A methodological framework for the theoretical exploration of photographic materiality still needs to be developed.
In this issue we propose to understand by the ‘materiality’ of the photographic, firstly, the physical characteristics of photographic materials, objects, and processes (they may be different at the stages of production, use, and storage of photographs). The physical characteristics of these materials, objects, and processes imply certain possibilities and limitations that affect their use. They also affect the specifics of the subjects’ interaction with photographic objects and technologies in time and space. Secondly, in the notion of ‘materiality of the photographic’ we include multisensory, i.e. not limited to the visual channel of perception, experience of individuals who create, store, look at, show, use photographs.
The following questions are proposed for discussion:
- How do photographic objects, materials, practices influence the social – for example, by organising time and space as well as social interactions that take place in these spatio-temporal coordinates?
- How do the physical characteristics of photographic objects and materials influence the cultural meanings of the photographic?
- What is the relationship between the material characteristics of the photographic and the affective labour of photographs?
- How does the materiality of photographic objects affect the sensory experience of making, using, distributing, storing, destroying photographs?
- What theoretical paths and frameworks are possible for investigating the materiality of the photographic?
№ 2(59) 2025: Practical aesthetics and cultural mechanisms
Guest editor:
Artem Radeev, Doctor of Philosophy, Associate Professor of the Department of Cultural Studies, Philosophy of Culture and Aesthetics, Institute of Philosophy, St. Petersburg State University, Head of the Russian Society for Aesthetics.
For a long time aesthetics as a branch of philosophy had a strange status. On the one hand, it was closely connected with the problem field of various philosophical trends and movements, which ensured its quiet development. On the other hand, aesthetics often found itself in a position of belated reflection on the processes in culture and art. Clamping aesthetics with axiological frameworks, identifying it as a philosophy of beauty and art, reveals its untenability. And one of the tendencies of contemporary aesthetics is the expansion of its problem field, which is expressed in determining the possibilities of not only the theory of aesthetics, but also its practice.
At the same time, we can notice a tendency to appeal to aesthetic field in contemporary culture. Aesthetic medicine in all its variations (e.g. aesthetic surgery and aesthetic stomatology) is actively developing, various confrontations of “anti-aging” and “pro-aging” trends are taking place in the beauty industry, beauty salons are becoming part of the everyday landscape of our cities, and adherents of the experience society pay great attention to aesthetics as an important component of contemporary economic and social processes.
The idea that different types of aesthetics (theoretical and practical, fundamental and applied) can exist independently of each other is irrelevant both to the contemporary aesthetics as such and to contemporary analysis of cultural mechanisms. We propose to conceptualize the tendencies of practical aesthetics in contemporary culture in the depth of the former and the diversity of the latter.
We invite papers that reflect upon such issues as:
- Conceptual boundaries of practical aesthetics
- What is the fundamental and the applied, the practical and the theoretical in contemporary culture and aesthetics?
- Practical aesthetics and culture: the history of interaction
- The role of practical aesthetics in culture
- Russian culture and its refractions in practical aesthetics
- Forms of contemporary applied aesthetics
- Experience society and contemporary culture
- Aesthetic medicine in the light of contemporary culture and aesthetics
- Beauty salon as a cultural phenomenon
- Aestheticization in contemporary culture
Deadline for submissions: 01 May 2025.
