GREEK (HIS)TORIES THROUGH THE LENS

The conference on Greek photography and Greek history organised for June 2011 by the Department of Byzantine & Modern Greek studies at King's College, London, which I first mentioned in a post last April, has now been extended to last four days. According to the organisers, the conference "aims at exploring photographic depictions of Greece and Greeks from the 1840s to the present in an empirical, theoretical and comparative context. The themes of the conference will examine photographs as a historical source of information, as windows into the country’s past, as symbolic capital in collective narratives and propaganda wars and as testimonies that record the interests and concerns of photographers as of their animate subjects and their surroundings. This will be the first conference worldwide to capitalise on photographic depictions of Greece as a means to problematise its recent history and its iconic representation in international media. Emphasis will be laid on processes of circulating photographs and contexts of consuming them, on photographs as artefacts and on narrative discourses developed around visual materials, on photography as memory and counter-memory, and on the complex relation between photography and archaeology as a nation-building institution."

With a broad spectrum of speakers from Greece and abroad covering a number of different disciplines, this promises to be probably the most intensive and searching consideration of Greek photography to date. A full programme, including abstracts of all the papers to be presented, is available from the Centre for Hellenic Studies site. The conference organisers are Philip Carabott, Eleni Papargyriou and Charlotte Roueché.

THE 2010 KYTHERA PHOTOGRAPHIC ENCOUNTERS

The Kythera Photographic Encounters, now in their ninth year, take place at the end of every September. This event, which has become an important date in the Greek photographic calendar, brings together photographers, photographic historians, critics and curators for four days of exhibitions, lectures, discussions and socialising. The focus is largely on Greek photography, but efforts are being made to give the Encounters a more international flavour.The highlights of the Encounters are the annual two-day Conference on the History of Greek Photography, the only one of its kind in the country, and a regular group exhibition of new work by young Greek photographers. Two annual prizes are also awarded: the Municipality of Kythera Award for the best Greek photographic book of the past year, and the Encounters Award which goes to one of the portfolios submitted for the young photographer’s exhibition.

This year’s event takes place from the 29th of September to the 3rd of October. The Kythera Photographic Encounters are organised by the Kythera Cultural Association under the direction of John Stathatos. For further information, please consult www.photokythera.com, or contact the organisers at mail@photokythera.com.