CFP | Photography and/as Network: Circulation, Latency, Convergence

The theory and history of photography have long been shaped by the succession—and frequent intersection—of shifting interpretative paradigms, marked by selective trajectories and strategic erasures, and developed in response to the intellectual and cultural demands of specific historical moments.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, art-historical approaches foregrounded photography’s aesthetic qualities and technical evolution, often through formalist and iconological approaches.  From the 1980s onward, methodological revisionism broadened the field’s horizons, moving beyond the reduction of photography to a static, two-dimensional representational surface, and situating it within a broader matrix of visual and material culture. The medium thus came to be understood as a discursive and ideological construct embedded in political, theoretical, and social relations. Over the past two decades, this scholarly trajectory has gained new urgency, as the rise of digital media, platform economies, and connective cultures has necessitated closer attention to the mobility and circulation of photographs, as well as to the transhistorical configurations of photographic networks. Recent scholarship has increasingly moved beyond established paradigms—such as authorship, photographic indexicality, or linguistic models of interpretation—to focus instead on circulation, latency, convergence, and the logistical movement of images, as well as on the infrastructural, technical, political, and economic conditions that enable, shape, or constrain these flows.

This shift reconceptualises photographs as concrete, plural entities that exist within specific spaces and times (Edwards, 2004; Batchen, 1997). They are objects that are used, preserved, transported, and dispersed—dynamic participants in continuous streams of data, attention, and meaning, often moving more rapidly than their authors’ intentions or viewers’ interpretative frameworks.

In doing so, it not only highlights the work of intermediation between producers and consumers of images (Lager Vestberg, 2023), but also prompts a reconsideration of agency itself. Feminist theory has long challenged models of authorship grounded in autonomy, mastery, and individual intentionality, proposing instead relational and distributed forms of action emerging through networks of dependence, care, and mediation. From this perspective, distributed agency functions not merely as a description of the technological condition of contemporary images but as a critical tactic: a way of rethinking photographic production and circulation beyond hierarchical models of control, and of foregrounding the collaborative, contingent, and often invisible processes through which images acquire meaning and efficacy. Such perspectives have been widely taken up within art-historical discourse, contributing to critiques of singularising narratives centred on genius and individual creativity.

This issue aims to offer the Italian scholarly public an overview of the perspectives opened by infrastructural and relational approaches to photography. We invite contributions that examine photography as an active agent within distributed networks (Latour 2005), comprising both human and non-human actors (Bärnighausen et al., 2019), and interrogate their agency within past and contemporary artistic and visual cultures. In this regard, we encourage the analysis of case studies that offer ‘networked’ interpretations of photography, bringing historical-critical analysis into productive dialogue with network theories.

Taking the network itself as a methodological point of departure, we argue, can radically reconfigure the significance of images by shifting attention from their content or objecthood to the visible and invisible forces governing their circulation—forces through which the “stubbornly local” (Schwarz 2017) may become globalised, the concept of “influence” mediated, and technologies, infrastructures, and “mediators” reframed as decisive meaning-makers.

This perspective opens up a range of questions that remain largely underexplored. The present call encourages contributions that engage with, among others, the following areas of inquiry:

• Forms of social, political, and geographical relations enacted by images as they circulate through infrastructures such as postal systems, institutions, and digital or algorithmic networks.
• The often-overlooked actors involved in photographic circulation, including couriers, servers, software, cables, ink, printing clichés, paper industries, and other material and logistical agents sustaining image mobility.
• Historical practices of image transmission and their dialectical relationship with the logics of contemporary networked mobility.
• Distributed agency as a feminist strategy for rethinking authorship, responsibility, and visibility in photography.
• Historical or contemporary case studies that bring photographic theory into dialogue with network theories and media relationality (actor-network theory, social network analysis, media archaeology, platform and infrastructure studies, circulation studies, and STS perspectives), as well as with ecological, systemic, or computational models applied to visual culture.
• Art-historical perspectives that approach photography as a relational and infrastructural node—one that activates connections among artistic practices, exhibition contexts, economies of circulation, and regimes of visibility.
• Theoretical approaches that foster a networked conception of photography, foregrounding its implications for understanding practices of digital and non-digital resignification within contemporary regimes of post-truth and misinformation.

Proposals must include a short abstract (max. 800 characters, written both in the language of the article and in English), a brief biographical note, and five keywords.

The required materials must be sent no later than May 15th to both of the following email addresses:

giorgia.ravaioli@unito.it; elephantandcastle@unibg.it

Notification of acceptance will be communicated by the editors by May 30th.

Selected articles, which must strictly adhere to the editorial guidelines of Elephant & Castle, will undergo a double-blind peer review process in accordance with the journal’s policies. To encourage greater internationalization, submissions will be accepted in English, French, and Italian.

The length of contributions must not exceed 35,000 characters (including spaces and bibliography). Articles must be uploaded to the journal’s website by September the 1st. Publication is scheduled for July 2026.

Suggested bibliography:

Albertsen, Niels, and Bülent Diken. 2004. “Artworks’ Networks: Field, System or Mediators?” Theory, Culture & Society, 21:3, pp. 35–58.

Appadurai, Arjun (ed.). 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Azoulay, Ariella, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler. 2023. Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography. London: Thames & Hudson.

Batchen, Geoffrey. 1997. Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bärnighausen, Julia, Costanza Caraffa, Stefanie Klamm, Franka Schneider, and Petra Wodtke (eds.). 2019. Photo-Objects On the Materiality of Photographs and Photo Archives. Bielefeld: Transcript.

Behdad, Ali. 2016. Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bentcheva, Eva, Annie Jael Kwan, and Ming Tiampo (eds.). 2025. Thinking Collectives / Collective Thinking. Berlin: ICI Berlin Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1965. Un art moyen: Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie. Paris: Minuit.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.

Dewdney, Andrew. 2021. Forget Photography: The Image in Network Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dewdney, Andrew, and Katrina Sluis. 2023. The Networked Image in Post-Digital Culture. London: Routledge.

Edwards, Elizabeth. 1992. “Objects of Affect: Photography Beyond the Image.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 41:1, pp. 221-234.

Edwards, Elizabeth, and Janice Hart (eds.). 2004. Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images. London: Routledge.

Edwards, Steve. 2020. “Why Pictures? From Art History to Business History and Back Again”. History of Photography. 44:2–3, pp. 95–110.

Faeta, Francesco. 2017. “Public History, antropologia, fotografia: immagini e uso pubblico della storia.” RSF rivista di studi di fotografia, 5, pp. 52-63.

Galloway, Alexander R., and Eugene Thacker. 2007. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Geimer, Peter. 2009. Theorien der Fotografie zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius.

Haeckel, Jana Johanna. 2025. “Embracing the Not-Knowing: Rethinking Photographic and Curatorial Practices as Collaborations of Care.” Photographies. 18:1, pp.  99-114.

Henning, Michelle. 2018. Photography: The Unfettered Image. London: Routledge.

Hodder, Ian. 2012. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide, New York, New York University Press, 2006.

Lager Vestberg, Nina. Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization. MIT Press, 2023.

Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Law John.1992. “Notes on the Theory of the Actor-Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity.” Systems Practice 5: 379–393.

Lemercier, Claire. 2015. “Formal Network Methods in History: Why and How?” In Social Networks, Political Institutions, and Rural Societies, pp. 281–310. Turnhout: Brepols.

Leonardi, Nicoletta and Simone Natale (eds.). 2018. Photography and other media in the nineteenth century. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Miller, Daniel. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell.

Moskatova, Olga (ed.). 2021. Images on the Move. Materiality – Networks – Formats, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.

Parks, Lisa, and Nicole Starosielski (eds.). 2015. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Perrin Khelissa, Anne, and Émilie Roffidal. 2019. “La Notion de Réseau en Histoire de l’Art: Jalons et Enjeux Actuels.” Perspective, 1, pp. 241–262.

Poole, Deborah. 1997. Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Reichardt, Ulfried. 2009. “The Network as a Category in Cultural Studies and as a Model for Conceptualizing America.” Amerikastudien / American Studies.

Rothöhler, Simon. 2018. Das Verteilte Bild: Stream—Archiv—Ambiente. Paderborn: Fink.

Schwartz, Joan M. 1996. “The Geography Lesson: Photographs and the Construction of Imaginative Geographies.” Journal of Historical Geography. 22:1, pp. 16-45.

Schwartz, Vanessa R. “Networks.” American Art. 31:2, Summer 2017, pp. 104–109.

Sekula, Allan. 1981. “The Traffic in Photographs.” Art Journal. 41:1, pp. 15-25.

Sekula, Allan. 1984. Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.