@saradominici
Reader in Photographic History & Visual Culture | Writing a book on the photographic darkroom 1850s-1910s I Editor at Visual Culture in Britain https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/researcher/886x9?sec
4 weeks today we will be celebrating #InternationalWomen’sDay with our 2026 online Women of Photography conference-athon on 8th March.
Join 72 speakers over 24 hours travelling across the world beginning with photography of Antarctica. Registration is open and free.
womenofphoto.com
I have a few book launches/ talks coming up:
26 March, London The Photographers' Gallery - talk, thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/tal...
28 April, Liverpool, Open Eye Gallery - in conversation with Prof. Sarah E. James. openeye.org.uk/whatson/book...
…
PHRC’s Research Seminars in Photographic Cultures & Heritage | Join us this Thurs, 19 Feb 2026, 5:30pm (GMT/UTC) for a talk by Donna West Brett, who will look at the rise of the photobook and its cultural and political uses. Attendance free but registration required: shorturl.at/YvVTs. All welcome!
JOB: PhD Position, University of Westminster & Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)
https://arthist.net/archive/51714
The walls of Katsema, Nigeria, 1930. Photo by Elizabeth Wilhelmina Ness/Royal Geographical Society
So pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded PhD opportunity co-supervised with Royal Geographical Society (with IBG):
"Collaborative Research as Pedagogical Method: Reinterpreting Photographic Collections at the RGS-IBG"
Deadline: 30 April. Full details here: lnkd.in/euQvMmrR
The walls of Katsema, Nigeria, 1930. Photo by Elizabeth Wilhelmina Ness/Royal Geographical Society
So pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded PhD opportunity co-supervised with Royal Geographical Society (with IBG):
"Collaborative Research as Pedagogical Method: Reinterpreting Photographic Collections at the RGS-IBG"
Deadline: 30 April. Full details here: lnkd.in/euQvMmrR
Teaching with material and visual culture - my favourite class of the year, in the Sudan Archive at Durham University. 🗃️📜📷📸🇸🇩
We start next week!
Spanning eight weeks, this course goes behind the scenes to look at the different areas of work of The Photographer’s Gallery. More info 👇
To celebrate the recent relaunch of Visual Culture in Britain, we are delighted to announce an ESSAY PRIZE for original research articles @vcib.bsky.social For more information please visit: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rvc... Thank you for sharing!
A picture of a pile of my books which have just arrived, complementary copies destined for copyright holders and kind friends.
They’ve arrived! It’s out!
It’s arrived!
We’re doing a photography conference! Please circulate!
This promises to be a great conference. The call for papers has been announced.
#demontfortuniversity
#photography
#photohistory
#conference
#phrc
photographichistory.wordpress.com/annual-confe...
THE AGE OF PHOTOGRAPHS. 50 YEARS OF IMAGE PRESERVATION
Call for papers
tempsepreuves.sciencesconf.org?forward-acti...
#photography
#conservation
#preservation
#conference
Cover of Photographica number 11 (2025)
Title page of Dominici's article
Delighted to have an article in the latest issue of Photographica! My piece considers the experience of visuality of the flash in conjunction with that of the fixing of the latent-turning-visible image around the 1890s. Available OA in French and English: journals.openedition.org/photographic...
Recently published; a short review of Across the West and Toward the North: Norwegian and American Landscape Photography, ed. Shannon Egan and Marthe Tolnes Fjellestad in latest issue of Norwegian-American Studies; muse.jhu.edu/issue/55851
The next Ethics of Medical Photography Network seminar will be on Mon 8 Dec, 2 pm UK time, online and we'll discuss a very hot topic: consent! We couldn't have better speakers: @duncanwilson78.bsky.social, Dr Chimwemwe Phiri and Dr Arya Thampuran. Book your place here: forms.gle/QUxL41SwixUH...
looks fantastic!
What Will Photography Be? An Invitation to Speculate – the program of the 3rd Essen Symposium for Photography, featuring eleven speakers from seven countries, is online and registration is possible!
Introducing our editors: @saradominici.bsky.social, Gary Bratchford, Victoria Horne, and @ecoomasaru.bsky.social. Interested in publishing with us? Please do get in touch!
very VERY nice 👏
And the CFP for our conference is out! I'm particularly excited about the topic this year 🤓 can't wait to see all the proposals! We're a friendly bunch, and there's always a good mix of scholars at all stages from all over the world. Historians, curators, practitioners, all welcome!
We're delighted to announce the CFP for our #PHRC26 annual conference on "Photography's Tacit Knowledge". As in the past few years, it'll be a hybrid conference, online and in Leicester, o 15-16 June. Send your abstracts by 9 January! photographichistory.wordpress.com/annual-confe... #photohist
We have a wonderful line up of speakers for our first Research Seminars in Photographic Cultures and Heritage! #photohist
We're also happy to announce the Research Seminars in Photographic Cultures and Heritage, which start on 30 October, 5.30 pm with none other than Martha Langford! The seminars are all free and online, and you can register here: photographichistory.wordpress.com/2025/10/05/r... #photohist
Delighted to be leading this course at The Photographers' Gallery in the new year! We will explore both the day-to-day work and the long-term strategic vision of TPG to think through the opportunities and challenges of the photography sector today: thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/cou...
To celebrate the recent relaunch of Visual Culture in Britain, we are delighted to announce an ESSAY PRIZE for original research articles @vcib.bsky.social For more information please visit: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rvc... Thank you for sharing!
Screenshot of article abstract. Text: Abstract. This essay uses the snow-crystal studies of the meteorologist James Glaisher and his wife, the illustrator-photographer Cecilia Glaisher, as a case study to describe a nineteenth-century aesthetics of accident, to assess its limits, and to draw wider lessons for the history of scientific and artistic representation. The argument is in two parts. The first examines the Glaishers’ accounts and images of snow-crystal morphology across a range of print media, from scientific periodicals to art journals. I argue that they pivoted from an empirical and taxonomic inquiry toward an aesthetics of design, developing representational strategies that emphasized symmetry. The latter part of the argument identifies two lessons we can draw from this case study. First, I complicate a narrative in the history of science that takes snow-crystals as exemplary of a nineteenth-century epistemic shift in styles of representation, from ‘truth to nature’ in hand-drawn images to ‘mechanical objectivity’ in photomicrography. The Glaishers’ case, I suggest, confounds this narrative of the ascendancy of mechanical reproductive techniques. Second, I contend that these images have an aesthetic kinship with projects of iterative representation in twentieth-century art, and anticipate conundrums about ‘pseudomorphism’. The Glaishers’ snow-crystals offer a compelling way to talk about quasi-identical forms in science and art, not so much by discriminating among them than by accommodating, even celebrating, the variety of causal stories and contexts that surround them. Their project reveals a nascent aesthetics of accident in the Victorian era whose legacy can be traced in, and help us understand, later representational forms.
Woodcut engraving of a snow-crystal with symmetrical laminae, in white lines on a solid ox-blood red background.
Woodcut engraving of two identical snow-crystals superimposed, in white on a solid dark green background, with a smaller cross-section showing the structure of the double crystal at lower left.
Woodcut engraving of a snow-crystal with complex symmetrical needles and short laminae, in white lines on a solid Prussian blue background.
“Crystal Forms: A Victorian Aesthetics of Accident” is out in JVC!
I read James/Cecilia Glaisher’s snow-crystal images as a case study in accidental aesthetics—unsettling familiar stories about representation, mechanical objectivity, and lookalike forms in science + art ❄️❄️❄️
doi.org/10.1093/jvcu...
The book is finally sent to print, and we could not be prouder (or more exhausted)! 🤩🥵🫠 @thalesorlie.bsky.social @haraldol.bsky.social
«Usynlig til stede» deals with photography and society in Norway after 1945 and highlights several new perspectives on how photography has changed Norway. 📸
If you are in the North West, check out this talk. It's a panel and a book launch. It's a fantastic topic. Please repost!