Thinking Photography

What does it mean to think about photography today? This question frames Thinking Photography: New Strands in Photo Research, a five-day doctoral workshop promotes by the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. The workshop brings together three international visiting scholars, Martin Jürgens (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), Steffen Siegel (Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen), and Kelley Wilder (De Montfort University, Leicester), for an intensive programme of seminars, discussions, and collaborative working sessions.

Coordinated by Nicoletta Leonardi and Maria Chiara Palandri and conceived as a collective laboratory, Thinking Photography reflects on the methodological transformations currently reshaping photographic studies.

Across five days, the programme develops four interconnected research strands:

• Business and economic histories of photography. Drawing on industrial archives and business records, this strand explores photography as a technological and commercial enterprise, addressing the infrastructures, labour, and economies that have shaped photographic production and circulation.
• Quantity and Significance in Photographic History. Using the case of etched daguerreotypes, this strand investigates how databases, statistical analysis, and the notion of “critical mass” can inform historical interpretation, raising questions about the relationship between quantity, use, value, and historical significance.
• Personal and family photographs as sources for writing photographic history. Focusing on private collections, the strand reflects on the methodological and ethical challenges of constructing historical narratives from family archives, considering both the possibilities and the pitfalls of working with intimate, personal materials.
• Photobooks as sites where aesthetics, politics, and social functions converge. Moving beyond national or stylistic canons, this strand focuses on photobooks’ social uses, examining how photographs acquire meaning within editorial, institutional, and ideological frameworks. It rereads questions of aesthetics and politics from a perspective reframed and enriched by social function.

Through these perspectives, the workshop addresses photography as an intermedial and institutional phenomenon, whose histories are produced at the intersection of images, objects, technologies, archives, markets, and social practices. The aim is not only to present new case studies, but also to reflect critically on the epistemological frameworks through which photographic history is written today.

Thinking Photography includes visits to the collections of the Leonardo da Vinci National Museum of Science and Technology, the Civico Archivio Fotografico, and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera.

Open to doctoral students of the Brera Academy, and to a limited number of external participants upon request, Thinking Photography is conceived as a moment of international and interdisciplinary exchange.