The 3rd International Photography Conference "Blurring the Lines"
“Blurring the Lines”, which began in 2016 with PCA Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and photographer, Klaus Fruchtnis, in collaboration with Steve Bisson, aims to promote students’ thesis research work, get international recognition, and contribute to an academic dialogue.
Since its invention, photography has been a decisive factor in gestating and deploying a new way of observing, representing, and understanding reality and with it, ourselves. Beyond its unique way of making visual information, photography has become the universal medium through which image-makers raise essential human ethics and responsibility. For the 2021 edition, the theme « Ethical shifts in photography »aims to explore the power, the moral principles, and the duties of photography in all its dimensions: the rights of privacy and publicity, cultural representation, appropriation, confidentiality, copyright, intellectual property, sustainability, ethics of wildlife, and nature photography, ethics in photojournalism, and accountability as well as the use of technology that started to challenge the landscape of ethics by doing things to photos without the viewer even being aware.
Ethics and photography are two terms that seem distant in the first instance: the first a foreshortening of philosophy, the second an activity sustained by a technological artifact. Photography can ask questions about the ethics of the world, but more likely, the world can ask questions about the ethics of photography. Faced with an overproduction of images by all means and possibilities, today more than ever, it is vital to distinguish what is significant and pertinent from what is purely aesthetic.
The conference will be held in the hybrid mode: online and on-site at Palazzo Michiel in Venice.