About us
Plan
Haut de pagePhotographica is a biannual journal dedicated to the art of photography, its history and the visual and material cultures that stem from it. It covers the period from the 19th to the 21st century and is released online and on paper. Given the challenges presented by modern historiography and the history of photography, Photographica aims at helping readers understand the trends that mark the field in France and abroad. The issues are organized around specific themes that various scholars are invited to work on, and the journal’s goal is to shed light on the questions arising from photographic material (archives, collections, and so on), key players and their stories, and actual items and practices. Through this, Photographica will make available to its readers numerous sources (prints, archives, photos), historical texts translated into French and the newest developments in the field.
The project
A journal for the history of photography
Photography studies as a field today is brimming with projects and ideas, thanks to an abundance of funds, pictures and sources always more accessible online. The interest for visual studies also keeps growing in academia as a whole. Scholars’ interest for the history of photography as a field and source of information has never been keener either, be they university or art school students, as well as researchers specializing in humanities. This is the audience Photographica targets: the academics, the professionals in museums, libraries and archives, and the publishers. But anyone with an interest for the medium and its history will find an interest in the journal as well.
Over the last few years, the field has gone through a thorough diversification process. Viewing it as solely focused on art alone therefore seems outdated. Documentary and everyday photography have long been topics of discussion, and subfields such as artistic, industrial, commercial or amateur photography present as many “feasts for thought”, as well as their evolutions and interactions. And at the heart of these changes, the history of photography outlines its new face: it is growing, not only in terms of the time-span it covers, but also of the new objects it encompasses. Photographica stems from these changes. The journal is the result of an academic project dedicated to the history of photography, its sources (materials, collections and archives, including digital ones) and the various trends in its practises, theories and histories, as this methodological, conceptual and historiographical aspect must indeed be explored.
Given those modern challenges, the field can no longer stand in splendid isolation and must now blur the lines between fields and practises: new pictures or objects, crossovers with different fields such as anthropology, sociology or geography, and every perspective the many successive Studies (cultural, visual, material, postcolonial, gender) have given on the realm of the visible and its counterpart: invisibilisation.
By questioning what history of photography means today, Photographica also aims (at its level) to offer new perspectives by working through themed issues and calls for papers. Its goals are to broaden, deepen or sometimes even create from scratch a history of the subjects and producers of pictures, of photography’s tools and paraphernalia, of its commercial, industrial, academic and amateur branches, of the exchanges and travels it spurred; one could even imagine a geography of photography or an ethnography of photographers. Light will specifically be shed on some periods that still lie in the shadows, such as the 19th century or the 1940s, and the connexions between photography and cinema, graphic design or applied arts.
Photographica : online and IRL
Photographica puts out issues twice a year. These are organized around specific themes and consist in articles written following a call for papers, conference or symposium initiated by the journal. We also outsource the editing leadership on some issues to researchers, curators, new PhDs and PhD students who are thus able to learn more about journal editing with our team.
Each issue opens with a short section called One issue, one picture, which introduces the issue’s theme through a single picture and a short, free-form text. Said theme informs the Focus section, which contains an introduction and 4 to 8 articles with various perspectives on a specific topic. Each issue centers on a Sources section relevant to its theme, which presents the reader with the analysis of an iconographic corpus, document or critical edition of a French or translated text that the public and specialists otherwise enjoy little to no access to. Thus, the idea in this section is to publish documents and imagery that researchers could use, and to showcase the historian’s “materials” throughout the issues. With this goal in mind, Photographica will often publish foreign historiographical texts whose translation in French would benefit academia. The Varia section contains articles on themes other than that of the specific issue, and the Interview section discussions with experts from other fields. Lastly, the Latest section offers a review of the newest developments in the history of photography field, with reports on books, exhibitions and conferences. Each issue closes with a French and English summary of each article and a short bio and list of publications of their authors.
Photographica is produced by the Société française de photographie (French Society for Photography, sfp.asso.fr) with the support of the French Ministry for Culture and help from the Laboratoire d’Histoire culturelle et sociale de l’art (Laboratory of Cultural and Social History of the Arts) at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. It is published and distributed by the Éditions de la Sorbonne (editionsdelasorbonne.fr).
The online version is free (journals.openedition.org/photographica) and contains each issue in its entirety, as well as additional elements that could not fit in the paper issue or strictly digital sources stemming from the journal’s academic project.