Critical Image Forum is a research project that focuses on the political, ethical, aesthetic and social dimensions of expanded documentary practices. The Forum's primary medium of research is photography, with an interest in how the proliferation of moving images, performance, sound and digital networks have challenged and complicated the veracity of the visual document.

Join us on Thursday, 5 December 2024 for A By-Product of our Production with writer Vanessa R. Schwartz at the Polygon Gallery. This talk considers the history of Time-Life Books and the reconsideration of the history of the photobook. They offer a key avenue for the reconsideration of the history of the photobook, and a window into the history of photography’s use, storage, and re-use in the service of illustration.

Join Shawn Michelle Smith for her talk Witness Trees: Ken Gonzales-Day re-surveys the US West, which proposes that Gonzales-Day's photographic series Searching for California Hang Trees brings into view the intertwined ecosystems of racialized human violence.

Join us for a lecture Nothing Primordial About It: The Political Ecology of Adivasi Art by Mumbai-based cultural theorist and curator Nancy Adajania. This event is presented by the Critical Image Forum and the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, and the Surrey Art Gallery. Critical Image Forum is a collaboration between the Belkin and the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at UBC.

All are welcome.

Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography is a groundbreaking study of photography by art historian, curator, and organiser Siobhan Angus. Joining her is Kelly McCormick, whose recent research into photography’s relationship with exposing industrial pollution events in Japan, will frame a critical discussion on what we see – or what is obscured – when we look at photographs.

Join multimedia artist Elizabeth M. Webb for a talk and film screening; both events are free and open to the public, no registration is required. Masks and proof of vaccination are mandatory. Webb is an artist and filmmaker originally from Charlottesville, VA. Her work is invested in issues surrounding race and identity, often using the lens of her own family history of migration and racial passing to explore larger, systemic constructs. She has screened and exhibited in the US, United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Ecuador, Singapore, Switzerland, Mexico, Spain, Austria, Norway and Germany and was a recipient of the inaugural Allan Sekula Social Documentary Award in 2014.

Please join us for a dialogue between Heather Igloliorte and Taqralik Partridge. The speakers will discuss their previous collaborations as well as broader issues in curating and producing contemporary Inuit Art in institutional and community contexts.

This conversation with From Slander's Brand exhibition artist Hannah Darabi and historian Kelly McCormick explores Darabi's critical project on the photo books published during the early years of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 recapturing the potential that revolutionaries and governments saw in photographs. Through Darabi's work we uncover the possibilities and limits of photographs as they are changed, manipulated, and turned into icons.