Visual Ethics Network

Organisers: Dr Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani, Centre for Modern Studies Research Associate and Dr James Boaden, Senior Lecturer, Department of the History of Art

In today’s visual world, we are bombarded daily with images via traditional and social media. Complex socio-political messages are conveyed through a single image. In this context, the ethics of representation become more pressing than ever, with questions as pertinent to production of art as to that of media images.

The interdisciplinary field of visual ethics lies at the intersection between visual culture, media studies, photography and art history, philosophy and politics. Potential themes might cover, inter alia, representations of: (human and animal) suffering, poverty, colonial histories, medical histories, queer histories, conflict and issues of warning. By examining a different theme in every session, the project will cultivate rich interdisciplinary discussions focusing on the core question: how can one produce and consume visual content in an ethical manner? What is the correlation between ethics and aesthetics and how is this reshaped by the ever-expanding digital visual cultures? How can researchers engage ethically with visual material through different methodologies?

This project aims to explore the scope of this interdisciplinary field by examining material dating from the invention of photography to the present day. One of the core-aims of VEN: Visual Ethics Network is to bring together scholars and creative practitioners from a wide variety of different fields in order to foster further collaborations between members of the network.

The strand’s events will include: an online monthly reading group, a series of screening session and a symposium/workshop. The online reading group will facilitate discussion on texts and visual material. In addition, the in-person screening of a film may further assist us in considering ethical questions around representing sensitive histories, politics and social events. Finally, the symposium/workshop will aim to provide the opportunity to members of the network to discuss their work.

If you would like to get in touch or for further details, please email Kyveli (kyveli.lignou-tsamantani@york.ac.uk)

Visit the Visual Ethics Network website

Sign up to the mailing list

Upcoming events

Blackout Poems for “Missing” Others: A Creative Participatory Workshop

Tuesday 20 June 2023, 11am to 1pm

BS/008 Seminar Room, Berrick Saul Building

Workshop organiser: Dr Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani, Humanities Research Centre Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of York.

Event details

In 2002, the poet and artist F. Starik, set up in Amsterdam “The Lonely Funeral Project”, according to which a poet will write a poem about a deceased person that does not have any family or friends to attend their funeral; the poet attends the funeral and reads their poem as a means of respect to the dead person.

At the same time, thousands of other people die but remain unacknowledged even if they have family due to the nature of their death. According to the Missing Migrants Project, since 2014, 26,855 missing migrants were recorded in the Mediterranean, although this number is probably an undercount.

In an era of “hostile environments”, through this experimental creative workshop, we will take the time to pay tribute to all those dead refugees and migrants that have been lost at the margins of the European continent, while we will try to consider whether we can comprehend and grieve the loss of “missing” or unidentified people, or of those that we never met. How can we commemorate those that remained “missing” or “anonymous”?

Those who’s next of kin were not there to claim their bodies and grieve them? How can we collectively grieve them? By employing blackout poetry on news reports about the refugee and migrant crisis in the Mediterranean, on this year’s World Refugee Day (20 June), which is designated by the United Nations to “honour refugees around the globe”, we will collectively rewrite narratives as a first step in acknowledging so many losses of human lives and our ethical responsibility as contemporary citizens.

The workshop will function as a non-hierarchical, safe and creative space. Craft material and coffee/tea will be provided.

The workshop is co-organised by the Visual Ethics Network (CModS Research Strand), the Found Poetry Experimental Workshops (Humanities Research Centre, University of York & Cultural Relations and Comparative Arts Lab, University of Thessaly) and the Migration Network of the University of York. The workshop is funded by the Centre for Modern Studies.

Previous events

Reenacting Photography: Artist talk and Workshop

Monday 5 June 11pm to 4.30pm BST, In-person and partially online

Treehouse, Berrick Saul Building, University of York (Campus West)

An event with Amy D’Agorne, artist and photographer.

In this one-day event we will explore cases of reenacting photographs. We will discuss what the term “reenactment” might potentially offer in a context of photographic ethics and to what extent it can assist a renewed approach to the ethical ramifications associated with images of colonial histories.

The event will start with an artist talk by Amy D’Agorne, a Yorkshire based photographer, who will discuss her practice, the ethical challenges she has faced during the creative process, and how in one of her projects she used reenactment as a tool to overcome certain ethical complexities.

The talk will be followed by a two-part workshop in which participants will have the opportunity to approach a set of questions regarding the ethics of reenacting pre-existing photographs and how this can be utilised as a method to decolonise violent (visual) histories. The first part of the workshop - based on the World Café Method - will involve small group discussions around set questions and extracts from the suggested readings, and will begin by exploring the different terms: “reenactment”, “re-photograph” and “staging” of a photograph. The second part, led by D'Agorne, will be a hands-on group exercise on re-enacting historic photographs.

Workshop participants will receive three set readings after they RSVP through the sign-up link.

This Visual Ethics Network (CModS Research Strand) event is funded by the Centre for Modern Studies.

Full programme:

11am to 12noon – Artist Talk by Amy D’Agorne, followed by a Q&A (in-person and online)
12noon to 1pm – Lunch break
1pm to 2.30pm – Workshop Part One: World Café Method discussions, with an introduction by Dr Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani (in-person only)
2.30pm to 3pm – Coffee break
3pm to 4.30pm – Workshop Part Two: Re-enacting historic photographs, group exercise led by Amy D’Agorne (in-person only)

Suggested Readings:

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, “Towards the Abolition of Photography’s Imperial Rights”, in Capitalism and the Camera: Essays on Photography and Extraction, edited by Kevin Coleman and Daniel James (London: Verso, 2021), 27-54.

Erina Duganne, “Staging”, in Global Photography. A Critical History, by Erina Duganne, Heather Diack and Terri Weissman (New York: Routledge, 2020), 39-44.
Rebekah Modrak, “Reenactment as a Photographic Act”, in Reframing Photography: Theory + Practice (London: Routledge, 2011), 204-215.

Martha Rosler, “The Second Time as Farce”, Idiom Magazine, 21 February
2011, http://idiommag.com/2011/02/the-second-time-as-farce/ (accessed 5 May 2023).

“Performing for the Camera: A discussion between Susan Butler and the exhibition selectors Tony Arefin and Maureen O. Paley”, in Photography As Performance. Message through Object & Picture (Exhibition Catalogue, The Photographer’s Gallery London, 11 September-18 October 1986), 7-16.

Sven Lütticken (ed), Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in
Contemporary Art (Exhibition Catalogue, Rotterdam and Amsterdam: Witte de With and Idea Book, 2005)

"Participatory Art Practices and Ethics"

Wednesday 3 May, 5.30pm to 7.30 pm (GMT), Online

An event with Clare Nattress, artist and lecturer at York St John University.

In this session, we will explore some difficult questions around performance and participatory art practices. We will take as a starting point Claire Bishop’s analysis of the “delegated performances” and encounter many different important art examples that challenge the limits between performer, participation and spectator, and where the ethical responsibility lies for each.

Yet, the main focal point of this session will be to explore to what extent these ethical
ramifications differ when we engage with artistic performances and participatory art research methods in regards to invisible “slow violence” (R. Nixon, 2011).

For this Visual Ethics Network event, we will be joined by the artist Clare Nattress who will start the session with an introduction about her practice based research in relation to air pollution and participatory performative cycling as an artistic method.

This will be followed by a Q&A before we move to the main part of the session, in which we will utilise the World Café Method, and we will engage in a series of small group discussions based on a few set questions and visual examples.

The theme of the session will embark from the set readings, which participants will receive after they RSVP through the sign-up link.

Set reading:

Bishop, C. (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso. (Pages 219-230 & 238-239)
Nattress, C. (2021) “Airpocalypse, Performance Research”, 26:7, 73-79, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2021.2059267
Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge, Massachusetts:, Harvard University Press. (Page 2 definition).

"Representing Homelessness"

Tuesday 7 February 2023, 5pm to 7pm (GMT) Online

In recent years, discussions that had once used the language of 'the homeless' have shifted to refer, instead, to experiences of homelessness and to those experiencing homelessness. Accompanying this shift, there has also been an increased concern for understanding forms of homeless experience beyond that which might be reduced to a certain, culturally familiar, representation.

Yet how might a more diverse understanding of homelessness experiences be represented? What are the political ramifications and possibilities for these shifts: how might homelessness be reimag(in)ed? The second session of the Visual Ethics Network will be introduced and led by Dr Thomas Morgan Evans (Art Academy London) as a lead-up to the CAA conference panel he is organising in February, entitled "Reimag(in)ing Homelessness".

The event will start with a brief presentation, and then group discussions will take place by taking as starting point the following reading:

Johnsen, Sarah, Jon May, and Paul Cloke. “Imag(in)Ing ‘Homeless Places’: Using Auto-Photography to (Re)examine the Geographies of Homelessness.” Area 40, no. 2 (2008): 194–207. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40346114.

“Why Visual Ethics?”

Monday 14 November 2022, 5-7 pm (GMT), Online

By employing the World Café Method for the inaugural session of VEN we will explore how we can define “visual ethics”, the lenses through which it has been approached in different disciplines, the key themes that could be explored in future sessions and explore whether the key questions differ significantly when posed from different disciplinary stances. In preparation for this event scanned versions of texts will be made available to those who RSVP.

Walead Beshty, “Introduction // Toward and Aesthetics of Ethics”, in Ethics, Documents of Contemporary Art series (London: Whitechapel Gallery and Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2015), 12-23.
Jennifer Evans, “Introduction: Photography as an Ethics of Seeing”, in The Ethics of Seeing: Photography and Twentieth-Century German History, edited by Jeniffer Evans, Paul Betts, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018), 1-22.
Paul Martin Lester, Visual Ethics: A Guide for Photographers, Journalists, and Filmmakers (New York: Routledge, 2018), 1-17 (Chapter 1: “Ethical Issues and Analytical Procedures”).
“Visual Ethics”, Wikipedia