Image by Rob Battersby 18-19 June 2026 / 9am – 5pm / Open Eye Gallery / tickets
A single-stream 2 day International Conference hosted by the Centre for Culture and Everyday Life, School of the Arts, University of Liverpool.
Keynote speakers: Prof. Jordan Bear (University of Toronto); Prof. Estelle Blaschke (University of Basel)
This conference investigates theories, histories and methodologies relating to photographic images that are, for different reasons, unseen or unseeable.
In the past twenty years, theorists and scholars across disciplines have raised the idea of the invisible image in various ways: discussing “operational” images intended for machine-reading rather than human viewing, and “invisual’ images that appear in aggregation and in which the visual qualities of the image are less significant than the metadata they carry; the legal and political processes that have restricted the viewing and distribution of certain types of images; the images that provide the ‘training’ for AI image production; latent photographic images that have been exposed and may never be developed, and the traces of erased, damaged and faded images.
Writers concerned with archival photographs of racialised subjects appeal to senses other than the visual: to the rhythms and tactility of pictures. And for a long time now, photographers and artists have found creative ways to visualise absence, and especially, to make present subjects “disappeared” by dictatorships and through war.
Address:
Open Eye Gallery
19 Mann Island
Liverpool L3 1BP
Open:
9am – 5pm
Ticketing:
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