The peer reviewed journal Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis calls for papers to be published in the 98th volume at the end of 2020. The topic is photography, but instead of its artistic traditions, we would like to invite researchers and artists to discuss its roles and condition in contemporary culture as well as its uses in the past.

When museums finally recognised photography as an art form in the 1970s, artists discovered it as an ambiguous (both realist and fictional) medium. Photography critic Andy Grundberg called it ‘the common coin of cultural image interchange’ because ‘photographs are no longer seen as transparent windows on the world, but as intricate webs spun by culture’. Since then, visual culture has become a limitless reservoir of images – easily reproduced and ‘authorless’ – from which one could borrow those fragments of quasi-reality and use them to (re)create identities, myths, illusions of space and time, political convictions or history. Digital technologies have expanded those possibilities even more, especially because now one could translate images of any kind into digital format; transform them without leaving any trace of human hand and share across the world wide web of virtuality.

Thus, photography is everywhere, but also, having lost its incontestable basis in reality, having dissolved into countless cultural forms, it is becoming, as if, invisible. Predictably, scholars have started rethinking this medium. They elaborate on the notions of its ontology and place in culture coined by the most influential theorists of the ‘linguistic turn,’ postmodernism and the philosophy of the media: Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Vilém Flusser. If that debate mostly focused on solving the contradiction between photography as a fragment of reality and an artificially constructed discourse, now such scholars as Peter Osborne, Ariella Azoulay, Geoffrey Batchen and Martin Lister treat those tensions as complicated or annihilated by the dematerialisation of the photographic image or by the splintering into a myriad of differences. Instead of entrenching identities, photography merges the documentary, political and aesthetic functions and partakes in diverse cultural processes so easily and swiftly that it can be barely captured and may be understood differently from various positions.

In hope that the coming volume will reveal multi-faceted definitions of the new status of photography we suggest a range of research topics:

• The use of photography in artistic practices: painting, graphic arts, interdisciplinary works of art etc.
• The role of photography as a document, an ‘objective’ fragment of time, a tool of memory in (re)writing the narratives of history.
• Photography and scientific truths: the cultural significance of evidence and technological invention.
• The functions of photography in museums, curated exhibitions, collections etc.
• The migration of images across culture through photography: appropriation, manipulation, deconstruction, reception, dialogues and polylogues.
• Advertisement or photography as a ‘machine of desire’.
• Photography and politics: propaganda and protest, struggle for identities and the rights of various groups, criminal evidence and reconstruction of an event.

Papers will be published in English or Lithuanian languages. For submission guidelines see: http://leidykla.vda.lt/acta-academiae-artium-vilnensis/information-for-authors

All papers will be evaluated by two peer-reviewers and, when published, included in the SCOPUS and EBSCO Publishing data bases.

Please send short abstracts for articles (up to 300 words) and authors’ bios (up to 100 words) by 28 February 2020 to anarusyte@gmail.com

The authors of selected (and not selected) papers will be informed by 6 March 2020.

The deadline for full papers is 1 September 2020.