A rethinking of photographic subjectivity is palpable across the field of visual social science. The increasing ease and speed with which digital technologies are employed to adjust the photographic image to desired messages and outcomes seem to inspire this academic imagination by unsettling the truth-value and the perceived quality of photographic evidence. The circulation, sharing, re-use and re-appropriation of images in changing contexts of consumption and communication are also contributing to a calling into question of the modern link between photography and truth.

Visual anthropologists, and others, grapple with this development, partly by employing art and curatorial techniques – such as interactive exhibitions, photographic repatriation and repositioning, and auto-ethnographic revisits to public and personal archives – to experiment with an inductive methodological practice. The open-ended investigation into what people made and make with and of images, rather than the closed or deductive search for answers to the question of what the photographer, the publisher or the scientist intended or accomplished is opening up new avenues in and for visual enquiry.

This panel calls for papers that engage with this exploratory moment, by researchers interested in placing their projects in a comparative context and of contributing to the assessment of contemporary method at the intersection of art, photography and social science.