Photo workshop in Lancaster

I've been invited to a workshop on photos and interspace, which was held today. There were a number of interesting presentations (which should be online at the workshop web site in a couple of days.

The first key talk was by Michael Hulme; he talked about the concept of interspace, which I wasn't familiar with. If I got it right, it's meant to describe the time/space between two events, particularly events involving more than one person. He's done some work on how these interspaces are used, and apparently, they are increasingly filled with communication through mobile devices.

Another talk I enjoyed was given by Matt Watson and Elizabeth Shove. They discussed a number of things but there we two points that I thought were intriguing. One was the tension between faithful and unfaithful reproduction of digital photographs, and the (mis)appropriation of photos shared through the internet. The other one was that as photography and the use of photos is changing so is 'family' as a whole.

Haliyana Khalid and Alan Dix presented some work looking into the use of photo blogs amongst foreign students in Lancaster, in particular how it was used to communicate with their families abroad but also amongst themselves. They also talked about 'photo lurking', which is browsing through other people's online photos; there was some discussion whether this is the best term to use for the concept, as it has a negative connotation.

I presented some stuff based on Peter Dixon's final year project (using Graffiti and its code of conduct as a way to operate a public photo display), and got a number of interesting comments and questions.