• News
    • News
      • Latest News
      • Announcements
      • Calls for Papers
      • Vacancies
      • New PhD-research
    • Events
      • Events
      • NICA recommends
      • Event Calendar
  • Education
    • About NICA’s educational program
    • Course Overview
    • Core Courses
  • Research
    • Dissertation Defenses
    • Current PhD Research
    • Past PhD Research
  • Podcast
  • Organization
    • About us
    • Mission Statement
    • Becoming a member
    • Membership Directory
    • Organize an activity
  • Contact
  • Menu Menu

Call for Book Chapters | ‘Virtual Photography’

April 21, 2023/in Call for Papers /by Pepita

Call for Book Chapters | ‘Virtual Photography’
Submission:
s.a.shobeiri@hum.leidenuniv.nl & h.f.westgeest@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Submission deadline: 15 June 2023
Publication date: Mid-2024

Over the past two decades, the medium of photography has repeatedly skipped its hasty demise (Mitchell, 1995) by readily adapting to its rapid technological transformations (Manovich, 1996; Rosler, 2004; Leister, 2013). Seemingly disinterested in prefixes such as “post-” (Batchen, 2000; Fontcuberta, 2015), “after” (Ritchin, 2009), or “non-” (Laurelle, 2011), photography has outlived its indexical past and ushered its way into the dematerialized, cybernetic, and algorithmic era. While it has traditionally been seen as a means of documenting an external reality or expressing an internal feeling, photography is now capable of actualizing never-existed pasts and never-lived experiences. Thanks to the latest photographic technologies, we can now take/make photographs in computer games, interpolate them in virtual reality platforms, or synthesise them via artificial intelligence. While some see such epistemological shifts as the creation of a “new visual regime” (Rubenstein, Golding & Fisher, 2013), others view them as the promise of yet-to-come subjectivities (Bate, 2014). It is no longer a question whether photography is an “expanded field” (Baker, 2005) or still “expanding form” (Plummer, 2015), but to which direction it is transmuting post-haste.

Presently, the most ubiquitous and contentious threads of such photographic expansions are: Artificial Intelligence, Extended Reality, and In-game Photography. Owing to the photographic features of popular video games such as Second Life, Skyrim, Fallout 3, and The Last of Us, the (non)diegetic (Galloway, 2006), remediative (Rizov, 2021), affective (Möring & De Mutiis, 2019), aesthetic (Tavinor, 2010), isometric (Poremba, 2007), and cybernetic (Moore, 2022) features of in-game photography have been discussed. Yet, due to the rapid transformation of video game industry itself, in-game photography is continually generating new aesthetics and modalities, such as: screencast and screenshot photography (Gerling, Möring, & De Mutiis, 2023). While the ontological implication of in-game photography is still an ongoing debate, the socio-cultural and ethico-political ramifications of AI imagery are yet to be explored. Because of the rapid popularization of the AI platforms such as DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion over the past couple of years, Boris Eldagsen’s AI generated image, called “the electrician”, has become the first AI image to win the Sony World Photography Award in 2023: the prize he refused to accept, thus putting into question the artistic legitimacy of AI photography as a medium. Obviously, not only AI photography necessitates a call for digital authorship and documentary veracity (DFA, 2023), but it also demands us to reformulate new ways of thinking about collectivity and individuality. Slowly but steadily, photography is also becoming part and parcel of Extended Reality platforms, consisting of: Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, and Cross Reality. While Extended Reality photography became mainstream via IKEA’s 3D rendered images of furniture pieces in 2008, new features of ER photography are now being used in ecological psychology (Boffi et al. 2022), design and modelling (Hedman, 2020), and memory studies (Juan et al. 2022)

Whether we subsume such images under the category of the “technical image” (Flusser, 1985), the “operational image” (Parikka, 2023), the “poor image” (Steyerl, 2009), the “algorithmic image” (Rubenstein, 2013), or the “soft image” (Hoelzl & Marie, 2015), all such images retain and convey a photographic “function” (Zylinska, 2022).  To cohesively account for the most recent photographic practices and technologies, our book proposes the term Virtual Photography as a binding theoretical and methodological framework. Although the term “virtual photography” has so far been loosely applied only to in-game photography, our book aims to consider any photographic practice that has a “virtual” core as Virtual Photography.

As some major thinkers of the 20th century have shown, the term “virtual” is a vexed concept for its definition is inherently contingent upon other concepts (Virilio, 1994;  Baudrillard, 1995; Levy, 1998; Quéau, 1998). For example, while virtual can be seen as an “ideal” (Berthier, 2004) or non-materialized real (Shield, 2003), it can also refer to the “realm of affect” (O’Sullivan, 2001) or “potential” (Massumi, 1995). Yet, as Gilles Deleuze has postulated, the virtual is neither opposed to the real nor to the possible, but to the actual. As such, in Deleuze’s words: “The possible is opposed to the real; the process undergone by the possible is therefore a ‘realisation’. By contrast, the virtual is not opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality by itself. The process it undergoes is that of actualisation” (1994, 211). This is, according to Grant Tavinor, the first misstep in understanding the virtual: that we lay too much emphasis on the distinction between the virtual and the real, whereas something virtual can be fully real (2022). Following this thought, a virtual x is almost or nearly an x, but not actually so: “virtual retains the efficiency or function of a real x, while manifesting these in an unfamiliar or non-customary form” (25). Virtual Photography, too, follows a similar logic: it refers to a photography that retains the efficiency or function of real (camera-based) photography while manifesting these in an unfamiliar or non-customary form. In other words, we would like to think of virtual photographs as real photographs undergoing actualization.

Thus, by pivoting around the concept of “virtual” and via the medium of photography, our book project inquires: 

What are the ontological and epistemological modalities of virtual photography in contemporary cultures and how can they enable us to conceive memory, identity, and subjectivity anew?

To this end, we welcome disciplinary and interdisciplinary abstracts that reflect on the topic of Virtual Photography via the most recent photographic practices and technologies, including but not limited to: Artificial Intelligence, Extended Reality, and In-game photography. The proposed topics may include, but are not limited to:

Photography &

  • Virtuality
  • Actuality
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • AI creative freedom & copyright 
  • Deep learning
  • Synthetic image
  • Poor image
  • Operational image
  • Soft image
  • Algorithmic image
  • In-game photography
  • Screenshot, Screencast, Screen image
  • Virtual reality technologies
  • Augmented reality
  • Mixed & Cross reality
  • Photogrammetry
  • CGI
  • Remediation
  • Expanded field & expanding form
  • 3D imaging
  • Phasmagraphy
  • Cybernetics
  • Virtual memory & virtual time
  • Phenomenology of the virtual

Abstracts

We welcome English abstracts of 200-250 words that engage with, and reflect on, the theme of Virtual Photography through the most recent photographic practices and technologies, including but not limited to: Artificial Intelligence, Extended Reality, and In-game photography. Please send your abstract & a short biography to the following Email addresses no later than June 15th, 2023.

s.a.shobeiri@hum.leidenuniv.nl

h.f.westgeest@hum.leidenuniv.nl

A selected number of abstracts will be invited to submit a full chapter of 3,000 to 6,000 words.

*Virtual Photography will be published full open access at an academic publisher in 2024.

Schedules & Deadlines

Submitting the abstract: June 15th, 2023

Communication of acceptance/rejection: June 30th, 2023

Submitting the full chapter: December 1st, 2023

Provisional date for publishing the book:  Mid-2024

Co-editors:

  • Dr. Ali Shobeiri, Assistant Professor of Photography and Visual Culture, Leiden University
  • Dr. Helen Westgeest, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theories of Photography, Leiden University

Bibliography

  • Baker, George. “Photography’s Expanded Field”. October. Vol. 114 (2005): 114-120.
  • Batchen, Geoffrey. “Post-Photography”. In Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000).
  • Bate, David. “The Emancipation of Photography”. In The Versatile Image: Photography, Digital Technologies and the Internet, edited by A. Moschovi, C. Mckay & A. Plouviez, A. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014).
  • Baudrillard, Jean. “The Virtual Illusion: Or the Automatic Writing of the World”. Theory, Culture & Society. Vol. 12. No. 4 (1995): 97-107.
  • Berthier, Denis. Méditations sur le réel et le virtuel (Paris: L’ Harmattan, 2002).
  • Boffi, Marco, et al. “Visual Post-Occupancy Evaluation of a Restorative Garden Using Virtual Reality Photography: Restoration, Emotions, and Behaviour in Older and Younger People”. Frontiers in Psychology. (2022): 1-20.
  • Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994).
  • DFA. 2023. Deutsche Fotografische Akademie. See: https://dfa.photography/
  • Fontcuberta, Joan. The Post-Photographic Condition (Montreal, Bielefeld: Mois de la Photo, Kerber Verlag, 2015).
  • Galloway, Alexander R. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis, London: The MIT Press, 2006).
  • Gerling, Winfried, Sebastian Möring & Marco De Mutiis, eds. Screen Images: Screenshot, Screencast, In-game Photography (Berlin: Kadmos Verlag, 2023).
  • Hedman, Peter. “Viewpoint-Free Photography for Virtual Reality”. In Real VR: Immersive Digital Reality, edited by M. Magnor & A. Sorkine-Hornung. pp. 132-166 (Online: Springer, 2020).
  • Hoelzl, Ingrid & Remi Marie. Soft Image: Towards a New Theory of the Digital Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
  • Joan, M. Carmen et al. “A Virtual Reality Photography Application to Assess Spatial Memory”. Behaviour & Information Technology, Vol. 20. No. 1. (2022): 1-14.
  • Laruelle, François. The Concept of Non-Photography (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011).
  • Leister, Martin. The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 2013).
  • Lévy, Pierre. Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age (New York & London: Plenum Trade, 1998).
  • Manovich, Lev. “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography”. In Photography after Photography: Memory and Representation in the Digital Age, edited by S. Iglhaut& H. Amelunxen, pp. 57-65 (1995). Exhibition catalogue.
  • Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
  • Mitchell, W. J. The Reconfigured Eye: Virtual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press, 1992).
  • Moore, Christopher. “Screenshots as Virtual Photography: Cybernetics, Remediation and Affect”. In Advancing Digital Humanities, edited by Paul Longley, Arthur and Katherine Bode. pp. 141-160 (Basingstoke, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
  • Möring, Sebastian & Marco De Mutiis. “Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography in Video Games”. In Intermedia Games—Games Inter Media: Video Games and Intermediality, edited by Michael Fuches & Jeff Thoss, pp. 69-94 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019).
  • O’Sullivan, Simon. “The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Beyond Representation”, Angelaki. Vol 6. No. 3. (2001): 125-135.
  • Parikka, Jussi, Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2023).
  • Plummer, Sandra. “Photography as Expanding Form.” Photographies. Vol. 8. No. 2 (2015): 137-153.
  • Poremba, Cindy. “Point and Shoot: Remediating Photography in Gamespace”. Games and Culture. Vol. 2. No. 1. (2007): 49-58.
  • Quéau, Philippe & Beatrice McGeogch. “Virtual Multiplicities”. Diogenes. Vol. 46 (1998): 107-117.
  • Ritchin, Fred. After Photography (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009).
  • Rizov, Vladimir. “PlayStation Photography: Towards an Understanding of Video Game Photography”. In Game: World: Architectonics, edited by Marc Bonner, pp. 49-62 (Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Press, 2021).
  • Rosler, Martha. “Image Simulations, Computer Manipulations”. In Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings. pp. 259-317 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004).
  • Rubenstein, D. J. Golding & A. Fisher. On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation (Birmingham: Article Press, 2013).
  • Shields, Rob. The Virtual (London: Routledge, 2002).
  • Steyerl, Hito. “In Defense of the Poor Image”. E-flux. Issue 10 (2009).
  • Tavinor, Grant. “Videogames and Aesthetics”. Philosophy Compass. Vol. 5. No. 8 (2010): 624-635.
  • Tavinor, Grant. The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality (New York: Routledge, 2022)
  • Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine. Translated by Julie Rose (Bloomington, IN: Indian University Press, 1994).
  • Zylinska, Joanna. “Does Photography Have a Future? (Does Anything Else?)”. In The Future of Media, edited by Joanna Zylinska, pp. 14-29 (eBook: Goldsmiths University London, 2022).

Newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates about our news, lectures, seminars, workshops and more.

Share this page

  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on X
  • Share on WhatsApp
  • Share on LinkedIn
  • Share by Mail

Newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates about our news, lectures, seminars, workshops and more.

NICA archive 2010 – 2020

Read all articles published by Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis 2010 to 2020.

Affiliated Universities

  • Leiden University
  • Tilburg University
  • Radboud University
  • University of Amsterdam
  • Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
  • Erasmus University Rotterdam
  • Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
  • University of Maastricht
  • Utrecht University
  • Open University

National Research Schools

  • ARCHON, Research School of Archaeology
  • Huizinga Instituut
  • LOT, Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics
  • NISIS, Netherlands Interuniversity School of Islamic Studies
  • NOG, Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies
  • NOSTER, Netherlands School for Advanced Studies in Theology and Religion
  • OIKOS, National Research School in Classical Studies
  • OSK, Dutch Postgraduate School for Art History
  • OSL, Onderzoekschool Literatuurwetenschap
  • OZSW, Dutch Research School of Philosophy
  • Posthumus Institute, Research School for Economic and Social History
  • Research School for Medieval Studies
  • RSPH, Research School Political History
  • RMeS, Research School for Media Studies
  • WTMC, Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture

Useful Links

  • Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA)
  • Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research (AIHR)
  • Amsterdam Research Center for Gender and Sexuality (ARC-GS)
  • Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA)
  • Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM)
  • Babylon: Center for the Study of Superdiversity, Tilburg University
  • Benelux Association for the Study of Art, Culture, and the Environment (BASCE)
  • Centre for BOLD Cities
  • Centre for Gender and Diversity, Maastricht University
  • Leiden University Centre for Cultural Analysis (LUCAS)
  • Platform for Postcolonial Readings
  • Radboud Institute for Culture & History (RICH)
  • Research Institute of the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies (PTR)
  • Environmental Humanities Center Amsterdam
  • Centre for Environmental Humanities (UU)

© 2025 - Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA)
Website by Nikolai NL Design Studio
  • Privacy
  • Contact
Scroll to top Scroll to top Scroll to top

We use cookies only for the purposes of measuring effectiveness of our website. Our Privacy Statement.

OK

Cookie and Privacy Settings



How we use cookies

We may request cookies to be set on your device. We use cookies to let us know when you visit our websites, how you interact with us, to enrich your user experience, and to customize your relationship with our website.

Click on the different category headings to find out more. You can also change some of your preferences. Note that blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience on our websites and the services we are able to offer.

Essential Website Cookies

These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with services available through our website and to use some of its features.

Because these cookies are strictly necessary to deliver the website, refusing them will have impact how our site functions. You always can block or delete cookies by changing your browser settings and force blocking all cookies on this website. But this will always prompt you to accept/refuse cookies when revisiting our site.

We fully respect if you want to refuse cookies but to avoid asking you again and again kindly allow us to store a cookie for that. You are free to opt out any time or opt in for other cookies to get a better experience. If you refuse cookies we will remove all set cookies in our domain.

We provide you with a list of stored cookies on your computer in our domain so you can check what we stored. Due to security reasons we are not able to show or modify cookies from other domains. You can check these in your browser security settings.

Other external services

We also use different external services like Google Webfonts, Google Maps, and external Video providers. Since these providers may collect personal data like your IP address we allow you to block them here. Please be aware that this might heavily reduce the functionality and appearance of our site. Changes will take effect once you reload the page.

Google Webfont Settings:

Google Map Settings:

Google reCaptcha Settings:

Vimeo and Youtube video embeds:

Privacy Policy

You can read about our cookies and privacy settings in detail on our Privacy Policy Page.

Privacy
Accept settingsHide notification only