Andrew Dewdney and Joanna Zylinska will be in an online conversation about the core concepts of the book – why photography must be forgotten and the frame of reality it prescribes and delineates rejected.

Forget Photography explores the paradox that at the moment of photography's replacement by the algorithm and data flow, photographic cultures proliferate as never before. The afterlife of photography, residual as it may technically be, maintains a powerful cultural and representational hold on reality, which is important to understand in relationship to the new conditions. Forgetting photography attempts to liberate the image from its historic shackles, forged by art history and photographic theory. More important, perhaps, forgetting photography also entails rejecting the frame of reality it prescribes and delineates, and in doing so opens up other relationships between bodies, times, events, materials, memory, representation, and the image.

Further Reading

Learn more about the argument of Andrew Dewdney's Forget Photography book in Zombie Photography: What is the Photographic Image Still Doing? published on Fotomuseum Winterthur's Still Searching... blog.

Biographies

Andrew Dewdney is a co-founder and co-director of The Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University. He is a research professor and supervises doctoral research, including collaborative projects with Rhizome, The Photographers’ Gallery, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Gasworks and Serpentine Galleries. He is an advisory member of the Post-Photography Research Group, based in Lucerne College of Art and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. He is on the advisory boards of the academic refereed journals, Photographies and Philosophy of Photography. His latest book, The Networked Image in Post-Digital Culture, edited with Katrina Sluis will be published by Routledge in June of this year.

Joanna Zylinska is an artist, writer, curator, and Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London. She is an author of a number of books, including AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams(Open Humanities Press, 2020) and Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017). Her art practice involves experimenting with different kinds of image-based media. She is currently researching perception and cognition as boundary zones between human and machine intelligence, while trying to answer the question: 'Does photography have a future?'