Greetings,

We are pleased to announce a new CFP for Trans Asia Photography.

CALL FOR PAPERS – Vol. 15, No. 2 (Winter 2025)
Trans Asia Photography invites submissions for a general issue, Volume 15, no. 2 (Winter 2025). The journal examines all aspects of photographic history, theory, and practice by centering images in or of Asia, conceived as a territory, network, and cultural imaginary. It welcomes:

• articles (5,000–7,000 words) that broaden understanding of Asian photography in transnational contexts
• shorter pieces (1,000–2,000 words) in formats that include interviews, curatorial or visual essays, and portfolios

Deadline: September 1, 2024

Trans Asia Photography is an international, refereed, open-access journal based at the University of Toronto and published by Duke University Press. It provides a venue for interdisciplinary exploration of photography and Asia.

Guidance for authors on submissions can be found at: transasiaphotography.org/submit

The TAP Editorial Team
Deepali Dewan, Royal Ontario Museum & University of Toronto
Yi Gu, University of Toronto
Thy Phu, University of Toronto
transasiaphotography.org
@transasiaphotography

Greetings,

We are pleased to share a new CFP for our May 2025 issue (15:1) of Trans Asia Photography.

Orphaned Images: Found or Inherited
Guest edited by Sabeena Gadihoke

This call focuses on the image whose origins are uncertain and history unknown. Photographs have usually been linked to the idea of the evidentiary. Even as the digital turn opens up possibilities of endless transmutation of the image, the photograph’ still retains its evidentiary status in official documents or in the everyday practice ofmaking memories.’ The idea of photographic evidence grounds the subject, whatever it may be, to a world that exists and can be known. But how do we understand the photograph that has floated away from its context and come unmoored from its history?  Or a photograph that carries traces of partial or incomplete histories or has tenuous links to original circumstances of production and circulation. How have `finders’, ‘discoverers’ or inheritors of such images, engaged with them?  How does the orphaned and found image tell its story?

The issue will explore the stories that have been mapped onto photographs of unknown provenance or ones for which only partial information is available thereby confronting the reader with challenges. It explores the possibilities that such an image can take its reader, precisely because it has been liberated from its own history, on an uncharted imagined journey. It is perhaps possible that an orphaned image, either found or inherited, has the potential to turn us into detectives, story-tellers, poets or visionaries. Continue reading Orphaned Images–cfp →

Trans Asia Photography, CALL FOR PAPERS for Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 2024)

Photobooks are both a public space and a personal space. In recent years, photobooks have emerged as one of the dominant formats for the presentation and circulation of the photographic image. Distinguished by prioritizing the photographic image as the central element, the photobook can range from a state or commercial venture to a self-published limited-edition project with a grassroots distribution network. The recent re-emergence of photobook production is a result of many factors including—access to advanced printing technology; a desire to keep control of the product and its distribution with the artist; a need for space to explore personal narratives, politically and culturally sensitive issues, expressions of dissent; and the new-found prestige of the photobook format.

This special issue of Trans Asia Photography encourages scholarly analysis of the photobook. It is meant to help move the field towards a critical examination of how the photobook works and its intersection with social, cultural, political, aesthetic, and photographic histories. This issue embraces an open-ended definition of the photobook to underscore the multiple transnational genealogies and varied contexts of photobook production and reception in different regions of Asia. If previous studies on the photobook have attempted to write an alternative history of photography, this special issue asks how a photo history would look when it is written through photobooks from Asia and its diaspora. Continue reading Trans Asia Photography–cfp →

We are looking for papers for an online panel:

Wayfaring: Photography in Taiwan during the Martial Law Era (1949-1987) for the 111th Annual Conference of CAA to be held February 15—18, 2023

Session Chairs:

Shuxia Chen, University of New South Wales <shuxia.c@gmail.com>
Olivier Krischer, University of New South Wales <okrischer@gmail.com>

Research on Taiwan’s long and complex photography history has been limited in Chinese and English to date, with much attention paid to the earliest examples of the medium in the 19th and early-20th century. This panel instead gathers new research on the history of photography across the Martial Law era (from 1949 to 1987) under the concept of ‘wayfaring’—a lyrical take on the what pioneering photographer Chang Chao-Tang described as the ‘path seeking’ (zhaolu) of photographers in the 1970s. This term evokes both the actual journeys photographers undertook across the Taiwanese landscape, searching for diverse everyday experiences, as well as their introspective search for a new path forward through creative experimentation. Photographers in Taiwan confronted complex and intersecting historical trajectories.

This panel welcomes research that attends to contending claims not only on local and cultural identity, but also gender, sexuality, indigeneity, and social class. It seeks to understand the relevance of photographic practices from Taiwan as parts of global developments in the medium, comparing and contrasting Taiwanese photographic experience to that of its peers worldwide.

Please send the following via email to session chairs by August 31, 2022.

1. Presentation title and abstract (250 words maximum)
2. A shortened CV (close to 2 pages) and a short bio (150 words maximum)

Greetings,

Trans Asia Photography invites submissions for a general issue, Volume 13, no. 2 (Fall 2023). The journal examines all aspects of photographic history, theory, and practice by centering images in or of Asia, conceived as a territory, network, and cultural imaginary. It welcomes:

• articles (5,000–7,000 words) that broaden understanding of Asian photography in transnational contexts
• shorter pieces (1,000–2,000 words) in formats that include interviews, curatorial or visual essays, and portfolios

Deadline for research articles and shorter pieces: October 31, 2022.

Trans Asia Photography is an international, refereed, open-access journal based at the University of Toronto and published by Duke University Press. It provides a venue for interdisciplinary exploration of photography and Asia.

Guidance for authors on submissions can be found at: transasiaphotography.org/submit

For more information, contact the editors: transasiaphotography@gmail.com
The TAP Editorial Team
Deepali Dewan, Royal Ontario Museum & University of Toronto
Yi Gu. University of Toronto
Thy Phu, University of Toronto
transasiaphotography.org