Welcome to the Centre for Culture and Everyday Life, where we conduct qualitative and experimental research in the arts, culture, and everyday life. We have interdisciplinary expertise on a wide range of issues including around space, time, and memory, and we engage with questions of urban experience and visual culture both locally in Liverpool and internationally. Watch this space for live and online events and opportunities relating to art and anthropology, cultural studies, everyday life research, material culture, urban media, critical and cultural theory, and much more.
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CFP: The Invisible Image: Photography and the Unseen
CFP: The Invisible Image: Photography and the Unseen
A single-stream 2 day International Conference hosted by the Centre for Culture and Everyday Life, School of the Arts, University of Liverpool.
18-19 June 2026
Instagram: @ccel_uliverpool
Bsky: cceluliverpool.bsky.social
Hashtag: #invisibleimageLiv
Keynote speakers: Prof. Jordan Bear (University of Toronto)
Prof. Estelle Blaschke (University of Basel)
This conference investigates theories, histories and methodologies relating to photographic images that are, for different reasons, unseen or unseeable. In the past twenty years, theorists and scholars across disciplines have raised the idea of the invisible image in various ways: discussing “operational” images intended for machine-reading rather than human viewing, and “invisual’ images that appear in aggregation and in which the visual qualities of the image are less significant than the metadata they carry; the legal and political processes that have restricted the viewing and distribution of certain types of images; the images that provide the ‘training’ for AI image production; latent photographic images that have been exposed and may never be developed, and the traces of erased, damaged and faded images. Writers concerned with archival photographs of racialized subjects appeal to senses other than the visual: to the rhythms and tactility of pictures. And for a long time now, photographers and artists have found creative ways to visualise absence, and especially, to make present subjects “disappeared” by dictatorships and through war.
The conference will address, both theoretically and methodologically, how we might study and account for images that are inaccessible, whether through censorship, destruction or other interventions. What methods can be used to account for images in their absence? Historically, lecturers used ekphrasis to discuss images that they could not show. What techniques and approaches now might help us to analyse invisible, inaccessible or undiscovered images? Conversely, how might photographic techniques be used to represent or express the invisible? How have photographers attempted to use the medium to visualise the unseen? What can this teach us about the nature of the photographic media or about ocularcentric cultures? What are the institutions and their internal processes that restrict certain types of images? How might we respond when archival research yields nothing but absence? When should researchers refuse to show images and why? How and why might we bring unseen images to light and what are the ethical and theoretical dilemmas surrounding this? How are unseen images produced and stored, for what purposes and by whom?
Other possible topics include:
Photographic latency
What photography can ‘sense’ which is invisible to human eyes
Operational and “invisual” images
The “invisible” labour behind digital images
The judicial status of images
The ethics and aesthetics of unseen images
Censorship and political interference in image production, consumption, and circulation
The use of visual technologies by law enforcement, military, and the surveillance industrial complex
Photographs of absence/invisibility/missing referents/spectres
Institutions and image oversight
Accessing and assessing absent images
The affective power of inaccessible images
Methodological inventions into unseen images
The manipulation, redaction and destruction of images
We welcome abstracts for 20 minute presentations that address any of the issues above, or that relate to questions of invisibility and photography in ways we have not anticipated. Please send abstracts of 250 words (maximum) with an indicative bibliography of up to 5 texts and a short bio of up to 100 words, to:
CCEL@liverpool.ac.uk by 30 January 2026.
Additional Information:
Conference fee: £90
Unwaged/ PhD students: £45
(fee includes lunches and refreshments across both days and a drinks reception, a conference dinner will also be organised which will be charged separately for those who wish to participate)
We are unable to offer fee waivers.
Honorary Professor Ben Highmore
Honorary Professor Ben Highmore
As of September 2025, the Centre for Culture and Everyday Life at the University of Liverpool has appointed Professor Ben Highmore as Honorary Professor. He remains Professor Emeritus at the University of Sussex. His affiliation began with a workshop and welcome event on the 10th September. We look forward to collaborating with Ben on future projects.
Past Events:
Weds 30 April 2025 Melissa McCarthy – “Absolutely Nebulous: Fog, Fuzzy Edges and Vagueness in Photographic Fields” University of Liverpool SotA library/online,
Weds 14 May 2025 Creative Methods Workshop: The Video Essay with Dr. Alan O’ Leary, Aarhus University, Denmark
Weds 28 May 2025 Eileen Perrier – “A Thousand Small Stories” – online only (Zoom)
Ghana - 1996 © Eileen Perrier
5-6 Sept 2024 Post-Pandemic Imaginaries Conference
This was a two day international conference, with speakers from many countries including South Korea, South Africa, the US and Portugal. The full conference programme can be found HERE.
Image: Andrii and Lia Dostliev, 'Comfort Work', work in progress.
Artist talk by Andrii Dostliev
At the occasion of the launch of the AHRC-IAA funded project "Contemporary Art and Political Change for Ukrainian Displaced Persons".
Andrii Dostliev (b. 1984) is an artist, curator, and photography researcher from Ukraine, based in Poland. His primary areas of interest are memory, trauma, decolonial practices in Eastern Europe, gay history of Ukraine, and the limits of photography as a medium. His art practice works across photography, video, drawing, performance, and installation. His work (together with Lia Dostlieva) will be part of the Ukrainian Pavillion exhibition at Venice Biennale 2024.
"Contemporary Art and Political Change for Ukrainian Displaced Persons". is a collaboration between the Ukrainian Pavillion, Vid Simoniti (Philosophy Department, University of Liverpool), and Open Eye Gallery, investigating political self-expression of displaced persons through art. Event hosted in collaboration with Centre for Culture & Everyday Life.
This in-person workshop was hosted by CCEL on December 1st, 2023. It explored the role of videogame engines such as Unity and Unreal in our contemporary visual culture. Curated by Paolo Ruffino (University of Liverpool) and Valentino Catricalà (School of Digital Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University), it included speakers Aleena Chia, Joseph DeLappe, Vid Simoniti, Lesley Taker, Sandra Youkhana & Luke Caspar Pearson . Full details on the University of Liverpool website at the link above.
Traces of Memory
This was a collaborative research project led by PhD student Emily Beswick, which explored how family photos can reveal the hidden stories of East and South East Asian communities in Liverpool. The sharing event and exhibition held in September 2023 at Tate Liverpool showcased the outcomes of the project. Emily is a member of the CCEL and holds a Collaborative Doctoral Award with Tate Liverpool.
Material Cultures of Play Symposium.
This interdisciplinary one-day symposium was held in May 2023 at the CCEL. Talks brought together disciplines including media, cultural studies, art history, archaeology, English literature, Latin American studies, photography studies and architecture, to reflect on the places, objects, practices and times of play. Speakers were: Jordana Blejmar & Erika Teichert, Peter Buse, Luca Csepely-Knorr & Amber Roberts Matthew Fitzjohn & Peta Bulmer, Ben Highmore, David Hopkins, and Joe Moshenska.
See our University webpages here. Enquiries: contact Prof. Michelle Henning or Dr. Les Roberts. If you would like to be notified of live or online events at the CCEL, join our mailing list by emailing us here.
The Centre for Culture and Everyday Life,
School of the Arts,
University of Liverpool,
19-23 Abercromby Square,
Liverpool,
L69 7ZG
United Kingdom
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