| When: | Thursday, November 21st, 2024 |
| Time: | 3:00 pm — 4:30 pm |
| Location: | Richcraft Hall, 4308 |
| Audience: | Current Students, Staff and Faculty |
Please join us on Thursday, Nov. 21 for a research talk by Dr. Bethany Berard, “Layers of Uncertainty: Seeing Photography Informationally”:
This talk presents work from the dissertation Photography Uncertain: Rethinking Photography through Information, which argues that key concepts from Claude Shannon’s theory of informational processes (entropy, noise, and redundancy) productively resituate photography in informational terms, offering conceptual language for media theorists to engage with debates around the significance of photography in societies transformed by informational technology. To do so, numerous and wide-ranging examples including the history of technical developments in cameras, the technical, material, and discursive processes involved in taking, printing, and reading photographs, and the operationalization of photography in administrative, forensic, and scientific contexts were brought into conversation. This talk highlights how the 185-year time span and varied subject matter necessary for such an argument were approached, through a discussion of methodological considerations including thin description, layering, the sometimes porous nature of primary and secondary source material, and the production of scholarship in the 2020s.
Dr. Berard completed their PhD in the School of Journalism and Communication in 2024.