The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife (founded in 1976) is pleased to announce the subject of its 2027 conference, Photographing New England, to be held on June 25–26 at Historic Deerfield, Inc.
The annual Dublin Seminar is a meeting place where researchers of all kinds—academics, students, museum and library professionals, practitioners, artists, artisans and craftspeople, educators, preservationists, collectors, and committed avocational researchers—join in deep conversation around a focused theme in New England history, pooling their knowledge and exchanging ideas, sources, and methods in a thought-provoking forum.
The 2027 Seminar invites proposals for papers and presentations that illuminate the practices, products, and impact of still photography in New England and adjoining regions.
Soon after photography’s introduction in Boston in 1840, Ralph Waldo Emerson ruminated on the power of the camera as a truthteller in an era of deception. The Concord Sage confided to his journal: “A camera! A camera! cries the century, that is the only toy.”
How did this technological and artistic “toy” and its products represent, affect, distort, and change what New Englanders saw in themselves and their region? What was the role of photography in “inventing” a “New England”? How did photographic images—daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, stereographs, cartes de visite, cabinet cards, snapshots, digital images—reflect, engage, and alter the region’s public culture? How did photography shape the region’s social relations in small towns and growing cities? How did photography change the region’s economy, from manufacturing photographic supplies in Connecticut’s Brass Valley to Boston’s fashionable studios to Instagram? How did photography in New England influence and shape regional and national politics? And what can the practices of preserving and sharing those images—from family albums and scrapbooks to Instagram and Facebook—tell us about how those images continued to function beyond the moments of their creation?
The Seminar encourages papers grounded in interdisciplinary approaches and original research, particularly visual and material culture, manuscripts, government and business records, the public press, oral histories, and public history practice or advocacy. Papers may address topics ranging from daguerreotypes in the 19th century through digital photography in the 21th century.
Some possible topics might include:
- The technologies of photography: equipment, materials, and processes in the production of photographic images
- The practices and communities of photography: amateurs, professionals, salons, clubs, schools
- The business of photography: small-town and city studios, camera and equipment manufacturers; advertising and commercial photography; impact on regional tourism and trade; the impact of economic downturns
- The politics of photography: the photographic image’s powers of representation and use in persuasion; the manipulation of the image; censorship; the employment of the medium in social relations, from family and school portraits to prisoner mug shots; the uses of photographic images in and as medicine; the use of photographs as forensics/historical evidence; the rise of the selfie and Instagram and New England identity
- The art of photography: the photographic image and art movements including Pictorialism, Modernism, Realism, but also documentary, photojournalism, and vernacular images; the impact of photography on painting and prints; Colonial Revivalism and the invention of Old New England
- Collecting and collections of photography: from parlor and family albums and scrapbooks and self-printed collections like Blurb and Snapfish to institutional collections of images and equipment; conservation; exhibition
- The literature of photography and photography in literature: the rise of photographic journals; the representation of photography in regional fiction, periodicals, advertising, and popular culture
- The perils of photography: the impact of hazardous chemicals and waste; legalities of depiction and ownership; privacy, publicity, and surveillance
- Photographic icons and iconography: the power of an individual image; images as biography
- Photography and self-presentation: Photography and self-presentation: individual and group choices in commercial and amateur practice, including pose, clothing, and furnishings; the effect of photographic cameras, processes, and chemicals on appearance of bodies, clothing, and environments
The conference will be a hybrid program with both on-site and virtual registration options for attendees; registrants will have access to recordings through July 2027. The program will consist of a keynote address and approximately sixteen 20-minute presentations. Speakers will present on site at Historic Deerfield, Inc. Speakers will be expected to submit the text of their presentation at least a week before the conference.
To submit a proposal, please send (as a single email attachment, in MS Word or as a PDF, labeled LASTNAME.DubSem2027) a one-page prospectus that describes the paper and the archival, material, or visual sources on which it is grounded, and a one-page CV or biography.
Email proposal to: dublinseminar@historic-deerfield.org.
Deadline: Noon EST, Monday, February 1, 2027.
Dublin Seminar presenters are expected to submit their papers (approximately 5,000 words) for consideration for publication in the Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar by October 29, 2027. The scholarship proposed for presentation should be unpublished and available for inclusion in this volume to be published about eighteen months after the conference.
