DOCTORAL WORKSHOP 

What does it mean to think about photography today? This question frames Thinking Photography: New Strands in Photo Research, a five-day doctoral workshop that will take place at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan, from 16 to 20 March 2026. The workshop brings together three international visiting scholars—Steffen Siegel (Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen), Kelley Wilder (De Montfort University, Leicester), and Martin Jürgens (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)—for an intensive programme of seminars, discussions, and collaborative working sessions.

Coordinated by Nicoletta Leonardi and Maria Chiara Palandri and conceived as a collective laboratory, Thinking Photography reflects on the methodological transformations currently reshaping photographic studies.

Across five days, the programme develops four interconnected research strands:

Photobooks as sites where aesthetics, politics, and social functions converge. Moving beyond national or stylistic canons, this trend focuses on photobooks’ social uses, examining how photographs acquire meaning within editorial, institutional, and ideological frameworks. It rereads questions of aesthetics and politics from a perspective reframed and enriched by social function.

Business and economic histories of photography. Drawing on industrial archives and business records, this strand explores photography as a technological and commercial enterprise, addressing the infrastructures, labour, and economies that have shaped photographic production and circulation.

Personal and family photographs as sources for writing photographic history. Focusing on private collections, this strand reflects on the methodological and ethical challenges of constructing historical narratives from family archives, considering both the possibilities and the pitfalls of working with intimate, personal materials.

Quantity and Significance in Photographic History. Using the case of etched daguerreotypes, this strand investigates how databases, statistical analysis, and the notion of “critical mass” can inform historical interpretation, raising questions about the relationship between quantity, use, value, and historical significance.

Thinking Photography includes visits to the collections of the Leonardo da Vinci National Museum of Science and Technology, the Civico Archivio Fotografico, and the Brera Academy of Fine Arts.

Through these perspectives, the workshop addresses photography as an intermedial and institutional phenomenon, whose histories are produced at the intersection of images, objects, technologies, archives, markets, and social practices. The aim is not only to present new case studies, but also to reflect critically on the epistemological frameworks through which photographic history is written today.

The initiative is part of the PNRR project INTAFAM IartNET – an international platform for artistic research and cultural heritage at Italian higher arts education institutions, led by the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. Funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU, Mission 4.

Visiting Scholars: 

Martin Jürgens is conservator of photographs at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. Before moving to the Netherlands, he worked as a conservator in private practice in Hamburg. His education includes a German diploma in photography and design, an M.S. from Rochester Institute of Technology and an M.A. in Paper Conservation from Queen's University in Kingston, Canada. Following a scholarship at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Conservation Institute published his book The Digital Print. Identification and Preservation in 2009. He is currently a part-time PhD student at the Photographic History Research Centre of De Montfort University in Leicester, UK.

Steffen Siegel has taught as professor of theory and history of photography at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen since 2015, where he also directs the master’s and PhD programs on the theory and history of photography. Since 2024, he has served as Chair of the Board of the Center for Photography Essen. During the 2019/2020 academic year, he was an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In the fall semester of 2024, he taught as Max Kade Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. 

Kelley Wilder is Professor Emerita and former Director, Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University, Kelley gained a BA from Kenyon College in 1993 in Studio Art and English Literature, and in 1995 graduated from the George Eastman House with a Certificate in Photographic Preservation and Archives Practice. Before beginning her doctorate, Kelley worked at the Paul Strand Archive (NY), the Maine Photographic Workshops, the Aultman Museum (CO) and Photo-Eye Books and Prints (NM) while learning platinum printing, albumen printing and daguerreotyping. In 2003, she gained a D.Phil. from Oxford University with a dissertation on the invention of photography and went on to a fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, working with Director Lorraine Daston. Kelley Wilder’s research ranges over the breadth of photography, science, materials, archives and knowledge, with numerous articles and books to her name. 

Participants: 

Open to doctoral students of the Brera Academy, and to a limited number of external participants upon request, Thinking Photography is conceived as a moment of international and interdisciplinary exchange.

WORKSHOP AND OPEN LECTURE

The Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera presents Code as Material: Creative Coding Foundations for Artistic and Design Practices, an intensive educational workshop dedicated to creative coding as an artistic and design practice, led by Lena Gieseke, Visiting Scholar and Professor of Image-based Media Technologies at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf in Potsdam.

The initiative is part of the PNRR INTAFAM IartNET project – an international platform for artistic research and cultural heritage at Italian higher arts education institutions, funded by the European Union – Next Generation EU, Mission 4, with the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera as lead institution.

The workshop will take place from 16th to 20th March 2026, at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera and will be accompanied by a public open lecture, scheduled for Wednesday 18th March from 12 PM to 2 PM, at the Centro Internazionale di Brera (CIB).

The initiative invites students to consider computation not as a tool to be mastered, but as a material to think and create with. Code is explored as an expressive medium capable of generating specific processes, aesthetics, and forms of authorship, and as a space for experimentation in which artistic and design thinking actively shape the structures of programming itself. From this perspective, creative coding becomes a field of research in which artistic practice and computational thinking mutually influence one another, opening up new possibilities for contemporary art and design.

Through theoretical lectures, hands-on exercises, and discussions, the workshop will provide the conceptual and practical foundations for understanding code as language, process, and material, fostering a critical and experimental approach to programming in artistic and design contexts.

Lecturer: Lena Gieseke is a Visiting Scholar and Professor of Image-based Media Technologies at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf in Potsdam. Her research focuses on the relationships between code, images, and contemporary artistic practices, with particular attention to creative coding, computational culture, and hybrid forms of audiovisual production.

Participants: The workshop is aimed at students of the Accademia interested in artistic and design practices related to computation, design, and new media.

WORKSHOP

From 26 to 31 January 2025, the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, within the framework of the PNRR project IartNET – An international platform for artistic practice/research and cultural heritage at Italian higher arts education institutions, will host the workshop Reorganization Methods for Museum Storage in the Context of Collection Management, led by preventive conservation expert consultants Giorgia Bonesso and Sonia Caliaro.

The workshop is dedicated to the design and management of museum spaces, the reorganization of collections, and the development of operational tools for professional practice. 

The initiative seeks to provide both theoretical and practical skills in the field of preventive conservation and museum storage management, with particular attention to critical issues and best practices at an international level. The training is based on the use of the RE-ORG method, a structured and flexible approach designed to support storage reorganization interventions and long-term heritage management activities. The method enables participants to acquire tools that can be applied autonomously in different museum and collection contexts.

Through theoretical lectures, analytical activities, and practical exercises, students will be engaged in a learning pathway addressing topics such as collection organization, space optimization, documentation, the design of reorganization plans, and the drafting of operational guidelines.
The workshop is part of the educational activities of the Brera Academy, with the aim of strengthening the dialogue between academic training and professional practice, offering students concrete tools to operate in the museum sector and in the management of cultural heritage.

With a total duration of two non-consecutive weeks, is aimed at a selected group of 20 students from two degree programs of the Academy: the School of Restoration and the School of Cultural Heritage. 

WORKSHOP

From 26th - 29th January 2026, 2nd - 6th March 2026, 4th - 8th May 2026, the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan will host the workshop Cataloging Photography: Methods, Standards, and Research Perspectives, led by Maria Francesca Bonetti, representative of the Italian Society for the History of Photography (SISF).

This intensive training workshop is dedicated to the cataloging of photography and is aimed at exploring methodologies, descriptive standards, and research perspectives related to the management and promotion of photographic heritage.

The program is designed for students interested in acquiring specialized skills in the conservation and enhancement of photographic collections. The workshop will provide a theoretical framework covering the main national and international cataloging standards, complemented by practical exercises to develop skills in critical image analysis, preparation of descriptive records, and presentation of collections and archives. Special attention will be given to the evolution of photographic study methodologies, challenges in managing photographic assets, and new research perspectives offered by technologies applied to historical and artistic heritage.

The initiative is part of the PNRR project INTAFAM IartNET – an international platform for artistic research and cultural heritage at Italian higher arts education institutions, led by the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. Funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU, Mission 4, IartNET is coordinated by Nicoletta Leonardi.

Lecturer: Maria Francesca Bonetti, an art historian and former official at the Italian Ministry of Culture (MiC), was responsible for the Photographic Collections at the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica from 1999 to 2022. Actively engaged in the safeguarding and promotion of Italy’s photographic heritage, she has contributed to the development of methodologies for the conservation, management, and cataloging of photographic assets, collaborating with various institutions and Italian universities to train art historians, conservators, restorers, and staff involved in the management and preservation of photographic collections and archives. In this context, she drafted the national standard for cataloging photographic assets (Scheda F, 1999), has served on several ministerial commissions, and has taught courses at universities and advanced training schools. She is currently a member of the technical-scientific committee for the project Guidelines for the Restoration of Photography, coordinated by MiC–Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity and the Fondazione Centro Conservazione Restauro “La Venaria Reale” (2025–2026). Since its foundation in 2006, she has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Italian Society for the History of Photography (SISF), serving as Secretary from 2014, and, since 2023, she has been a member of the Scientific Committee of the Carlo Levi Foundation in Rome.

Participants: Students and collaborators of the IartNET research project.