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.