Call for Papers

NUMBER 11 (2025): PHOTOGRAPHIC BOUNDARIES
PROPOSAL SUBMISSION DEADLINE: MAY 1ST TO SEPTEMBER 30ST, 2025
PUBLICATION: DECEMBER 15TH, 2025

The concept of the border presents a dual quality close to the human being, not only has it been an instrument of both interior and exterior containment, but it has also aroused in humanity the need to cross them, the need for travel, ultimately the need for otherness, the need for knowledge of the other. The concept of the border is also a metaphor and an invitation to research carried out at disciplinary limits.

Photography, for its part, nearing two hundred years of existence, has gone through various historical phases always associated with the evolution of photographic process technique and technology. It has also been a mirror of social and historical processes. In recent years, we have witnessed a paradigm shift in the use of photography. Digital photography has facilitated the photographic process so much that the role of the photographer, which until recently tended to disappear, is beginning to blur, being reserved for the profession only in those creative and social spaces where disciplinary knowledge still matters.

On the other hand, the integration of photography by academic research circles has been longstanding. In what we could consider scientific photography, anthropology was one of the first disciplines to use it as a research method. The explicit use of photography by anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, subsequently continued by Lévi-Strauss, John Collier Jr., and Malcom Collier, among others, created an important methodological and research tool, although little known outside the field of anthropology. Over time, many other disciplines have included photography in their research, either as an instrument, methodology, or final objective. As a result, there has been an increase in academic publications placing photography at the center of this interest over the past thirty years. Parallel to this fact is the interest that photography arouses in the general population.

Many academic disciplines have researchers interested in photography at a theoretical level, while other researchers work by including it in their methodology. This occurs at a historical moment in which, at the social level, almost every person has a camera, in a global society where more photographs have been produced in recent years than in the entire history of photography. The exponential increase in its consumption, driven by social networks and the incorporation of cameras in mobile phones, has also facilitated a paradigm shift in its consumption and use in recent years.

We invite proposals that address these and other issues related to photographic boundaries from a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. We accept both academic essays and research exploring the following themes, which by no means claim to be exclusive:
- Photography Across Disciplinary Boundaries.
- Scientific photography.
- Documentary photography.
- Social representation through photography.
- Photography and artificial intelligences.
- Photography as a means to explore the boundaries between the public and the private.