The Camera as Research Instrument (Finn Arne Jørgensen)
2027-01-27 The Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC) invites you to the upcoming Climate Futures Workshop with Finn Arne Jørgensen (Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities, University of Stavanger).
Wednesday, January 27th / 10 am–12 pm / C40.154
Registration is not necessary.
Cameras are often present when researchers head into the field and into the archive, yet the camera rarely appears in their methods discussions. As scholars, we analyze photographs as sources and as media. And we know much about how scientists, surveyors, and colonial administrators used cameras. However, far less has been said about how we as researchers use cameras, and how they structure attention, position, tempo, and record-keeping in our research.
This workshop explores how those effects can be used deliberately, drawing on work in progress from my environmental history fieldwork involving repeat photography of a Norwegian forest and encountering and photographing the atomic bomb survivor trees of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After a short presentation, participants will use the cameras they already carry in a guided hands-on exercise, followed by a collective discussion. No photographic experience or special equipment is required; a standard camera phone is enough.
Finn Arne Jørgensen is Professor of Environmental History at University of Stavanger and co-director of the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities. His research investigates how technology shapes and enables relationships between people and their environments, drawing on history, media studies, and Science and Technology Studies. He has published two monographs on environment and infrastructure: Making a Green Machine (2011) and Recycling (2019) and five edited volumes. He has been a project leader for several interdisciplinary international cooperative projects: EnviroCitizen Horizon 2020 project (2020-2023), the Locative Technologies and the Human Sense of Place NFR FRIPRO project (2019-2023), and the Asia-Norway Environmental Storytelling (ANEST) INTPART network (2020-2024).
Disclaimer
An event organised in collaboration with the Centre for Digital Culture and the research area Climate Futures in Digital Cultures