2026 SPE Annual Conference: Catalyst for Exchange
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print this pagePhotography as Invocation: Mysticism, Gender, and the Act of Self-Authorization
Nika McKagen: Nadia Sablin, Olivia Johnson, Lily Lagrange, Kelsey Sucena
Friday, March 20 - 2:30PM to 4:30PM
Atlanta 5
This session will explore the current resurgence of mysticism in photography, specifically focusing on women and gender non-conforming people using photography in their practice as an act of divination and invocation. This allows photographers to craft self-authorizing narratives in opposition to dominant systems of knowledge and visibility.
Photography, bound by its indexical nature, has long carried the burden of being asked to provide evidence of the real. Yet, from early spirit photography to contemporary experimental darkroom practices, artists have used the medium to reveal hidden dimensions of experience. Photography's history as a masculine and empirical technology has often stood in tension with its deeper enchantments and potentials.
In the contemporary era - shaped by global perversions of capitalism, patriarchal violence, ecological collapse, and digital oversaturation - we have seen a resurgence of interest in magical and ritual thinking. The darkroom and the studio offer opportunities to enter a realm in which alchemy and intuition reign - a realm in which we give up fact in order to find an artistic and magical truth. These spaces have become sites of revival. These gestures are not nostalgic in origin, but rather are radical acts of re-enchantment.
This panel will consider photography as a mystical, interior practice - deeply tied to resistance and creating safety, yet relevant to a shared cultural unconscious. I invite conversation around women and gender non-conforming peoples' roles in shaping contemporary photography in a way that is deeply felt, haunted, and speculative.
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