Publishing the Camera Roll: Conflict in Times of Visual Pervasiveness

The immediacy and pervasiveness of everyday phone images and their wide distribution through social media platforms have turned both nearby and distant wars into content, which is consumed as routinely as any other while often showing unfiltered scenes of violence and destruction. The easy production of photographs with smartphones in conflict and war zones, often by soldiers and others who are not observing from a distance but are directly involved in the action, lies at the center of this development.

Vsevolod Kazarin, co-founder and editor of Solomiya Magazine, has been researching the relationship between Ukrainian soldiers and their use of smartphone photography for months, collecting images from their camera rolls and conducting interviews with them.

What role do these photographs play for the soldiers themselves, and how do they function as documents for outsiders and as tools of communication with an audience? How can vernacular photographs be properly archived to preserve their value as a future resource for research and editorial work?

He will be joined in a panel discussion by Anhar Salem, artist and filmmaker, who investigates the role of social media in their collective Saudi ethnographic diary, which documents urban, social, and cultural landscapes across different cities in western Saudi Arabia — as well as Julian Peschel, a geospatial analyst in German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle's data journalism unit and member of froh.ngo.

Publishing The Camera Roll is supported by the International Cultural Exchange Program of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg.