Theory & Psychology invites contributions to a Special Issue on Psychology and Photography: Epistemology, Aesthetics, Method.
The deadline for Abstracts (300-500 words) is April 30, 2026 (to be sent directly to the guest editors Martin Dege (mdege@pratt.edu) and Desmond Painter (dpainter@sun.ac.za). Please see all details, including the call below and on T&Ps website.
Call for Papers Special Issue Theory and Psychology: Psychology and Photography: Epistemology, Aesthetics, Method
Photography opens an unusually rich field for theoretical psychology. Its histories, practices, and protocols of seeing allow us to trace how worlds are organized, how subjectivity is sensed, and how the social appears. Photography is simultaneously an aesthetic practice, an archive of the everyday, a material technology of inscription, a method, and a form of thinking. In this special issue, we want to explore this multiplicity as an opportunity: to take seriously that photography is not simply an image-producing machine, but a site in which psychological meaning is made, contested, and transformed. The question is not how photography can serve psychology, but how photography thinks with psychology, and how psychology is obliged to respond.
Photography articulates more than space or movement; it renders forms of subjectivity that unsettle the stability of the self. Photography here becomes a privileged site for thinking: the cut, the aperture, the shutter, the grain — not as metaphors, but as the very procedures through which theory is forced to encounter its limits. We invite essays that approach photography as epistemological events, historical force, and conceptual challenge; as method, as philosophy, as fieldwork documentation, and as technical-material theory. We welcome historically grounded scholarship, conceptual studies rooted in psychoanalysis, narrative theory, practice-based photographic research that advanced argument through image, critical reflections on digital, algorithmic, and AI-mediated photography as transformations of psychological seeing, and writing that situates photography within the ongoing reconfiguration of psychological knowledge. What matters is not that the photograph illustrates theory, but that the photograph co-produces theory. This special issue aims to gather work that takes photography seriously as an active participant in the making, unsettling, and transformation of psychological sense.
Contributions may address, but are not limited to:
- Photography as epistemology, theory, or conceptual challenge
- Psychoanalytic, narrative, phenomenological, or critical-theoretical engagements with photography
- The material-technical dimensions of photography (camera, shutter, grain, archive) as theory-generating practices
- Historical analyses of photography’s role in psychological knowledge
- Digital, algorithmic, and AI-mediated photography and their implications for psychological seeing
- Practice-based photographic research in which images advance theoretical argument
What unites the issue is a commitment to treating photography not as illustration, but as a co-producer of theory. Abstracts (300–500 words) should be submitted to the guest editors by April 30, 2026, via email to Martin Dege (mdege@pratt.edu) and Desmond Painter (dpainter@sun.ac.za). Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit full manuscripts, with final submissions due by October 31, 2026.