Brian Bishop

His scholarship considers the precarious state of the image in this post-photographic era when our world is increasingly populated by non-human generated images, and the resistance in the arts and society to this new scopic regime. In particular, he is interested in the recent materialist turn of the image and its shifting agency in our contemporary social-political landscape.

Recently, these enquiries have extended into questions of custody, memory, and belonging explored through his ongoing project Nobody's Keepsake. Sourcing discarded photographs from the secondhand economy of online martketplaces, the project examines who takes possession of memory once its original owners are gone, and what it means that this custody now passes through impersonal, commercial channels rather than family or community. It extends his broader use of found and appropriated material to interrogate authorship, ownership, and the residue people leave behind, situating the found photograph as a site where private intimacy becomes entanged with loss, isolation, and the erosion of intergenerational memory-keeping.

His research takes many forms from exhibitions to essays to scholarly panels that question how politics, personal history, belief systems, generational change, and technological innovation shape our relation to the image-object. This has led to recent academic conference sessions on the removal of art in the public realm, and on the possible long-term impacts on art production and circulation due to current geo-political tensions. Other outcomes include exhibitions of original artworks based on archival or “found” photographic images that explore a variety of topics. However, the power of the image, and its’ materiality, is central in all these enquiries.