SYMPOSIUM Truth AND Photography

Friday 31 October 2025
10:00 17:00

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Garry Fabian Miller, The Middle Place Golden, 2012

‘Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.’

Susan Sontag (1977) On Photography

Photo Oxford’s fifth edition explores Truth and Photography. Questions about photography’s relationship to truth are as old as the medium's history. The Photo Oxford Symposium will consider photography’s relationship to truth today, from investigations into the stories missing from photographic records to photographers challenging their medium’s relationship to actuality.

Join us at Oxford University’s Weston Library for a day of papers and discussions with renowned artists, writers, curators and academics.

SYMPOSIUM HIGHLIGHTS

IN CONVERSATION
Siân Davey and Garry Fabian Miller
PHOTOGRAPHY, TRUTH, MATERIALITY
Geoffrey Batchen on Surface Tension
IN CONVERSATION
Heather Agyepong and Stephen Barber
FILM SCREENING
TALK
Diane Smyth
TALK
Jermaine Francis
PANEL DISCUSSION
Truth, the Archive and Photography, chaired by Richard Ovenden, with Edmund Clark and Crofton Black, Olivia Arthur and Taous Dahmani (TBC)

SPEAKERs

Heather Agyepong is a British Ghanaian award-winning artist and Olivier-nominated actress. Her visual artist practice centres around mental health and wellbeing, disapora, the archive, radical truth telling and catharsis.
Olivia Arthur is a photographer working across multiple mediums. Her recent practice examines the human relationship to the body, ies, fieldwork, research management and data analysis to support complex international legal cases relating to human rights abuses, criminal defence and asylum/extradition.
Taous Dahmani is an art historian, writer, editor and curator specialising in photography. She is an associate lecturer of the University of the Arts London.
Siân Davey uses photography to investigate psychological landscapes, her own and those of the people around her.
Garry Fabian Miller has exclusively made ‘camera-less’ photographs since the mid-1980s. His memoir Dark Room was published by the Bodleian in 2023.
Jermaine Francis is a multi-disciplinary artist who primarily works with photography and video. His practice investigates these mediums, and how they shape our understanding of visual culture, exploring their roles in storytelling and the construction of memory.
Richard Ovenden is Bodley’s Librarian and the Helen Hamlyn Director of the University of Oxford Libraries, and is responsible for their strategic oversight. He holds these posts alongside his role as Head of Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM), University of Oxford.
Diane Smyth is a writer, educator, curator, and editor of the British Journal of Photography.