CREAM PhD researcher Lucy Rogers presents her paper ‘Seeking Sanctuary in the Sacred: Sites of Worship in the Photographs of Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’ at Spiritual Landscapes and Photography: An Exploration from the Caucasus to the Mediterranean at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut on Tuesday 15 October 2024.

Rogers will introduce Schulz-Dornburg’s photographs of Armenian cloisters from the 1990s. Many of these photographs show churches in a state of ruination and were made prior to their eventual restoration. Despite this, there is a mystical quality to the architecture found in her photographs. Spirituality becomes an act of solidarity and resistance, as well as a bridge between the future and past. The photographs take on new meanings, considered at a time when the country was questioning the future of its own social, cultural, and political identity as a newly independent nation. 

This conference is organised by the OSCOP project. The scope of the OSCOP project is to study and promote the collection of photographs of South Caucasian art and architecture taken by the research group of Adriano Alpago Novello between the 1960s and 1980s, now preserved in the Centre of Study and Documentation of Armenian Culture in Venice. 

The conference aims to cross-examine photographs of spiritual landscapes from various point of view, with the double lens of seeking innovative methodological approaches to study the interplay between nature, humans, artifacts, and the underlying transcendental relations on the one hand and the role of the spiritual in related photographs and photographic aesthetics on the other.

Find out more about the conference programme here.