Vladimir Rizov
PhD Student

Profile

Biography

I started my undergraduate degree at York in 2010 and, after a second year away on an Erasmus exchange at the University of Bergen in Norway, I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology with Social Psychology in 2013. After that, I received the 50th Anniversary Scholarship and through it I had the chance to do a Master’s degree in Social Research.

Currently, I am developing the work from my Master’s degree dissertation further and I am exploring issues in the practice of documentary photography. My work focuses on the way narratives are constructed and employed in the process of presenting the practice of documentation. In addition to this, I am interested in all things visual – from visual sociology through contemporary photography to the historical developments of cameras and development processes.

Research

Overview

At the moment I am working on two papers. The first one is called ‘Photography without the Photograph’ and it is a theoretical text, in which I am trying to emphasise the need to conceptualise photography as a practice without treating photographs as an entry-point of research. The second paper is called ‘Dialectics of the Document’ and in it I am proposing a dialectical approach of determining what is a document. In the text I rely on the photographers Eugene Atget (1857-1927) and Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) and their landscape depictions of Paris.

• 21st Century Photography; Art, Philosophy, Technique - Central Saint Martins, London 5-6 June 2015 - Presenting ‘Photography without the Photograph’
• Locating Fantastika - Lancaster University, 7-8 July 2015 - Presenting ‘Dialectics of the Document: The Case of the Parisian Landscape in Atget and Cartier-Bresson’

Additionally, as of recently I have started reviewing books for two journals. Marx and Philosophy Review of Books have commissioned me to review ‘Karl Marx and Digital Labour’ by Christian Fuchs; and International Sociological Review has commissioned me to review ‘The Dialectics of Inquiry Across the Historical Social Sciences’ by David Baronov.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Currently, I am a seminar tutor on the first year undergraduate module ‘Introduction to Social Theory’. The module covers both classical and contemporary sociological theory.