Dr Ben Burbridge's new book Photography After Capitalism (Goldsmiths Press, 2020) will be launched in a special online event on Wednesday 17 February.

In the book Ben makes the case for a radically expanded conception of photography, encompassing the types of labour too often obscured by black-boxed technologies, slick platform interfaces, and the compulsion to display lives to others.

Bringing together cultural criticism, social history, and political philosophy, Ben examines how representations of our photographic lives – in advertising, journalism, scholarship and, particularly, contemporary art – shape a sense of what photography is and the social relations that comprise it.

More precisely, he focuses on how different critical and creative strategies – from the appropriation of social media imagery to performative traversals of the network, from documentaries about secretive manual labour to science fiction fantasies of future sabotage – affect our understanding of photography's interactions with political and economic systems.

Find out more.

Joining Ben will be Charlotte Cotton, Curator in Residence at the California Museum of Photography, as they explore a range of questions in a far-reaching conversation about the politics and economics of contemporary photographic cultures.

The event is a collaboration between the Photographers' Gallery, London, and Sussex's Centre for Photography and Visual Culture.

It is a pay-what-you-can event. You are welcome to attend for free, or can make a donation.

For more information and to book a place, please visit the Photographers' Gallery website.