About the events
Photo Oxford 2025 events are taking place at the Weston Library, including the Photo Oxford symposium.
More events to be confirmed soon.
Photo Oxford Symposium: Truth and Photography
Friday 31 October 2025 | 10.00 – 17.00
Sir Victor Blank Lecture Theatre, Weston Library
‘Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.’
— Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977)
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 the Weston Library for a day of papers and discussions with renowned artists, writers, curators and academics.
More information & book tickets
Talk: Constance Talbot, early photographer and lifelong artist
Wednesday 5 November | 13.00–14.00
Sir Victor Blank Lecture Theatre, Weston Library
This talk by Rose Teanby illuminates the life of Constance Talbot, wife of William Henry Fox Talbot.
Recent research into artworks and photographs from the Bodleian and British Library Talbot collections throw a new light on the status of Constance Talbot as one of the earliest women photographers in Britain. Drawings from her family home in Derby, sketches at Lake Como and watercolours of Lacock Abbey show Constance's lifelong dedication to art. Re-creating her first documented photograph also brings a 21st-century insight into the challenges she faced as an early photographer. Combining her preserved letters with artworks and photographs brings us closer to the truth about Constance Talbot's unique place in photographic history.
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