Daniel Campbell Blight

General interests: history and theory of photography; photography and philosophy; art writing; the essay; art history; contemporary art; media philosophy; sociology of race; critical philosophy of race; critical whiteness studies.

Research specialisms: photography and literature; photography and fiction; photography and the essay form; photography and prose poetry; photography and scientific racism; photography and whiteness; photography and magic; spirit photography; photography and surrealism; photography and spectrality.

Teaching (2019/20): My undergraduate teaching includes the Second Year elective Photography & Magic, which looks at the relationship between pre-photographic esoteric image cultures, the 19th century emergence of spirit photography and contemporary ideas and images pertaining to hauntology and spectrality. I also undertake third year extended essay and dissertation supervision and contribute individual lectures and seminars on a range of subjects, which in the past has included photography and whiteness, photography and postmodernism, photography and surrealism.

At postgraduate level I am module leader for Contemporary Debates, a critical survey of key concepts in photography practice and theory that includes ideas of medium, technology, apparatus, the digital, materiality, immateriality, incorporeality, automatic, accident, chance, temporality, picturing, painting, cinema, truth, fiction, fictionality, documentary aesthetics, race and whiteness. Following this, I am also module leader for the MA Dissertation. 

Daniel C. Blight is a writer based in London. He is lecturer in Historical & Critical Studies in Photography, School of Media, University of Brighton, and has been visiting lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts, Coventry University, Royal College of Art, University of Copenhagen, University of Oxford and Yale University.

His writing – which ranges from fiction and poetry to various forms of the essay – has been published by 1000 Words, Aperture, American Suburb X, Foam, frieze, The Guardian, Notes on Metamodernism, Philosophy of Photography, Photoworks, Source, Manchester Art Gallery; UCL Art Museum; Art Museum of Estonia; FOMU, Belgium and the Australian Centre for Photography. His writing has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, Estonian, French and Russian. In 2018 he was shortlisted for the School of Visual Arts New York prize for critical writing on photography. His first book, The Image of Whiteness: Contemporary Photography and Racialization, was co-published by SPBH Editions and Art on the Underground in September 2019.