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Photography Matters - Even in an era marked by emerging imaging technologies, neural networks, and challenges to photography’s visual authority, photography continues to be embedded in both our online and offline experiences. However, there has been a profound shift in our relationship with photographic images. Now, more than ever, it is necessary to critically reassess how photographic processes and images mediate our understanding of the world. This moment calls for the development of new photographic paradigms.

Photography encompasses diverse applications, be it artistic, scientific, journalistic, or activist. This multiplicity underpins its foundational relevance within the fields of visuality, as well as visual, digital, and media literacy. By engaging with these varied frameworks, Image Matters researchers employ interdisciplinary approaches to examine the diverse ways in which photographs and photographic images engage with and reveal both human and non-human conditions.

Image Matters explores how photography—through its materiality, technologies, dissemination, aesthetics, and epistemology—shapes the ecology of images and, in turn, reflects media systems, social conditions, power structures, environmental concerns, and creative futures.

Our individual research areas investigate a range of themes, including virtual photography and AI-based practices, identity and representation, materiality and ecologies, pedagogy, and human-technology interactions.

The goal is to foster the continued development of photographic understanding within both academic and lifelong learning environments, as well as through public-facing initiatives such as exhibitions, talks, public events, and community organizations.

Currently we are: , ,      and Professors Harri Laakso and Donald Weber 

Research group members have been recipients of funding from multiple sources including  Finnish Museum of Photography, Kone foundation, Finnish Cultural Foundation, Frame Contemporary and