Expanded Photography

Expanded photography refers to an inter-disciplinary field in which the photographic image operates across multiple media, formats, and contexts rather than remaining confined to the single framed, two-dimensional picture. It treats photography as an “expanded field” that overlaps with visual art, film, performance, writing, design, and digital culture, emphasizing how photographic images circulate within broader systems of signs and data. Historically, the idea grows out of avant-garde film and post-conceptual, performative, intermedia practices, notably media-reflexive works presented under titles such as "Expanded Photography" and experimental projects developed in Central and Eastern Europe. The concept gains renewed force with the shift from analogue to digital imaging, which multiplies the possible forms and functions of photographs and prompts efforts to rethink what counts as photographic.

In practice, expanded photography spans many techniques, from camera-based to cameraless, and manifests in print, video, installation, online environments, and hybrid sculptural forms. Methods include digital post-production, photomontage, collage, darkroom manipulation, mixed media, and the transformation of flat prints into three-dimensional objects. Practitioners may cut, fold, or re-stage photographs, combine them with text and sound, or embed them in augmented reality, 3D scanning, CGI, photogrammetry, 360 imaging, drone and satellite imagery, or AI-driven workflows. Educational and artistic frameworks around expanded photography often stress experimentation, critical reflection, and ethical engagement with networked image cultures.

Debates around expanded photography center on the status and limits of photography itself. Some discussions ask whether AI-generated images, point clouds, or purely synthetic renders should still be considered photographic, and whether new practices require new labels such as "synthography." The concept intersects with intermedia art, conceptual photography, and expanded documentary, while also drawing on theoretical models of photography’s "expanded field" that map its movement between stillness and motion, narrative and non-narrative forms. Supporters see expanded photography as clarifying how the medium continually renovates itself; critics argue that trying to include everything beyond the frame risks logical confusion or recenters photography just as it claims to disperse it.