The Developing Room holds its second annual graduate student colloquium, an event for Ph.D. candidates from any field of study who are working on dissertation topics in which photography—its histories and theories—play a central role.
We encourage presentations on underrepresented histories globally. Students selected to present will share their work with their peers and an official respondent who is a leader in the field. The format involves a formal presentation of 25 minutes in length, followed by 30 minutes of discussion. Although only five presentations are given at each colloquium meeting, the Developing Room invites a large audience of students in order to ensure a rich conversation, and to build a constituency from which papers can be drawn in subsequent years. Last year, our inaugural event brought together an international group of researchers working across a wide range of topics related to photography.
This year’s respondent is Leslie Wilson, Assistant Professor of Art History at Purchase College, State University of New York. Professor Wilson’s teaching and research focuses on the global history of photography, modern and contemporary art from Africa and the African diaspora, American art post-1900, and museum studies. Her current project charts the development and popularization of color photography in South Africa, from its inception in the early twentieth century to contemporary practice. From 2015 to 2017, she was a 24-Month Chester Dale Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
The event is free and open to the public. But please RSVP at developingroom@gmail.com
Sponsors
Center for Cultural Analysis
Art History Department, Rutgers University
Schedule
9:30 Coffee and Pastries
10:00 Introduction
10:15 Leila Anne Harris
10:40 Discussion
11:10 Daniel Peacock
11:35 Discussion
12:05 Lunch Break (1 hr 30 min)
1:30 Özge Calafato
1:55 Discussion
2:25 Alexandra Nicolaides
2:55 Discussion
3:25 Break (10 min)
3:35 Samuel Ewing
4:00 Discussion
4:30 General Discussion led by Leslie Wilson
5:00 End
Respondent
Leslie Wilson, SUNY Purchase
Leslie Wilson
SUNY Purchase
Leslie Wilson is Assistant Professor of Art History at Purchase College, State University of New York. Professor Wilson’s teaching and research focuses on the global history of photography, modern and contemporary art from Africa and the African diaspora, American art post-1900, and museum studies. Her current project charts the development and popularization of color photography in South Africa, from its inception in the early twentieth century to contemporary practice. From 2015 to 2017, she was a 24-Month Chester Dale Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Talks
Labor and the Picturesque: Photography, Propaganda, and the Tea Industry in Colonial India and Sri Lanka, 1880-1914
Labor and the Picturesque: Photography, Propaganda, and the Tea Industry in Colonial India and Sri Lanka, 1880-1914
Leila Anne Harris, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century colonial photographs of workers on tea plantations in India and Sri Lanka – with women in saris gently plucking leaves from lush bushes and men in sarongs operating heavy industrial machinery – are powerful symbols of a chain of production within the British Empire. My dissertation questions how these images of labor support a sense of nation-building that is defined by a new lucrative commodity: British-grown tea. Labor is at the center of my study, which aims to challenge the clear-cut division in current scholarship between representations of workers in industrialized England, and those in rural South Asia. I investigate how a new phase of commercial photography represented this new product, and how these images contributed to make industry in the colonies more visible at home.
Tea was an expensive novelty when it was first introduced to England from China in the mid- seventeenth century but quickly became the country’s national beverage. In the 1880s tea grown in British colonies began to outsell Chinese-grown tea. Concurrently, advances in technology made photographs inexpensive to print, leading to a vast increase in distribution of these images through multiple channels. They illustrated travel literature, were displayed at international exhibitions, and were collected by tourists in private albums. Through a visual analysis of the compositional strategies in these pictures, alongside study of their distribution, I seek to demonstrate how photographs of tea production helped to construct a new vision of the British Empire in which notions of primitivism coalesced with modern industry.
BIO
Leila Anne Harris is a PhD candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY specializing in the history of photography. Her dissertation, “Labor and the Picturesque: Photography, Propaganda, and the Tea Industry in Colonial India and Sri Lanka, 1880-1914,” considers how photographs functioned as nationalistic propaganda advertising the merits of British-grown tea through a romanticization of colonial labor and a celebration of industry in the British Empire. Her dissertation research has been recognized with support from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Yale Center for British Art. She holds a BA with Highest Distinction in Art History and Studio Art from the University of Virginia. Before pursuing graduate studies she worked in a professional photography lab. More recently, she has worked as a curatorial intern at the Museum of Modern Art and as a fellow at the Morgan Library & Museum.
Alvin Langdon Coburn and the Pictorialist Photograph in Print
Alvin Langdon Coburn and the Pictorialist Photograph in Print
Daniel Peacock, Princeton University
ABSTRACT
In 1911, Mitchell Kennerley published The Door in the Wall and Other Stories, a luxury volume collecting short fiction by the pioneer of "scientific romance" H. G. Wells, illustrated with ten photogravures by Alvin Langdon Coburn. Spearheaded by the photographer, this project followed Coburn's work with Henry James to produce photographic frontispieces for the twenty-four volume New York Edition of James's collected works. In contrast to the small scale, industrial production, and authorial interference of the James project, Coburn's collaboration with Wells afforded him the freedom to choose the stories "most suitable for photographic illustration" and to decide the means of their illustration. The resulting pictures, printed in Coburn's own photogravure studio, enter into a close relationship with the chosen narratives that shows the photographer tangling with pressing questions underlying the pictorialist enterprise. Aligned with fantastical narratives about the uncertain borders between illusion and reality, the pictorialist aesthetic strategies in Coburn's pictures are tethered to the joys and terrors of the literary events. Through his Symbolist-inflected subject matter, soft-focus effects, and sly manipulations of his original negatives, Coburn effected text-image relationships that self-reflexively question the photographic picture's perceived relationship to reality and the psychological effects this belief might make possible. Positioning Coburn's work in a historical lineage of photographic illustration, this chapter presents an account of the theoretical opportunities that illustration offered at a crucial moment in the development of art photography.
BIO
Daniel Peacock is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Art & Archaeology. His research focuses on American and European art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a specialization in the history of photography. His dissertation, “Alvin Langdon Coburn and the Pictorialist Photograph in Print,” explores the intersections of art photography and literature in the early decades of the twentieth century. Further areas of interest include vernacular art and the histories of science and technology. Daniel has worked extensively in the Princeton University Art Museum’s Photography Department and recently curated the two-part installation “Photography and Belonging.” He received his B.A. in Art History and Gender & Sexuality Studies from Bard College, where his thesis on photographer F. Holland Day was awarded the Alexander Klebanoff Award for Outstanding Achievement in Art History.
Posing for the Republic: A Beauty Queen and Turkish Vernacular Photographs from the 1920s and 1930s
Posing for the Republic: A Beauty Queen and Turkish Vernacular Photographs from the 1920s and 1930s
Özge Calafato, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam
ABSTRACT
This paper focuses on the interplay between photography, body and gender performed in vernacular photographs from the 1920s through the 1930s within the context of Turkish modernity. I investigate the modern femininities that newly forged Turkish citizens produced and negotiated during the formative years of the Republic by studying photographic representations of urban middle-class and upper middle-class women. Through the case study of Naside Saffet, the Turkish Beauty Queen of 1931, the paper explores the ways in which photography was circulated as a tool to generate classed and gendered identities for citizens of a modern nation state in the context of a society undergoing rapid secularization and Westernization. By decrypting visual and textual information in the photographic material, I analyze its social, economic, cultural, and geographical origins and the relationships present therein. Research material is sourced from a collection of 17,000 vernacular photographs from Turkey, which I have built over the years for the Akkasah Photography Archive at the New York University Abu Dhabi.
BIO
Özge Calafato is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, the University of Amsterdam, focusing on vernacular photography and Turkish modernity. She completed her BA degree in Political Science and International Relations at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, and her MA degree in Journalism at the University of Westminster, London. Since 1999, she has worked as a journalist, editor, and translator for several newspapers and magazines focusing on photography, literature, contemporary art, film, music, and travel. Between 1999 and 2007, she worked as a writer and editor for the Geniş Açı Photography Magazine from Istanbul. Between 2008 and 2013, she worked as Programming Manager the Abu Dhabi Film. Since 2014, she has been working as Project Manager for the Akkasah Center for Photography at the New York University Abu Dhabi.
Experiments and Failures in Exhibiting Color Photography, 1950-1976
Experiments and Failures in Exhibiting Color Photography, 1950-1976
Alexandra Nicolaides, Stony Brook University
ABSTRACT
“EVERYONE IN GRAND CENTRAL AGOG AND SMILING. ALL JUST FEELING GOOD,” Edward Steichen, the Director of the Photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, sent these words by telegram to the advertising department at the Eastman Kodak Corporation in November 1950. Steichen was relaying the happy, slack-jawed reaction amongst commuters, going to and from New York City’s Grand Central Terminal under the latest Kodak Colorama display located in the station’s central concourse. The massive size, saturated color and commercial motivations of the Colorama display was at odds with the existence of art color photography in 1950. As a medium on the periphery. This paper traces two groupings of color photography exhibitions: Colorama (1950-1990) and Color Photography (1950); and All the Meat You Can Eat (1971) and The Photographs of William Eggleston (1976). These exhibitions are not easily categorized. They are variously successes and failures; experimental and well-laid; impromptu and planned; clear and confused. However, the through line of color photography between these divergent approaches is diagnostic about the ways the medium would come to be defined as a modern art. It is as a result of this history of color photography that exhibitions can be understood as a key site to form artistic practice; to understand the aesthetic origins of color photography as a modern art; and the medium’s resistance to, and resulting absence from, modern art institutions.
BIO
Alexandra Nicolaides is based in New York City where she is a Ph.D. candidate in the Art History, Criticism, and Theory department at Stony Brook University. Her research broadly examines the diverse influences within the development of American modern photography, with the particular focus of her dissertation on the display and exhibition of color photography within this history. Aspects of this research will be published in the Revista de História da Arte in Fall 2019. She received her BA in Art History from Wellesley College, a MA in Art History from University College London, and an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing from the School of Visual Arts. Her critical writing has been published in Artcritical, The Brooklyn Rail, and BOMB Magazine. She wrote the catalogue essay for the exhibition Judy Linch: LUNCH at the CUE Art Foundation.Samuel Ewing is originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he received a BFA in Photography from the University of Tulsa in 2009. While his engagement with photographic history started as a supplement to his artistic practice, it soon took on a more central importance. He began his graduate studies at Florida State University, completing an MA in Art History in 2013 before coming to Harvard in the fall of that year to pursue a PhD. He is currently the Goldsmith Curatorial Fellow in Photography at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where he is planning an exhibition on the intersection of photography and land speculation. His research strives to understand how photography has shaped political subjectivities in the past, with an eye on their continual transformation in the present. He still produces photographs, although in the minor genres of cat portraiture and urban detritus, posted in the endless scroll of social media.
Instructive Documents: The San Diego Group and Radical Documentary in the Long 1970s
Instructive Documents: The San Diego Group and Radical Documentary in the Long 1970s
Samuel Ewing, Harvard University
ABSTRACT
With the recent cultural anxiety over "alternative facts" and the attendant claims of a rising, "post-truth" society, art historians have begun questioning the political efficacy of documentary with renewed energy. While much attention has been given to our present conjuncture, my project contends that an unrecognized history of these debates existed among American photographers of the 1970s. I focus on a group of four San Diego-based photographers (Fred Lonidier, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, and Phel Steinmetz, also known as the San Diego Group) who proposed their own solution to what they perceived as the waning political use value of documentary, a genre Sekula notably disparaged as "dead facts, reified objects torn from their social origins." I contend that the group sought to enliven these “dead facts” by embracing radical pedagogy. At stake was documentary’s ability to intervene in the social reproduction of American capitalism. Each chapter presents a case study in the various modes of radical pedagogy employed in the group’s work, ranging from proletarian autoethnographies, worker education initiatives, and Brechtian learning plays for the mass media age. At the colloquium, I will present material related to Sekula's School is a Factory project, the centerpiece of my third chapter. I argue that Sekula's project configures documentary as a means to "deskill" the increasingly business-oriented university, situating the dead facts of liberal education's emancipatory promise within a more complex historical field.
BIO
Samuel Ewing is originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he received a BFA in Photography from the University of Tulsa in 2009. While his engagement with photographic history started as a supplement to his artistic practice, it soon took on a more central importance. He began his graduate studies at Florida State University, completing an MA in Art History in 2013 before coming to Harvard in the fall of that year to pursue a PhD. He is currently the Goldsmith Curatorial Fellow in Photography at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where he is planning an exhibition on the intersection of photography and land speculation. His research strives to understand how photography has shaped political subjectivities in the past, with an eye on their continual transformation in the present. He still produces photographs, although in the minor genres of cat portraiture and urban detritus, posted in the endless scroll of social media.