The colloquium will be held online in the Eastern Time Zone
Please register in advance at our Zoom link.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
The Developing Room holds its fifth semi-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.
Presenters will share their work with their peers and an official respondent who is a leader in the field. Students may be at any stage of dissertation research, but presentations will consist of a dissertation chapter or a section, along with an account of how that chapter/section fits within the larger project. The format involves a formal 25-minute presentation followed by 25 minutes of discussion. Although only four presentations are given at our this 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. In the last four years, our event brought together an international group of researchers working across a wide range of topics related to photography.
The respondent will be Monica Bravo, Assistant Professor of Art History at University of Southern California. Her publications have appeared in American Art, Art Criticism, caa.reviews, The History of Illustration, History of Photography, and Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. She is the author of Greater American Camera: Making Modernism in Mexico, published by Yale University Press in June 2021, with support from the Terra and Wyeth Foundations for American Art. Research for this project was supported by fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Center for Creative Photography, the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center, the Harry Ransom Center, the Huntington Library, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Bravo’s next major research project, Silver Pacific: A Material History of Photography and its Minerals, 1840-1890, is currently being supported by a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society and a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art. Bravo is co-chair of Photography Network, a CAA Affiliated Society. Prior to coming to USC, Bravo was an Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts, and a Lecturer at Yale University in the History of Art Department and Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration.
The event is free and open to the public. To attend, please register at our forthcoming Zoom link.
If you have any questions, write us at developingroom@gmail.com
Sponsor
Center for Cultural Analysis
Tina Modotti, “Mella’s Typwriter,” 1928. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Anonymous gift.
Schedule (in Eastern Daylight Time)
12:30 Introduction and welcome
12:45 Marie Meyerding
1:15 Discussion
1:45 Frances Cullen
2:15 Discussion
2:45 Break (15 min)
3:00 Marina Dumont-Gauthier
3:30 Discussion
4:00 Sameena Siddiqui
4:30 Discussion
5:00 General Discussion led by Monica Bravo
5:30 End
Respondent
Monica Bravo, University of Southern California
Monica Bravo
University of Southern California
Monica Bravo is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California.
Bravo’s publications have appeared in American Art, Art Criticism, caa.reviews, The History of Illustration, History of Photography, and Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. She is the author of Greater American Camera: Making Modernism in Mexico, published by Yale University Press in June 2021, with support from the Terra and Wyeth Foundations for American Art. Research for this project was supported by fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Center for Creative Photography, the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center, the Harry Ransom Center, the Huntington Library, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Bravo’s next major research project, Silver Pacific: A Material History of Photography and its Minerals, 1840-1890, is currently being supported by a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society and a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art. Bravo is co-chair of Photography Network, a CAA Affiliated Society. Prior to coming to USC, Bravo was an Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts, and a Lecturer at Yale University in the History of Art Department and Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration.
Talks
Marie Mayerding, "Between Affirmation and Denial. The Photographic Practice of Mavis Mtandeki and Primrose Talakumeni"
Between Affirmation and Denial. The Photographic Practice of Mavis Mtandeki and Primrose Talakumeni
Marie Meyerding, Die Freie Universität, Berlin
ABSTRACT
This presentation looks at the practice of the two black women photographers Mavis Mtandeki and Primrose Talakumeni and their work’s absence from the history of photography in South Africa. As members of the United Women’s Congress, both were delegated onto a one-year media course led by the politically motivated Community Arts Project in 1989. Subsequently, they operated as a team, focusing their lenses on the lives of the women surrounding them. During the early 1990s, when the apartheid system started to crumble, paving the way for democracy, their photographs were exhibited in art institutions in South Africa and London.
Following the approach of a social art historian, I consider the conditions which facilitated these photographs’ production and distribution. Looking at the reception of Mtandeki and Talakumeni’s documentary-style photographs and previously published ‘struggle photography’ shows how the medium’s status changed in compliance with the political situation in South Africa. This analysis of the institution of South African photography and the ways in which it is archived reveals changing international power structures in the realms of politics and art then as now.
This presentation showcases one of my three dissertation chapters through which my research project outlines the representation of women in the field of photography in South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. Highlighting issues of gender and intersectionality in the country’s history of photography, my dissertation explores the professional and personal lives of some of the most important women photographers working in apartheid South Africa.
BIO
Marie Meyerding is a PhD candidate at the Department of African Art History at Freie Universität Berlin. Her dissertation examines the representation of women in the field of photography in South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. Focusing on the representation of women on two different levels (as agents, behind the camera, and as subjects, in photographs), her research reveals the changing underlying power structures of the field of photography along gendered lines. Meyerding holds an MA with Distinction in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
Frances Cullen, "Cybernetics, Semiotics, and the Secret Life of the “Photographic Analogue”: A Recourse to Roland Barthes"
Cybernetics, Semiotics, and the Secret Life of the “Photographic Analogue”: A Recourse to Roland Barthes
Frances Cullen, McGill University
ABSTRACT
In the field of photography studies as in others, the word “analog” has a certain transparency. It has become a naturalized part of the language that we use to describe this medium’s technical and historical horizons, its meaning synonymous with the figure of a “film-based” photography, with the idea of a pre-digital past, and with the vision of a photographic modality that is more material, more authentic, and more real. It also has the rhetorical effect of rendering each of these aspects as an opposite to the digital “other”.
Given these associations, it is perhaps surprising to consider not only that this terminology has a traceable history, but that its origin story includes the moment when, in his 1964 essay “Rhetoric of the Image”, the famous French theorist Roland Barthes introduced to photography theory his idea that the medium is definable by its “absolutely analogical nature.” That, however, is precisely the line of connection that this paper establishes when it argues, firstly, that Barthes’ innovation took place in the context of his little-discussed encounter with American Cybernetics; and secondly, that his many interlocutors subsequently put that informational logic into a broader circulation across the field of postmodern photography theory. This same language, I show, would eventually find its way into the everyday lexicon for discussing the stakes of technology change in the context of photography’s digital revolution.
By that point, of course, the term’s meaning had substantially changed. And yet by mapping out the deeper lexical and conceptual trajectory by which analog once travelled from American cybernetics, into Barthesian photography theory, and finally into the sphere of contemporary techno-culture, my paper demonstrates that the history of photography’s informationalization is not just a cultural or material one. It is an intellectual one too..
BIO
Frances Cullen is a PhD candidate in Art History at McGill University specializing in the study of photography, media, and contemporary art and visual culture. Her dissertation analyses case studies from contemporary photographic practice to argue that analog photography has been constructed and rhetorically deployed as an icon of obsolescence in the twenty-first century. This project has been supported by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship and Media@McGill.
Earlier research projects considered the material and institutional status of film stills; and the role of cinematic time as a theme in the contemporary art gallery. Before joining the department at McGill she studied art history at the University of Alberta; the material history of photography at Ryerson University; and cinema studies at the University of Toronto. She has also worked with a number of photography, film, and art collections, most notably during two years spent as a student and staff member at the George Eastman Museum and, more recently,as a Max Stern Fellow at McGill University’s Visual Arts Collection. She has presented her workacross Canada and in the United States, Europe, and the United Kingdom.
Marina Dumont-Gauthier, "Modernity in Flux: Transatlantic Exposures and Buenos Aires’s Photographic Avant-Garde"
Modernity in Flux: Transatlantic Exposures and Buenos Aires’s Photographic Avant-Garde
Marina Dumont-Gauthier, University of Toronto
ABSTRACT
Most art historians agree that it was Sur, a literary avant-garde magazine founded in 1931 by Victoria Ocampo, that launched Argentina’s photographic avant-garde when in 1935, the magazine mounted a major exhibition in its headquarters that introduced the work of Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola and his German wife, the photographer Grete Stern. Described as the “first serious manifestation of photographic art” seen in Argentina, the first half of this chapter revisits the workings of the exhibition: how it came to be, what its main goals were, its manifesto-like declaration, and its reception and impact.
Though there has been a growing interest in the history of Argentina’s modern photography in recent years, the bulk of the spotlight remains given to photographers who trained in avant-garde circles in Europe, rather than those who trained in Argentina. And so, though the importance of the Sur exhibition cannot be overstated, the second half of this chapter challenges the idea that it constitutes the starting point of an avant-garde in what was otherwise a photographic scene firmly entrenched in nineteenth century Pictorialism, by notably looking at the work of German-born photographer Annemarie Heinrich. Heinrich fills an interesting liminal space as European woman who first picked up a camera in Argentina when she was fourteen years old. Considering aspects of her practice such as her studio dynamic, her manipulation of negatives, and her assessment of surrealism, this chapter reassesses her role in the genesis Argentina’s photographic modernity.
BIO
Marina Dumont-Gauthier is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. Her research explores the role played by female photographers in the wake of Argentina’s photographic avant-garde and its subsequent development in the country, focusing on the works of German-born photographers Gisèle Freund (1908–2000), Annemarie Heinrich (1912–2005), and Grete Stern (1904–1999), between the mid-1930s and the early 1950s.
Since starting her PhD, Marina completed a research internship in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2017) and was the Graduate Intern of the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2019–20). Starting in September 2021, she will be a Doctoral Fellow at the Northrop Frye Centre. Her doctoral research is funded by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2016) and the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Award (2017–20).
Sameena Siddiqui, "In the grey zone between itinerant commercial exhibitions and Bombay cinema: Practices and technologies of vernacular photography in North India, 1930-1980s"
In the grey zone between itinerant commercial exhibitions and Bombay cinema: Practices and technologies of vernacular photography in North India, 1930-1980s
Sameena Siddiqui, University of British Columbia
ABSTRACT
This dissertation examines the history and politics of production, dissemination, and consumption of photographic images in the vernacular cultures of cantonment and suburban towns, with a focus on North India. By concentrating on the visual cultures and economies of such towns in what was once the United Provinces (UP) and Delhi, my study, through a mapping of itinerant commercial circuits such as fairgrounds (numaish or melas) and district exhibitions (colonial or swadeshi), traces the material, infrastructural and cultural history of commercial photography and the constitutive role of images during the analogue era. It also looks into the development of the profession ‘commercial photographer’ through the establishment of photo studios in cantonment towns and how consumption of photographic images led to the self-fashioning of post-colonial identities. The inquiry will extend from the early decades of the twentieth century into the first three decades following Indian independence, thus spanning the 1930s to the 1980s. By focusing on the intersections between photography, cinema, and print cultures as part of leisure and visual economy, this study will try and understand the analogue photography’s commercial role and cultural viability in 20 th c India. It explores the following questions: How did traditional itinerant spaces, like fairs, get restructured into exhibitions and become a conduit for the flourishing of bazaar photographers and modern practices of seeing? To what extent, the practices of Bombay Cinema and print cultures, influenced the essence of analog photography in India? My study links (media) technology and commerce with each other on the ground, to critically examine the emergence of a wide range of practices of photography developed by amateur/professional photographers as well as development of illegal infrastructures (in the absence of State-sponsored organizations) like alternative trans-regional pirate economy in modern India that led to democratization of studio spaces and images. More broadly, I ask: how did media crossovers, second-hand flea markets, and piracy in India enable a diversity of visual engagements with modernity?
Thinking of vernacular photographic practices as ‘rearguard practices’ (evolved and based on do-it-yourself tools), this research will look at how multiplication in diverse paths of itinerant image created alternative networks of meaning-making and affirmative practices of resistance for its consumers.
BIO
Sameena Siddiqui is a Ph.D. candidate and SRSF doctoral fellow at the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia, Canada. She did her M.Phil. from the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi, and has presented her research work in several international conferences and residencies. Her dissertation research recently won the MFAH Joan and Stanford Alexander Dissertation Award, US, 2021.