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 fourth 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.
This year’s respondent will be Mitra Abbaspour, a photography historian and a curator who holds the title of the Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Princeton University Art Museum. She previously served as an Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art and an Assistant Curator at the California Museum of Photography. She has authored numerous essays on contemporary artists in this field, most recently contributing to monographs of Reza Aramesh, Lalla Essaydi, Dor Guez, Hassan Hajjaj, and Shirin Neshat.
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
Sponsors
Center for Cultural Analysis
Art History Department, Rutgers University
Thomas Askew, “Thomas-Four African American women seated on steps of building at Atlanta University, Georgia,” c. 1900.
Schedule (in Eastern Daylight Time)
12:30 Introduction
12:45 Irem Gülersönmez
1:15 Discussion
1:45 Alyssa Bralower
2:15 Discussion
2:45 Break (15 min)
3:00 Delphine Sims
3:30 Discussion
4:00 Tory Jeffay
4:30 Discussion
5:00 General Discussion led by Mitra Abbaspour
5:30 End
Respondent
Mitra Abbaspour, Princeton University Art Museum
Mitra Abbaspour
Princeton University Art Museum
Mitra Abbaspour is the Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Princeton University Art Museum.
Abbaspour joined the Museum in 2016. She previously served as an Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art and an Assistant Curator at the California Museum of Photography, in addition to having served as a guest curator for a number of exhibitions at various institutions. Exhibitions she has curated or co-curated at the Museum include Helen Frankenthaler Prints: Seven Types of Ambiguity (2019), Frank Stella Unbound: Literature and Printmaking (2018), Making History Visible: Of American Myths and National Heroes (2017) and, selections of previous work includes, Re-Orientations: Islamic Art and the West in the 18th and 19th Centuries (2008), Lori Nix: Some Other Place (2003-04) One Ground: 4 Palestinian & 4 Israeli Filmmakers (2003), and Common Borders: Casa Blanca, Riverside and La Frontera (2002).
At MoMA, she led the curatorial branch of an interdisciplinary research initiative that resulted in the print and digital publications Object : Photo: Modern Photographs 1909-1945. She has authored numerous essays on contemporary artists in this field, most recently contributing to monographs of Reza Aramesh, Lalla Essaydi, Dor Guez, Hassan Hajjaj, and Shirin Neshat and has also taught courses both in her specialization, the modern and contemporary Middle East and, general area specializations—Islamic art, modern art, and the history of photography—at The Cooper Union, Hunter College, and Brooklyn College.
Talks
Irem Gülersönmez, "Absence of Violence: Ottoman Visual Propaganda during WWI and the Armenian Genocide"
Absence of Violence: Ottoman Visual Propaganda during WWI and the Armenian Genocide
Irem Gülersönmez, Birkbeck College, University of London
Arrested Armenians and Confiscated Arms - Diyarbekir
ABSTRACT
How can we think of photography of violence in the absence of photographs? This paper aims to look at photographs of Ottoman visual propaganda during the First World War to claim that despite the scarcity of the visual documentation of the Armenian Genocide, photographs produced for propaganda purposes in wartime can act as manifestations of the Genocide itself. Moving from Ariella Aisha Azoulay's argument in Unlearning Imperialism: A Potential History in which she claims that "in zones of systemic and omnipresent violence the co-presence of cameras and rape in the same unit of time and space should be enough to reject the axiom according to which there are no images of rape.", I argue that the photographs of official war propaganda taken across the empire as well as photographs in the White Book, a propaganda album produced explicitly by the Ottoman state to acquit itself from the accusations of the massacres against Armenians, carry a potential for a counter-narrative. These images, if truly investigated, can reveal, on the one hand, the ongoing state violence towards Armenians and on the other hand, offer material witnesses to the violence Ottoman Armenians were subjected to.
To this end, by drawing links between visual war propaganda traditions and the genocide denial, the paper offers a way to reconstitute a visual archive of the Armenian Genocide and challenge the common acknowledgment that there is insufficient image of the Genocide.
BIO
Gülersönmez is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the Irem Gülersönmez is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London, working on the Ph.D. project "Historical Imagery of Violence: Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (1890-1918)." She received her Bachelor's and Master's Degrees from the History Department at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Her research explores the relationship between successive waves of mass violence and the use of photographic technology in the Ottoman context. She is interested in questions of representation, agency, and memory.
Alyssa Bralower, "The New Vision of Palestine: Nation-building and Homemaking in Ellen Auerbach’s Film Tel Aviv"
The New Vision of Palestine: Nation-building and Homemaking in Ellen Auerbach’s Film Tel Aviv
Alyssa Bralower, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ellen Auerbach, Self-portrait in Palestine, 1934/35. Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Kunstsammlung, Ellen Auerbach 160
ABSTRACT
In a 1985 letter, the photographer Ellen Auerbach reflected on her images of the mid- twentieth century, concluding that, “I have grown old without ever having been possessed by a fanatical, world-reforming idea...It is not that I have no ideas or convictions about my pictures, but...it is hard to describe what my intentions are.” The observation is striking when one considers the many “world-reforming” artistic and political movements Auerbach navigated across the mid-twentieth century—these include not only the best-known episode of her career, the photography studio ringl+pit that she co-founded with Grete Stern before fleeing National Socialism in 1933—but also the largely unexamined works that followed, such as the Zionist films and photographs she made in Mandate-era Palestine. These latter works require us to reconsider midcentury aesthetics and politics to account for multifaceted dynamics related to settler colonialism, exile, and gender.
After fleeing Nazi Germany for Palestine, Auerbach occupied a complex position, as simultaneously exile and settler. In this paper, I will consider this double-edged positionality within Mandatory-era Palestine by analyzing her film Tel Aviv, her work for the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO), and the children’s portraits she made with Liselotte Grschebina at their studio, Ishon. These works are informed by the specific character of Zionism in the 1930s—a utopian project that radically re-imagined Jewish life, but one that also enabled the settler-colonialist displacement of indigenous Palestinians. Attending to these works offers insight into the way that modernist aesthetics served ends that were sometimes radical, sometimes regressive, and, as I will show, often both at once.
BIO
Alyssa Bralower is a PhD Candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign specializing in modern and contemporary art and the history of photography. Alyssa has previously held positions at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and the Krannert Art Museum in Urbana, IL. Her writing has appeared in Art Inquiries, ASAP/J, and Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual Culture. She is the recipient of a 2020 Davidson Family Fellowship at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and a 2021 DAAD German Studies Research Grant.
Delphine Sims, "Exposing the (Un)Visible of Black Presence"
Exposing the (Un)Visible of Black Presence
Delphine Sims, University of California, Berkeley
Nona Faustine, “From Her Body Sprang Their Greatest Wealth,” Wall Street, 2015
ABSTRACT
Through an exploration of photographer Nona Faustine’s White Shoes series I contend with what has been rendered ungeographic, unknowable, and unphotographable: the long legacy of slavery and, more specifically, Black women’s history, knowledge, and presence. Through close- readings of Faustine’s photographs captured in Manhattan, I argue that her self-portraits rewrite the history of landscape photography, for in the moment that she photographs her nude figure at the locus of invisible Black histories, any engagement with said site must contend with the realities that Black life is embedded in these geographies.
My argument leverages Black geographies, histories of photography, performance, and Black feminist methodologies. I principally take up Katherine McKittrick, Kimberly Juanita Brown, and Kate Palmer Albers’s explorations of lost (visual) histories to propose that Blackness is always present in American geographies and by consequence in landscapes of American photography whether Black bodies are visibly present or not. I build upon Faustine’s photographic practice to upend established methods for reading American landscape photography—one should not solely be concerned with what is visibly present but also what or who was once present. I offer a brief example of such a method through a rereading of Paul Strand’s New York (Wall Street), 1915 according to Black narratives on the site—Black folk’s thoughts, labor, life, death, etc. Faustine’s photographs haunt other photographs by making evident the proliferation of Blackness throughout United States histories and geographies, so present that her body becomes a kind of metaphorical afterimage that permeates an image like Strand’s New York.
BIO
Delphine Sims is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley, where she studies the history of photography in the Americas. Her research focuses on the ways in which race, gender, geography, and urbanity inform and redefine landscape photography. Most recently she was the Mellon Curatorial Intern at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive during which time she helped organize the 2019 exhibitions Unlimited: Recent Gifts from the William Goodman and Victoria Belco Collection with Sandra Phillips and About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging. In 2018, she was a curatorial intern at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the photography department. Previously, Delphine was a curatorial assistant at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art also in the photography department. Delphine also co-organizes the graduate student working group Decolonizing Museums?, which regularly hosts meetings and events concerned with critiques of museum pasts, presents, and futures.
Tory Jeffay, “'Nothing But Stains”': Edward O. Heinrich and the Photographic Logic of Modern Forensics
“Nothing But Stains”: Edward O. Heinrich and the Photographic Logic of Modern Forensics
Tory Jeffay, University of California, Berkeley
Pioneer American criminologist Edward Oscar Heinrich’s crime collection opened at the Bancroft Library in December 2018. (Photo © the Regents of the University of California, The Bancroft Library, cubanc00005983_ae_a)
ABSTRACT
While scholars following Foucault have understood the history of photography’s relationship with law and policing as an oppressive application of realist technology, in this presentation I show that that history oversimplifies the practices of those employing photography and film in these settings—practices that take us far from realism. It was the camera’s ability to transcend or refute the unaided human eye rather than replicate natural vision that drove its development as a tool of evidence. Forensic practitioners used photography to fix the object or scene for further scrutiny. It was the tool that allowed them to bring evidence of fingerprint, blood spatter, or bullet hole into the courtroom, to render that evidence visible and quantifiable, and to display it persuasively before the jury. These imaging practices engendered what I call a forensic imaginary, a belief that the photograph retains more knowledge than initially meets the eye.
My presentation draws on the archive of forensic expert Edward Oscar Heinrich, who gained an international reputation as “America’s Sherlock Holmes” in the 1920s due to his pioneering scientific and photographic methods. Analyzing the writings of Heinrich and his contemporaries, alongsideclose readings of evidential photographsand theories on inscription from Friedrich Kittler, Lisa Gitelman, and James Lastra, I argue that the modern field of forensics emerged from a logic of photographic inscription. Considering crime labs, detective bureaus, and other unlikely sites of photographic analysis reveals a forensic discourse network whose effects extended beyond the domain of the law into popular visual culture.
BIO
Tory Jeffay is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Berkeley with a designated emphasis in New Media. Her dissertation, “The Forensic Imaginary: Visual Media and Evidentiary Culture” looks to the history of photography and film as evidence within law and policing from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century to better understand contemporary uses of visual evidence. Her work is forthcoming in the New Review of Film and Television Studies. Prior to graduate school she worked as a documentary filmmaker and editor.