The colloquium will be held online
Please register in advance at this Zoom link
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
The Developing Room holds its delayed third 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 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. In the last two year, 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 Ellen Handy, a historian, curator and critic of photography and modern art. She teaches courses in the history of photography, art of the United States, art criticism, and research methods in art history at The City College of New York. Previously, she was Executive Curator of Visual Collections at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the International Center of Photography, Senior Research Assistant in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a regular columnist for Arts Magazine. She received her PhD from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, and her BA from Barnard College of Columbia University. Her research interests include landscape and urban imagery in photography and other mediums, intersections of art and science in 19th century photography, women and photography, connoisseurship in photography, printed ephemera, and early modernism in visual and literary culture in the United States.
The event is free and open to the public. To attend, please register at this Zoom link
If you have any questions, right us at developingroom@gmail.com
Sponsors
Center for Cultural Analysis
Art History Department, Rutgers University
Schedule (in Eastern Daylight Time)
10:00 Introduction
10:15 Kaitlin Booher
10:40 Discussion
11:10 Lauren Graves
11:35 Discussion
12:05 Lunch Break (1 hr 25 min)
1:30 Colin Young
1:55 Discussion
2:25 Molly Kalkstein
2:55 Discussion
3:25 Break (10 min)
3:35 Kathryn Poindexter
4:00 Discussion
4:30 General Discussion led by Ellen Handy
5:00 End
Respondent
Ellen Handy, CUNY Manhattan
Ellen Handy
CUNY Manhattan
Ellen Handy is a historian, curator and critic of photography and modern art. She teachers courses in the history of photography, art of the United States, art criticism, and research methods in art history. Previously, she was Executive Curator of Visual Collections at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the International Center of Photography, Senior Research Assistant in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a regular columnist for Arts Magazine. She received her PhD from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, and her BA from Barnard College of Columbia University. Her research interest include landscape and urban imagery in photography and other mediums, intersections of art and science in 19th century photography, women and photography, connoisseurship in photography, printed ephemera, and early modernism in visual and literary culture in the United States.
Talks
Kaitlin Booher "Color Sells: The Creation and Reception of Color Fashion Photographs in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, 1932–45"
Color Sells: The Creation and Reception of Color Fashion Photographs in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, 1932–45
Kaitlin Booher, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
ABSTRACT
When Vogue publisher Condé Nast’s market research indicated that issues with color photographs on the cover outsold those with hand-drawn illustrations, the magazine’s photography budget increased exponentially. The first publisher to overcome the technical challenge of printing, Nast created what photography historians have called a monopoly of color photography publishing in the mid-1930s. He promoted the advantages of color photographs to potential advertisers in the 1932 trade publication Color Sells, while Vogue staff scrambled to schedule photography shoots. Although previous histories position these advances as a tremendous success, editorial photographs remained in black-and-white through the 1940s. Behind the scenes of Vogue, editors and photographers struggled to take advantage of the attention-grabbing novelty and descriptive opportunities afforded by this technology. Drawing upon the approaches of scholars Thierry Gervais and Nadya Bair, who advocate for considering the broader teams of people who work on the photographs published illustrated magazines, this paper integrates original archival research with close analysis of magazine spreads to reveal the paradoxical role of editorial photography in American fashion magazines. Although fashion has long been considered a genre too commercial to merit serious study, I argue that it represents a critical aspect of the medium’s history: its burgeoning success as a business. Studying the networks of people—particularly women—who created and published fashion photographs advances an approach to photo history that challenges its modernist tenets and demonstrates the power of photographs to transform the life and desires of vast constituencies.
BIO
Kaitlin Booher is a PhD candidate in Art History at Rutgers University. She studies the history of photography with attention to its technical and aesthetic transformations, its social history, and its use as tool for communication at the turn of the 20th century. Her dissertation “Fashioning an Industry: Photography at the Intersection of Aesthetics and Economics” is the first study of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue’s role in the dissemination of modern photography in the first half of the 20th century. Prior to Rutgers, Kaitlin was a curatorial consultant in the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art and assistant curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Her exhibitions include “Alex Prager: Face in the Crowd” (2013) and “Shooting Stars: Publicity Stills from Early Hollywood and Portraits by Andy Warhol.”
Colin Young "Capturing Absence: Indigenous Disappearance and Desert Emptiness in the First Photographic Albums of the Prairies and Pampas"
Capturing Absence: Indigenous Disappearance and Desert Emptiness in the First Photographic Albums of the Prairies and Pampas
Colin Young, Yale University
ABSTRACT
This paper proposes a hemispheric reading of the first photographic albums of the Canadian prairies and Argentinian pampas, two grassland zones understood to be “deserts” by nineteenth-century settler colonists. The images for the former were taken by Humphrey Lloyd Hime as part of the 1858 Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Exploring Expedition, while those for the latter were captured by Antonio Pozzo during the 1879 Campaña del desierto. Based on the ostensible purposes of these frontier operations, the albums are an unlikely pairing. Henry Youle Hind was the geologist in charge of the speculative Canadian project, a civilian-led scientific survey tasked with creating a topographical and geological report of the area west of the Red River. General Julio A. Roca headed the Argentinian military campaign whose purpose was to clear the remaining indigenous population of the pampas and integrate this land into the national body.
Despite the sizable differences in context, uncanny parallels exist between Hime and Pozzo’s pictures. The Desert Campaign resulted in 1,313 indigenous deaths and 12,849 captives, but, as in Hime’s series, explicit violence is disavowed in Pozzo’s images. Both expeditions relied heavily on indigenous men—over half of the Canadian team under geologist Henry Youle Hind and 230 soldiers in General Julio A. Roca’s unit alone—and yet native life is photographically registered as a contained diminution, if at all. Time and again Pozzo and Hime foster an aesthetic of absence through a combination of distant perspectives and unpeopled views. This paper contends that in picturingindigenous absence and desert emptiness, these albums proffer a delineation of futurity that captures aftermath in the present, naturalizing and thereby justifying their settler colonialism.
BIO
Colin Young is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art Department at Yale University. He works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art and visual culture, with a particular focus on landscape painting in the Americas. His research interests include hemispheric studies, race and archive formation, and intermedia translation. His dissertation, Desert Places: The Visual Culture of the Prairies and Pampas across the Nineteenth Century, argues for the necessity of approaching the prairies and pampas as a shared cultural, political, and visual landscape in the nineteenth-century Americas. Colin holds a B.A. in Spanish from Carleton College and has held curatorial positions at the Crocker Art Museum and the Yale University Art Gallery. His work has been supported by the Amon Carter Museum, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, The Huntington, and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Molly Kalkstein "The Discerning Eye: Materiality and the 1970s American Market for Photographs"
The Discerning Eye: Materiality and the 1970s American Market for Photographs
Molly Kalkstein, University of Arizona
ABSTRACT
The late 1960s and 1970s were marked by a commercial and institutional explosion of photography, known commonly as the photo boom. My dissertation looks in particular at the development of photograph connoisseurship, a diverse set of practices for evaluating, authenticating, and caring for photographic objects. My investigation follows three distinct strands of connoisseurship: vocabularies and strategies aimed at creating rarity and distinguishing photographs as collectibles; the notion of “image permanence” and the advent of photograph conservation; and photographic forgery and its implications for the connoisseur’s pursuit of authenticity.
This paper provides an overview of my chapter on the first of the above mentioned strands. The early years of the photographic market coalesced around a central concern with the intellectual and pragmatic implications of selling and collecting a reproducible medium. Accordingly, the connoisseurial innovations of this period included both the notion of the “vintage” print and the production of limited editions and portfolios. Over the course of the decade, such approaches were publicly legitimized in book-length collecting guides and in articles published in both popular and specialist periodicals. This phenomenon is exemplified by The Print Collector’s Newsletter (PCN), founded in 1970 and helmed for two decades by editor Jacqueline Brody. PCN was one of the only publications of the era to systematically consider photographic prints as collectible objects, incorporating them into a larger conversation about the newly burgeoning market for graphics and multiples.
BIO
Molly Kalkstein is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Arizona, with emphases on the history of photography and Digital Art History. She holds an MA in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, an MFA in Print Media from Concordia University, and a BA in English Literature and Studio Art from Swarthmore College. Kalkstein has worked in curatorial departments at museums including the Center for Creative Photography, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her doctoral studies are supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and focus on facets of connoisseurship during the 1970s photo boom. Her work has most recently appeared in the Rutgers Art Review and photographies.
Kathryn Poindexter "Aaron Siskind’s Photographs as Rosenberg’s Imaginary Museum"
Aaron Siskind’s Photographs as Rosenberg’s Imaginary Museum
Kathryn Poindexter, University of Southern California
ABSTRACT
This paper examines critic Harold Rosenberg’s essay for a 1959 Horizon Press publication titled, Aaron Siskind, Photographs, which served as the first publication of the American photographer’s work. Specifically, I focus on Rosenberg’s claim that Siskind’s work resembled reproductions of fictional American abstract expressionist art. Rosenberg, who had not been involved with photography until this point, was primarily known for his criticism of painting and most, famously, his edict on “action painting.” He used the Siskind essay to denigrate contemporary photographers and to critique the prevalent mode of encountering abstract art through reproductive photography. I reveal how Siskind’s work, particularly as experienced in the book format, unexpectedly dovetailed with Rosenberg’s own theorization of the medium of painting and may have even influenced his later writing on painters such as Arshile Gorky. In his confrontation with Siskind’s work, I contend that Rosenberg actually articulated a distinctly photographic mode of vision in order to advance certain ideas related to style, action, cohesion, and originality. Ultimately, Siskind’s publication and Rosenberg’s commentary attest to an underacknowledged discourse between American painting and photography at mid-century. I consider recent scholarship on Rosenberg as well as his other texts, together with period writing on abstract expressionism and photography. In the process, not only does Rosenberg emerge as a surprising critical voice for our understanding of postwar photographic theory, but Siskind’s abstract photography becomes newly visible for histories of abstract expressionist art.
BIO
Kathryn Poindexter is a third-year doctoral student in the department of Art History and an enrollee in the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate at the University of Southern California. She studies twentieth-century American art with an emphasis on photography and its relations to painting, abstraction, and reception. She earned her BA at the University of California, Irvine in Studio Art, completed Study Abroad coursework at the University of British Columbia, and earned her MA in art history from University of Southern California. Poindexter was formerly assistant curator at the California Museum of Photography, UCR ARTS (part of UC Riverside), where she curated several exhibitions, including Aaron Siskind: Pleasures and Terrors, Penelope Umbrico: Master, Mountain, Range (and Rangers), Fictive Kin: Sarah Conaway, Annette Kelm, Kim Schoen, and Jennah Ward Bentley: Teviot 10. She was project manager for UCR ARTS’ 2017-18 Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA exhibition, Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas, and was managing editor and contributor for the companion publication. At Riverside Art Museum she curated numerous exhibitions, including Eretai: John Beech, Lael Marshall, David Rabinowitch, Michael Voss. She has published essays and criticism for the California Museum of Photography, Riverside Art Museum, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, Artillery magazine, and KCET Artbound, among others. She juried the photography fairs Fotofest Houston and Medium and was an invited participant at FOCUS: LAX 2018.
Lauren Graves "The Neighbor: Helen Levitt’s imagined landscapes of East Harlem"
The Neighbor: Helen Levitt’s imagined landscapes of East Harlem
Lauren Graves, Boston University
ABSTRACT
My dissertation, “The Politics of Place: Photographing New York City During the New Deal,” contemplates the role that New Deal era photographs play in constructing a sense of place and identity within the American city street. Chapter two, “The Neighbor: Helen Levitt’s imagined landscapes of East Harlem,” explores the early work of Helen Levitt, specifically Levitt’s photographs of children’s chalk drawings in East Harlem taken during her tenure at New York City’s Federal Art Project. This chapter analyzes how Levitt, dissenting from normative representations of the city, reveals a city transformed by play and imagination. I argue that through her continued attention to collective and marginal spaces within the urban landscape – such as sidewalks, stoops, facades, and doors – Levitt is able to offer an empowering reading of children’s ability to create, define, and transform urban space into their own, creating a place within the anonymous city street. Enhanced by the context of the Federal Art Project’s goal to create and preserve American art, Levitt frames these chalk pictures as fine artworks, instances that uncover the folklore of the changing urban spaces of East Harlem and what goes on in the minds of children. Through a close look at the objects, subjects, and ideas that populate the chalk drawing series, we can see the child’s effort to create and inhabit their own imagined landscape, a landscape weaved into the mutable space of the urban street. Through this creation, activation, and socialization of space – real and imagined – the children create a place for themselves within the transforming city streets.
BIO
Lauren Graves is a PhD candidate at Boston University working on her
dissertation “The Politics of Place: Photographing New York City During the New Deal.” She received a M.A. in Art History from Temple University in 2016 and her thesis, “Navigating the Built Environment: Reading Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York,” sought to broaden the framework of conversation surrounding Abbott’s canonical photobook. Lauren also holds a B.A. with Honors in Art History from the University of Rochester. She has held curatorial positions at the MIT museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and Exit Art. Lauren is currently an adjunct lecturer at New York City College of Technology where she teaches the history and appreciation of photography.