The Developing Room holds its first 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.
How do we write the histories of photography today? What sort of topics, themes, objects, and methodologies should we foreground? What are the most pressing questions that our work suggests? This event showcases six new doctoral investigations to gauge the direction of our field across numerous disciplines. The presenters will share their work with an audience of peers and an official respondent, Prof. Steffen Siegel of the Folkwang Universität der Künste. The aim is to solicit a free exchange of ideas that will help nourish all our work and lead organically toward next year’s grad workshop.
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 Stella Jungmann
10:40 Discussion
11:00 Donata Panizza
11:25 Discussion
11:45 Anne S. Cross
12:10 Discussion
12:30 Lunch Break
2:00 Emily Doucet
2:25 Discussion
2:45 Margaret Innes
3:10 Discussion
3:30 Coffee Break
3:45 Nicholas Morgan
4:10 Discussion
4:30 General Discussion led by Dr. Steffen Siegel
5:00 End
Respondent
Steffen Siegel, Folkwang Universität der Künste
Steffen Siegel
Folkwang Universität der Künste
Steffen Siegel is Professor of Theory and History of Photography at Folkwang University of Arts, Essen (Germany). At Folkwang, he leads the Master’s program “Photography Studies and Research.”Among his recent publications are two books on contemporary photography: Belichtungen. Zur fotogra schen Gegenwart and Ich ist zwei andere. Jeff Walls Diptychon aus Bildern und Texten (2014). His critical edition Neues Licht. Daguerre,Talbot und die Veröffentlichung der Fotogra e im Jahr 1839 (2014) was recently published in English as First Exposues: Writings from the Beginning of Photograph (Getty Publications, 2016). Prof. Siegel is one of the two co-editors of the important book series photogramme.
Talks
Labor and the Picturesque: Photography, Propaganda, and the Tea Industry in Colonial India and Sri Lanka, 1880-1914
'Imaging' Japan: Photographs of the Japanese Embassy in the United States, 1860
Stella Jungmann, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
ABSTRACT
“ [...] only a few weeks ago, the word Japan was associated with tea-trays and melanotype plates [...] Now Japan means a great empire wherein useful arts flourish, and the graces of politeness and hospitality abound,” the Photographic Journal (1860) writes after the Japanese Embassy visited the U.S. for the first time, following the forceful opening of the Japanese Treaty ports. Resulting from this mission, which served to ratify the Treaty of Amity and Commerce originally drafted by Townsend Harris in 1858, were not only countless newspaper articles, but a rapid dissemination of photographic images, portraying the members of the Embassy, the ceremony of welcome, and the objects and presents brought by the Japanese diplomats. Photographic images were used as models for wood engravings in newspaper articles, stereographs, or cartes de visites, and were as much a source of “knowledge” about Japan and its people, as they were self-representation and re- definition of U.S. American national identity. How did photographs of this particular diplomatic encounter help construct an image of Japan in the U.S.?
This presentation focuses on wood engravings modeled after photographs, which were published in illustrated newspapers in the U.S. I investigate how photographs of the Japanese mission not only visualized the diplomatic encounter, but were also consciously implemented to stage the U.S. in their new role as a global Western power. These images alongside reports of the diplomatic encounter reveal a complex, often paradoxical construction of Japan in relation to the West, where text and image are in continuous conflicted dialogue with each other.
BIO
Stella Jungmann is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Art History at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She received her B.A. in Global Cultures at the University of California, Irvine, and her M.A. in Media Culture and Art Theory at the University of Arts and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria. Her master thesis ‘Untouched Wilderness’: Carleton Watkins’ Fotografien und der Reformierte Blick auf die Natur (‚Untouched Wilderness: Carleton Watkins’s Photographs and the Reformed View of Nature) has been published at the Akademiker Verlag in Saarbrücken in 2014. She is a coordinator and research assistant at the Center for Studies in the Theory and History of Photography at the University of Zurich, and has taught seminars and introductory courses on photo history. Currently she is working on her research project entitled Imaging Japan in the U.S., 1850-1865, focusing in particular on photographic images of the Japanese Embassy in the U.S. in 1860.
Photographs of a Death Foretold: Florence's Modernization and The Alinari Brothers, 1852-90
Photographs of a Death Foretold: Florence's Modernization and The Alinari Brothers, 1852-90
Donata Panizza, Rutgers University
ABSTRACT
In 1852 Florence, as the city’s resonance as “Italian Athens” was blooming internationally, the Alinari brothers took on the burgeoning photographic medium and in a few decades produced a vast archive of photographs of Florence’s Medieval and Renaissance heritage, which circulated widely throughout Europe and the United States. However deliberate the Alinari’s attempts to frame historic monuments and areas, their photos contained the traces of mid-to-late nineteenth- century urban upheaval, as Florence changed its medieval structure to become a modern city and the capital of newly unified Italy from 1865 to 1871. The Alinari photographs’ tension between the establishment of the myth of Florence as the cradle of the Renaissance and an uneasy attitude towards modernization, both cherished and feared, produced a multi-layered city portrait, analyzed in my dissertation’s first chapter, which will be the focus of my presentation to the Developing Room group. This portrait raises questions about crucial issues such as urban heritage preservation, mass tourism, (de)industrialization, social segregation, and real estate speculation. These questions remain unresolved in contemporary Florence, and my dissertation explores them by following the influence of the Alinari’s photographic gaze on contemporary representations of Florence in international cinema (Chapter Two), art and tourism photography (Chapter Three), and their relationship to contemporary urban development (Chapter Four). Ultimately, my work aims to redefine the relevance of early photography as a unique tool for understanding contemporary urban space and its representation, thanks to its capacity to expose the contradictions of the present and look into the city’s future.
BIO
Panizza graduated in History of Contemporary Art and Comparative Literature from the University of Florence with theses on, respectively, the intersection of art and politics in 1968 Italy and the role of contemporary city in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003). While working as a museum assistant and free-lance art journalist in Florence, I delved into the history and theory of photography, which has since then become my prevailing research interest. As a PhD candidate in the Italian Department at Rutgers University, I have published several articles at the intersection of photography and cinema as well as photography and literature (see CV for details), interned at the Department of Print, Photographs, and Architectural Collections of the New York Historical Society, and taught classes on Italian culture, cinema, literature, and art.
'Features of Cruelty Which Could Not Well Be Described by the Pen': The Media of Atrocity in Harper's Weekly, c. 1865
'Features of Cruelty Which Could Not Well Be Described by the Pen': The Media of Atrocity in Harper's Weekly, c. 1865
Anne S. Cross, University of Delaware
ABSTRACT
On June 17, 1865, two months after the Confederate surrender, Harper’s Weekly published an article warning its readers against an immediate reconciliation with the South. Entitled “Rebel Cruelties,” the article featured illustrations depicting disabled Union soldiers who had lost their feet, in whole or in part, due to conditions in Southern prisons. Bordering the article’s second page, the illustrations reinforce the text by conveying the reality of these atrocities in a way that words cannot. As the author states, they bring to the eye “features of cruelty which could not well be described by the pen.”
These engraved illustrations are identified as “exact facsimiles” of photographs, faithful to their origins as surgical documents adapted into cartes de visite for wider circulation. Further remediated by Harper’s engravers, these images offer an opportunity to examine how the brutality of the Civil War was apprehended and understood within a hierarchy of media. In this paper, I begin to trace the visual history of an aesthetics of atrocity within Harper’s Weekly through the material practices of remediation, and examine how visual and textual information was transformed by this process. Specifically, I will focus on images of disabled soldiers from Andersonville prison as they underwent a necessary process of graphic translation for publication. Invoking the arc of the images’ materiality, I will argue that this material archive should be regarded as evidence of their evolving reception across greater audiences, as a pre-photojournalistic aesthetic of atrocity was integrated into the nineteenth-century American mass press.
BIO
Anne Cross is a third-year PhD student studying American Art at the University of Delaware with Dr. Jason Hill. Anne’s work focuses primarily on photography and print culture of the long nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Her dissertation, currently in progress, explores the publication of remediated images of atrocity in the nineteenth-century American mass press and, specifically, Harper’s Weekly illustrated newspaper. In 2017 Anne received a CASVA Predoctoral Fellowship to support her research on the transnational histories of racism and the legacies of activist photojournalism in South Africa. Anne received her Master’s degree in 2013 from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Prior to attending the University of Delaware, she served as the Luce Fellow in American Prints at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In addition to her academic work, Anne curates and writes about contemporary art in the Philadelphia area.
Developing the Future: Technological Determinism and 19th Century French Photography
Developing the Future: Technological Determinism and 19th Century French Photography
Emily Doucet, University of Toronto
ABSTRACT
Emerging from its many mythical origins, photography’s future has long been theorized as ubiquitous by practitioners and cultural critics. Throughout the nineteenth century, speculations on future applications of the emergent medium were often prefaced by histories in miniature of the developing technology. This paper tracks arguments for photography’s inevitable progress through the discourse of nineteenth-century French writing on photography (particularly in technical manuals), interrogating the philosophy of history which presented the medium as an inevitable technological achievement. I ask, what are the historical and philosophical sources of the technological determinism which dominated early accounts of the medium’s evolution? And in what ways was this tied to an emergent discourse of capitalist innovation? This narrative draws out a key theme in the recent historiography of photography—the history of the future of photography (Batchen, 1997; Brunet, 2012; Edwards, 2006; Lewis, 2012; Siegel, 2017; Thélot, 2003; von Brevern, 2015). This paper thus builds on recent work on future-oriented rhetoric and the technological imagination in nineteenth century photographic discourse to examine the roots of this historiography of photography in Enlightenment thought, Romantic science, and Utopian philosophies of technology of the early nineteenth century. As has frequently been observed, the history of photography in the twentieth century inherited much of this technological optimism and determinism. Submitting nineteenth century histories of the medium to the same historiographical rigor as those of the twentieth sheds some light on the twin discourses of deterministic thinking and media specificity that have so profoundly shaped the discipline of the history of photography.
BIO
Emily Doucet is currently a PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of Toronto. She holds an MA (Distinction) in the History of Art from University College of London and a BA (Hons) in the History of Art from the University of Winnipeg. Her MA dissertation won the Association of Art Historians Post-Graduate Dissertation prize in 2013. Her doctoral dissertation, “Developing the Future: Félix Nadar’s Photographic Experiments,” explores the experimental photographic practice of the nineteenth-century French photographer Félix Nadar, broadly considering the historiography of the photographic future and the technological imagination in nineteenth century France. She lectures on the history of photography at the University of Toronto and writes regularly on contemporary art for a number of publications such as Border Crossings, Canadian Art and C Magazine.
Action and Speech: The Photographic Program of the Workers' Film and Photo League
Action and Speech: The Photographic Program of the Workers' Film and Photo League
Margaret Innes, Harvard University
ABSTRACT
Between 1930 and 1933, the Workers’ Film and Photo League of New York (WFPL) operated in partial capacity as a press service, furnishing images of labor demonstrations, protests, and strikes to American media. Although the organization is well-known for its newsreels, far less has been said about its photographic production. This paper draws on extant WFPL work prints and reproductions to characterize the group’s visual program. Specifically, I consider WFPL members’ compositional use of signage and text to posit a structural relationship between montage and emergent genres of labor photography. As opposed to that antipolitical sociality Hannah Arendt attributes to the nature of laboring, here the mutual constitution of subject and speech defines the basic condition of photographic visibility.
BIO
Margaret Innes is a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University (2004) and an M.A. from Hunter College, CUNY (2012). Her dissertation examines the visual rhetoric of left-wing mass media in the United States between 1926 and 1951, with a particular focus on the reception of montage and worker photography. She has worked for Magnum Photos and held research positions and internships at the International Center of Photography, the Magnum Foundation, and Deborah Bell Gallery. She served as the 2016-2017 Patricia and Phillip Frost Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. and is currently a 2017–2018 Luce/ACLS Fellow in American Art.
The Bodily Activity of Photography: Mark Morrisroe's Late Photograms
The Bodily Activity of Photography: Mark Morrisroe's Late Photograms
Nicholas Morgan, Columbia University
ABSTRACT
Mark Morrisroe is best known as a member of the “Boston School” of photography, and for using experimental printing techniques to produce evocative portraits and snapshots of friends and lovers. This paper focuses on his less well-known photograms, a body of work begun in 1986 and continued until the artist’s death in 1989. The source material for Morrisroe’s photograms ranges from fabric and tattoo designs to pornography and x-rays. I argue that Morrisroe’s engagement with this array of material constituted an investigation into the history of photography, and in particular into the interconnections between evolving photographic technologies on the one hand and the history of sexuality on the other. Morrisroe’s photograms reflect on the politics and emotional impact of the AIDS crisis and on the role of photography in mediating the experience of desire.
BIO
Nicholas Morgan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. His dissertation takes up questions of identity and difference in art from 1989 to 1993, particularly in relation to the AIDS crisis. He curated the featured web gallery “Institution Critical” for Visual AIDS in March 2018 and in July 2017 organized the exhibition “in the hopes of not being considered” at Kate Werble Gallery, New York. A contributor to Artforum.com, he has also recently written for caa.reviews, art & education, and other publications.