Thursday, April 27, 2023
The colloquium will be held in person and online in the Eastern Time Zone (EDT)
Academic Building (West Wing) 6051
15 Seminary Place, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (New Brunswick, NJ). If attending online, please register at this Zoom link.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
The Developing Room, a working group at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University, announces its seventh graduate student colloquium. The event is for Ph.D. students from any field of study who are working on dissertation topics in which photography—its histories and theories—plays a central role. This year we particularly encourage contributions on the subject of photography and resistance writ large.
Photography, bell hooks tells us, can be liberating. Using the medium, disempowered subjects can connect “to a recuperative, redemptive memory that enables us to construct radical identities, images of ourselves that transcend the limits of the colonizing eye.” But across its many historical arcs, photography has also consistently offered another side of the same coin: exploitation. Pictures of unwilling and marginalized peoples abound, be they colonial subjects or incarcerated citizens, or in extreme cases victims of atrocities. How do we understand and historicize these countervailing powers of the medium? In what ways might we account for articulations of the self and others that, as Tina Campt suggests, “resist easy categorization and refuse binary notions of agency versus subjection”? Our next graduate student colloquium at the Developing Room inquires into photography as a dialectical site of resistance and exploitation. The medium may offer innumerable opportunities to thwart forces exercised by institutions, governments, and photographers, and it can contest the hold of images that express such power. But what are the ways in which the medium has been successfully used as a form of refusal despite its frustrating mutability, and are there patterns to the forms of nuanced pushback that it has taken? How do evolutions in the medium’s technologies both afford and squelch efforts to image and exercise resistance? And what of the troubled relationship between people engaged in struggle and photographers seeking to speak for them? How might we conceive of self-fashioning and proud quotidian life as itself a form of resistance in pictures, even if the images are “neither wholly liberatory vehicles of agency, transcendence, or performativity nor unilateral instruments of objectification and abjection,” as Campt expands? And how might the unveiling of hidden communities and practices contribute to overturning stereotypes and regimes of repression, only to be absorbed into the body politic as false intimacy or spectacle?
Our respondent this year will be Dr. Kylie Thomas. Thomas is a Senior Lecturer at the Radical Humanities Laboratory and Art History at University College Cork, Ireland.
The event is free and open to the public.
If you have any questions, write us at developingroom@gmail.com
Sponsor
Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis
Rutgers Art History GSO
Rutgers Graduate Student Association
Yinka Shonibare, from Diary of a Victorian Dandy, 1998
Schedule (in Eastern Daylight Time)
12:30 Introduction and welcome, Prof. Andres Zervigon
12:45 Kimber Chewning
1:15 Discussion
1:45 Alex Fialho
2:15 Discussion
2:45 Break (15 min)
3:00 Daniel Menzo
3:30 Discussion
4:00 Summer Sloane-Britt
4:30 Discussion
5:00 General Discussion led by Dr. Kylie Thomas
5:30 End
Respondent
Kylie Thomas, University College Cork
Kylie Thomas
University College Cork
Kylie Thomas is a Senior Lecturer at the Radical Humanities Laboratory and Art History at University College Cork, Ireland. She is also a Senior Researcher at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
She writes about photography, visual activism, feminist, LGBT and anti-racist movements, resistance and protest, and South Africa during and after apartheid. She is the author of Impossible Mourning: HIV/AIDS and Visuality after apartheid (Wits University Press & Bucknell University Press, 2014) and co-editor of Photography in and out of Africa: Iterations with Difference (Routledge, 2016) and Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges (Routledge, 2020). She has held numerous research fellowships, including a European Institutes for Advanced Study Junior Fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, Austria; a British Academy International Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Brighton, UK; and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at NIOD. From April-September 2022 she was a Visiting Scholar at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. She currently co-directs the NIOD ImageLab, which focuses on war and visual culture from the time of the Second World War to the present.
Talks
Kimber Chewning, “The Turn to Experience: Constructing Michael Schmidt’s Berlin-Kreuzberg”
The Turn to Experience: Constructing Michael Schmidt’s Berlin-Kreuzberg
Kimber Chewning, Boston University
ABSTRACT
This presentation assesses Michael Schmidt’s 1984 photobook Berlin-Kreuzberg.Stadtbilder (Berlin-Kreuzberg.Cityscapes). The West Berlin district of Kreuzburg bordered the Berlin Wall and its decaying urban landscape became home for residents undesired in other districts, drawing foreign guest workers (primarily from Turkey), squatters, and youth subculture. Context and critical realism are key to Schmidt’s project, which is invested in the lived and historical experience of Kreuzberg’s residents. Berlin-Kreuzberg.Stadtbilder experiments with photography’s seriality, hinting at, as Ute Eskildsen writes, “new pictorial worlds.” I argue that this photobook, rooted in the local, the everyday, and mundane, operates within the temporal registers of its moment, when critical discourses began to displace conceptions of a singular, universalizing, and collective history with individual notions of experience and memory. His negotiation between landscape and portrait, environment and subject, not only visualize profound shifts in political subjectivity at the time, but offer an opportunity of spatio-temporal openness that allows us to question the historical forces of its day. My chapter on Schmidt holds in tension how Schmidt’s works of the 1970s and 80s support the social democratic project of West Germany’s final decades, capitulating to certain forms of social representation and relation, with Schmidt’s repeated attempt to step beyond a mere mimesis of these cultural ideals, challenging, as much as reproducing, this new reality. I address how the photographic mediation and interpellation of these evolving social and political forms of experience, within a photobook, photo series, or exhibition, put pressure on the relationship between individual and collective identity.
from Berlin-Kreuzberg Stadtbilder (Publica; Bezirksamt Kreuzburg), 1984.
BIO
Kimber Chewning is a PhD candidate in the History of Art & Architecture program at Boston University. Her dissertation, “Facing Niemandsland: the Photographic Subjects of Divided Berlin,” examines photography’s role in evolving forms of political subjectivity and conceptions of experience during divided Berlin’s final two decades. She has worked previously with the ICA/Boston and the Ringling Museum of Art. Her research has been supported by the BU Center for the Humanities and she is a 2022/2023 Fulbright research fellow in Berlin, Germany. She has written criticism for caareviews.org and asap/j and is currently the Associate Program Director for Boston University’s “The One & the Many,” a free humanities-based summer program for local high school students from underserved communities oriented around the theme of “justice.
Alex Fialho, “Lola Flash’s “Cross-Colour” Vision of Art, AIDS and Activism”
Lola Flash’s “Cross-Colour” Vision of Art, AIDS and Activism
Alex Fialho, Yale University
ABSTRACT
Artist Lola Flash’s “cross-colour” photography animates scenes of AIDS activism through darkroom development that shifts color to inciting effect. Flash’s photography represents moments of AIDS activist and queer community, including the first unfurling of the AIDS Quilt on the National Mall in 1987 [Figure 1] and the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)’s demonstration at the National Institutes of Health in 1990. Flash reflects on the emotional tenor of their artworks, writing that they “speak to the sadness and loss of too many friends during that period, as well as the anger towards many of the institutions that silently watched us die.”
First, I argue that Flash’s cross-colour photographs both support and shift visual understandings of AIDS-related history, unsettling iconic imagery of AIDS activism. Second, I explore how Flash’s photographs decenter the white masculinity often associated with AIDS activism, through Flash’s perspective as a Black lesbian at formative moments of AIDS-related history. Third, through Tina Campt’s writing, I demonstrate how Flash’s photographs trouble legible readings of race and gender through their shifting sense of color, offering what Kara Keeling describes as a “black queer critical project.” Throughout, I suggest that the intensity of colors spark Flash’s artworks with an affective charge that resonates with the energy of AIDS activism, offering images of remembrance and response. The photographic process of agitation offers an analog for understanding Flash’s photographs—as AIDS activists agitated for access to AIDS treatments, Flash developed their images through a cross-colour process that animated this resistance.
Lola Flash, AIDS Quilt, Washington DC, 1987
BIO
Alex Fialho is a fourth year PhD Candidate in the History of Art and African American Studies Departments at Yale University. His firsthand involvement in AIDS-related cultural production enlivens the perspective of his dissertation project, which thinks through photography by African American artists and archives of their work as apertures onto AIDS-related art histories. Fialho identifies as a white, queer, HIV-negative, cisgender man/person (he/they)—who, as an art historian and curator in community, has worked and made space in service and support of queer, femme, Black and anti-racist creative contexts for over a decade. As Programs Director of the New York-based arts non-profit Visual AIDS from 2014–2019 before starting graduate school, Fialho facilitated projects around the ongoing AIDS pandemic, intervening against the widespread whitewashing of HIV/AIDS cultural narratives.
Daniel Menzo, “Looking Back, Dragging Forward: Visualizing Queer Resistance in Early Portraits from Colombia”
Looking Back, Dragging Forward: Visualizing Queer Resistance in Early Portraits from Colombia
Daniel Menzo, Stony Brook University
ABSTRACT
What research methods might we use to analyze the intersection of digitized historical photographs and queer kinship practices in the Americas today? Part of my dissertation research on the Colombian portrait photographer Benjamín de la Calle (1869–1934), this paper analyzes how a contemporary queer artist collective in Medellín employs part of Calle’s work to disrupt normative narratives of the country’s past, present, and future. Through a series of Facebook posts, the group Cultura Drag Medellín puts some of Calle’s more ambiguous portraits from the early 1900s—from two men sharing a chair with their legs intertwined, to men posing in women's clothing—into conversation with hemispheric queer politics. The drag artists’ affective response to these historic images aligns with Marianne Hirsch’s notion of a “familial look,” a viewing mode that creates and extends affiliative bonds across time and space. Employing a “familial look” in a queer way, the collective circulates these earlier portraits across the Spanish speaking world by strategically using the hashtag #resistenciamarica, which loosely translates as “sissy” or “queer” resistance. As Calle’s photographs encounter both similar and unlikely counterparts in their digital mobility, this circulation echoes what Eduardo Cadava sees as the “itinerant language" of photography, as photographic images are “moving signs that… travel from one forum to another.” Ultimately, I find the artist collective’s methods of circulating Calle’s portraits in line with what Juana María Rodríguez calls a “queer gesture,” a “literal and figurative” positioning that entails an active and future-oriented sense of queer embodiment.
Screenshot of Cultura Drag Medellín's Facebook page, with earlier portraits made by Benjamín de la Calle.
BIO
Daniel Menzo is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Art History and Criticism program at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on studio portraiture and transnational practices of photography at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as queer representations of gender and sexuality in modern art of the Americas. Daniel completed his MA in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management at the University of Rochester, in partnership with the George Eastman Museum. He has worked in collections and digitization labs for museums, libraries, and historical societies, and he has worked as a memoir workshop facilitator for a local non-profit organization.
Summer Sloane-Britt, “Imaging the Plantation Zone: Black Feminist Ecologies in Doris Derby’s Photography”
Imaging the Plantation Zone: Black Feminist Ecologies in Doris Derby’s Photography
Summer Sloane-Britt, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU
ABSTRACT
During the Black Freedom Movement, photography documenting Black resistance against white supremacy held a precarious position. Photographs publicized by white news distributors regularly emphasized “white on black violence,” particularly images portraying physical violence enacted by white men against passive Black bodies (Berger 2011). The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) established a photography department quickly following the organization’s founding in 1960. SNCC’s main visual concerns did not cater to national and international media, instead focusing on documenting the Movement from a young activist’s perspective, often subverting imaginaries of resistance during this era. My chapter situates photographer and SNCC worker Doris Derby (1939-2022) within a (long) history of imaging the relational specificity found in the Southern American plantation zone. The region, including Mississippi and Louisiana, was significantly marked by extreme violence towards Black individuals, families, and communities. Yet, some sites imagined alternative political economies where liberation was visibly foregrounded. Derby’s images depicting Black cooperative farms and Black-owned land in the Deep South disrupt prior visualizations of the rural South. When we consider landscape as a verb and land as an instrument of power (Mitchell 1994), the attempted recovery of Southern plantations becomes essential to the Black Freedom Movement. Derby highlights a vital refuge site for Movement workers who depended upon Black landowners as radical localities, actively reimagining Southern landscapes. I posit that Derby’s photographs supply a Black feminist vision of ecology and land relations in the plantation zone, connecting her contributions alongside fellow Black women photographers meditating on rural space.
Doris Derby, Southern Media staff member Larry Rand and civil rights workers at the Erwin family farm, Tougaloo, Mississippi, 1969
BIO
Summer Sloane-Britt is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She is interested in the global history of photography, particularly the intersection of photography and liberation movements. Her dissertation explores the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) photography department, emphasizing their innovative contributions to the 1960s Black Freedom Movement. At the Institute, Summer co- curated the exhibition Cauleen Smith, H-E-L-L-O: To Do All at Once (2021) and a forthcoming group exhibition on Chicana muralists in Los Angeles. She recently contributed to Women and Migration(s) II (Open Book Publishers, 2022) and co-authored an article in NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art (Duke University Press, 2022). Summer has held positions at the National Gallery of Art, the Grey Art Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.