The colloquium will be held online in the Eastern Time Zone (EDT)
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 sixth 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 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 Dr. Lori Cole, Clinical Associate Professor and Associate Director of the interdisciplinary master’s program XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement at New York University. At NYU she teaches courses on photography, experimental art and literature, global modernism, and print culture. She previously taught at Brandeis University, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. Her writing has been published in Artforum, Cabinet, The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, and The Journal of Avant-Garde Studies, as well as in exhibition catalogues, most recently Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is the author of Surveying the Avant-Garde: Questions on Modernism, Art, and the Americas in Transatlantic Magazines (Penn State University Press, 2018).
The event is free and open to the public. To attend, please register at this Zoom link.
If you have any questions, write us at developingroom@gmail.com
Sponsor
Center for Cultural Analysis
Paulo Bruscky, from série Envelopes, 1977-2009, mail art.
Schedule (in Eastern Daylight Time)
12:30 Introduction and welcome, Prof. Andres Zervigon
12:45 Emmet von Stackelberg
1:15 Discussion
1:45 Claudio Monopoli
2:15 Discussion
2:45 Break (15 min)
3:00 Anna Stielau
3:30 Discussion
4:00 Paula Victoria Kupfer
4:30 Discussion
5:00 General Discussion led by Dr. Lori Cole
5:30 End
Respondent
Lori Cole, New York University
Lori Cole
New York University
Dr. Lori Cole, Clinical Associate Professor and Associate Director of the interdisciplinary master’s program XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement at New York University. At NYU she teaches courses on photography, experimental art and literature, global modernism, and print culture. She previously taught at Brandeis University, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. Her writing has been published in Artforum, Cabinet, The Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, and The Journal of Avant-Garde Studies, as well as in exhibition catalogues, most recently Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is the author of Surveying the Avant-Garde: Questions on Modernism, Art, and the Americas in Transatlantic Magazines (Penn State University Press, 2018).
Talks
Emmet von Stackelberg, "To Be Continued: Celluloid Film and Cinema as the Medium of the Future"
To Be Continued: Celluloid Film and Cinema as the Medium of the Future
Emmet von Stackelberg, Rutgers University
ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that motion picture film, manufactured through an unending transformation of viscous fluid into thin plastic, made cinema into a medium uniquely oriented toward a linear, predictable future—a medium for the temporality of capital. At the turn of the 20th century, years before Ford implemented his assembly line, the Eastman Kodak company developed a way of continuously making celluloid film, employing giant wheels that could produce film of limitless length. Kodak replaced a twenty-four-hour cycle of coating and drying on long tables with a process that broke from daily rhythms and physical limits; the wheels could run for months on end without stopping. The resulting raw film stock, unviewable until exposed to light, was an intermediate good made only for the purpose of holding future images. Those images were only recorded in order to be projected in front of future mass audiences, a function of the low cost of machine-made film, which made it easy to strike more prints to send to more places. Kodak’s continuous mass manufacture of film depended upon the key industrial capitalist process, which Timothy Mitchell has recently described as the “capturing” of the future in the present. Producing film on huge wheels required large capital outlays: it was only through the future profits Kodak could promise investors that it could make motion picture film in this fashion. Looking backward from our age of the endless scroll, this paper seeks to understand how movies, and the stuff they’re made of, have helped condition how we relate to the future.
BIO
Emmet von Stackelberg is a PhD candidate in history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, studying the technologies and political economy of visual culture in the United States. His dissertation is a history of industrial capitalism told through the plastic that made cinema possible, motion picture film. His research has been supported by the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers, the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, and the Hagley Museum and Library.
Claudio Monopoli, "The agency of pornographic photography: visuality and obscenity in 19th and early 20th century Italian censorship nets"
The agency of pornographic photography: visuality and obscenity in 19th and early 20th century Italian censorship nets
Claudio Monopoli, University of Padua
ABSTRACT
Visual and material culture from the past lives in a state of disconnection from its original context, and its interaction with people and society cannot be easily reconstructed without wider references related to it (Jordanova, 2012). The modern concept of pornography is strictly linked with censorship (Kendrick, 1987), and sources from the latter could give us more information about the first. In my research, censorships sources are employed to answer the main question: did the newborn photographic medium cause any revolution in habits, ideas and morality about sexuality and pornographic imaginary?
The idea that images can act on culture and society lays on the perspective of their possible agency (Bredekamp, 2010), which is to be found in social nets (Gell, 1997). Censorship itself is a net of relations where photography acted among people and culture. Each kingdom in Italy before the 1861, represent a specific legal and cultural context, as the subsequent Italian Kingdom until 1919, when the first struggle specifically focused against pornography occurred. Reports of police censorship activities from the main Italian State Archives give us data about consumers, producers, sellers of those photos, but also experiences and thoughts related to pornographic photos. Censorship nets interactions reveal also the attention given to visual culture, in comparison with textual culture, and obscenity, among the political surveillance. These sources can tell us if and how pornographic photography caused any change in Italian society between 1839 and 1919.
BIO
Claudio Monopoli started his career at University of Bari, where in 2016 he gained a Bachelor cum laude in History and Social Sciences, after a 6-month Erasmus+ study program at University of Freiburg. He got his master’s degree in Cultural History at University of Pisa, under the supervision of Alberto Mario Banti. His career proceeded in 2019 with a research traineeship at Cardiff University, with Kevin Passmore, and the starting of the PhD in Historical, Geographical, Anthropological Studies at Universities of Padua, Ca’Foscari of Venice, Verona, with a project titled The origins of pornographic photography. Sexuality, technology and culture in Italian society, 1839-1919, tutored by Carlotta Sorba. He is currently a member of SISF (Italian Society for Photography Study), CSC (Cultural History Center), and SISSCO (Italian Society for Contemporary History Study). From April to June 2022, he will be a visiting researcher at De Montfort University, under the supervision of Gil Pasternak.
Anna Stielau, "How to Kill Your Parents: Reframing the Settler Family Album in South Africa"
How to Kill Your Parents: Reframing the Settler Family Album in South Africa
Anna Steilau, New York University
ABSTRACT
On the African continent, as elsewhere, the camera has been theorized as a principle instrument of racial violence. By turning people into objects and objects into property, photography is understood to advance the colonizing project to which it is irrevocably bound, with imperial visual archives masquerading as a source of objective knowledge even as they authorize dispossession (Azoulay 2019; Sealy 2019). However, less attention has been paid to a related archive, invisibilized by its seeming banality and limited circulation. The settler family album arguably plays an equally important role in molding a white imaginary in and of Africa, reinstating temporal, spatial, and racial orders, and dictating what forms of accountability come into view. My presentation explores how the intimate archives of white South Africans shape conceptions of generational responsibility and inheritance in a post-apartheid milieu. Specifically, I examine the work of three white South African artists, each of whom uses the peculiar temporal properties of photography to enact ancestral dialogues. Following Houria Bouteldja’s (2016) provocation to choose better ancestors, I argue that Monique Pelser, Jansen van Staden, and Mikhael Subotzky usefully disturb a core function of photography: to stabilize racial time, ensuring the “changing same” of whiteness. In conjunction with their work, I pursue a more personal investigation, revisiting my own family’s photograph album across three generations of colonization in Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Ultimately, I ask how photographers might unlearn a technology that so readily reproduces whiteness, thereby pushing form, genre, and medium toward a project of common liberation.
BIO
Anna Stielau is an artist, writer, and PhD candidate in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, where her research explores the politics of time in contemporary African art.
Paula Victoria Kupfer, "Mata to floresta: Marc Ferrez’s Photographs and the Evolution of Rio de Janeiro’s Tijuca Forest"
Mata to floresta: Marc Ferrez’s Photographs and the Evolution of Rio de Janeiro’s Tijuca Forest
Paula Victoria Kupfer, University of Pittsburgh
ABSTRACT
In the 1880s, Brazilian photographer Marc Ferrez (1843–1923) often made photographs in the Tijuca Forest, a large, wooded area adjacent to Rio de Janeiro. Men, women, and children appear minuscule next to cascading waterfalls, majestic trees, and immense boulders, or contemplating the region’s characteristic morros (hills). Ferrez’s photographs conform neither to pictorial conventions of the tropical forest as dark and fearsome, nor to the positivist visual language of man’s domination of nature. Rather, I propose that they emphasize a vision of environmental history, that is, the history of human beings’ relation to their natural environment and their efforts to survive and thrive in it—as opposed to an idealized version of natural history devoid of humans or their impact. They synthesize in photographic form the shifting cultural and ecological discourse of late-imperial Rio de Janeiro, questioning the relationship between humans and nature, city and forest, and historicity and atemporality. The recent history of Tijuca Forest, which was extensively reforested in the 1860s and 1870s following soil depletion from coffee plantations, lends these pictures further critical resonance. As photographer of the Imperial Geologic Commission (1875), among other projects, Ferrez was central to the construction of the Brazilian empire’s public image in the decades before abolition (1888) and the transition to a republic (1889). This presentation argues that his photographic representations of the forest’s verdant nature, as evident in his pictures of Tijuca, articulate a fundamental aspect of late-nineteenth-century Brazilian history and an evolving relationship to the natural world.
Marc Ferrez, Cascatinha da Tijuca, ca. 1885.
Coleção Gilberto Ferrez, Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo
BIO
Paula V. Kupfer is a Panamanian art historian, writer, and editor specialized in the history of photography and modern art in Latin America. She recently contributed to Une histoire mondiale des femmes photographes (Paris: Éditions Textuel, 2020; forthcoming as A World History of Women Photographers by Thames and Hudson, 2022); the exhibition catalogue Gertrudes Altschul: Filigrana (Museum of Art of São Paulo, 2021); and What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women 1843–1999 (New York: 10x10 Photobooks, 2021), winner of the Aperture–Paris Photo Photography Catalogue of the Year Award. She is a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, where her work is focused on photography, environmental history, and race in imperial Brazil. Her research has been supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Social Sciences Research Council. Kupfer is a former managing editor of Aperture magazine.