Introducing your new PN Board Members

Kate Bussard, Co-Chair

After more than 20 years in the field, I find dialoguing with peers remains among the most rewarding—and inspiring—aspects of my intellectual life, whether this takes the form of orchestrating scholars' days to explore a photo topic or running mock interviews for former interns. It’s an honor to begin serving as co-chair of Photography Network, where we are clearly surrounded by brilliant people, all working toward new approaches to photography, and I’m especially delighted to bring a curatorial perspective to this role.

Katherine A. Bussard is the Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography at the Princeton University Art Museum. A dedicated collaborator, Bussard most recently co-edited the first comprehensive consideration of Life magazine’s groundbreaking and influential contribution to the history of photography, Life Magazine and the Power of Photography (2020), which featured 25 interdisciplinary contributors and won the College Art Association’s 2021 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award. That publication was accompanied by a major exhibition co-organized with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Prior to that project, Bussard co-authored the award-winning publication exploring the intersection of photography, architecture, and urban studies, The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960–1980 (2014). She is also the co-author of Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman (2013) and author of So the Story Goes: Photographs by Tina Barney, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, and Larry Sultan (2006). Her doctoral research on street photography at the City University of New York is the subject of Unfamiliar Streets: The Photographs of Richard Avedon, Charles Moore, Martha Rosler, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia (2014). Bussard has previously served in curatorial roles at the Art Institute of Chicago, J. Paul Getty Museum, and Clark Art Institute.

Sarah Parsons, Treasurer

I am an associate professor of art history at York University in Toronto where I served for five years as department chair of Visual Art and Art History and four years as director of the graduate program in Art History and Visual Culture. My recent publications include “Women in Fur: Empire, Power and Play in a Victorian Photography Album” (British Art Studies, 2020), “Site of Ongoing Struggle: Race and Gender in Studies of Photography” in the Handbook of Photography Studies edited by Gil Pasternak (Routledge, 2020), and “’Planted there like human flags’: Photographs of Inuit Canadians and Cold War Anxiety, 1951 -1956,” in Cold War Camera edited by Thy Phu, Erina Duganne, and Andrea Noble (Duke, 2022). I have also written extensively about 19th century Canadian photographer William Notman, including a forthcoming article in American Art on his portraits of the family of Jefferson Davis. From 2016-2018, I served on the steering committee of The Family Camera Network, a collaborative research project led by Thy Phu which collected photographs and oral histories and explored the relationship of photography to the idea of family through articles, exhibitions, and a special journal issue I co-edited on “Seeing Family.” With Sarah Bassnett I co-wrote a survey of photography in Canada forthcoming from the Art Canada Institute in spring 2023. My current research project examines how early photography shaped ideas about privacy in 19th century North America and is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Part of this project entails an exhibition I am co-curating for The Image Centre (formerly Ryerson) in 2024. I also serve as a co-editor of the journal Photography & Culture.

Jessica Williams Stark, Outreach and Membership Coordinator

Jessica Stark is a historian of modern African art and the global histories of photography. She received her doctorate in History of Art and Architecture from Harvard (2022) and is currently the McCormick Postdoctoral Research Associate in the History of Photography in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton. Stark’s research engages the intersections of modernist, feminist, and leftist histories and has been generously supported by the Peter E. Palmquist Memorial Fund for Historical Photographic Research, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, the Fulbright Program, and the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships Program. Her work has appeared in October (2020) and Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges (2020), and is forthcoming in Urban Exile: Theories, Methods, Research Practices (2023). Stark's current book project examines the unheralded photographs that Anne Fischer, a German-Jewish refugee to Cape Town, produced in South Africa in the years leading up to and during apartheid. The first monograph on Fischer, her study explores how this young woman mobilized German modernist aesthetics and pro-working class photographic practices in her new colonial context and demonstrates how South African art histories, although historically sidelined in narratives of art, have had significant implications for the development of new transnational modernisms in Africa and Europe.

Josie Johnson, Conference and Symposium Liaison

Josie Johnson is a curator and art historian based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She earned her B.A. in Art History from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture from Brown University. Her dissertation examined the relationship between politics and art in the work of American photographer Margaret Bourke-White during her visits to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. Portions of this project were published in Panorama, the journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, in Fall 2020 and in the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies in Spring 2022.  

Josie has completed research fellowships at the New York Public Library, the Getty Research Institute, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Harry Ransom Center. She has also received the Peter E. Palmquist Memorial Research Grant and the Alexander Award from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 2021, she received a Project Grant from the Photography Network.  

Josie previously held curatorial positions at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Currently, she is the Capital Group Foundation Curatorial Fellow for Photography at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. Her exhibition, Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography 1929–1941 opens in March 2023. Featuring the work of Edward Weston, John Gutmann, Helen Levitt, and others, this project and its accompanying catalog explore the role of imagination in photography made throughout the United States in the 1930s. 

Lauren Graves, Events Coordinator

I am currently the Polly Thayer Starr Curatorial Fellow at the Boston Athenaeum where I focus on growing and interpreting the institution’s dynamic photography collection. I recently co-curated the exhibition Re-Reading Special Collections at the Boston Athenaeum, an exhibition that reinterprets the BA’s Special Collections to reflect a more expansive view of American art and history across a range of media. I am also currently working on the exhibition Developing Boston: Berenice Abbott and Irene Shwachman Document a Changing City, slated to open in August, 2023. This exhibition examines the evolution of Boston’s urban landscape, as well as documentary photography’s development throughout the twentieth century.

I specialize in American photography and received a PhD in Art History from Boston University in 2021, writing a dissertation entitled “The Politics of Place: Photographing New York City During the New Deal.” I received an MA in Art History from Temple University and a BA in Art History from the University of Rochester. Prior to joining the Athenaeum, I 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. My research has been supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona. My writing has appeared in Buildings and Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum and Sequitur.