Re-Framing Photographic Geographies: A Roundtable on Researching Image Economies in the Middle East and Africa
Friday, September 29 at 9am PST • 12 Noon EST • 5pm BST
Event held via zoom • Registration Link
This roundtable investigates photography as a technology of modernity—from its earliest moments to the twenty-first century. It examines the medium’s itinerant character, its role in the visualization of cultural identity and diasporic modes of representation in Africa and the Middle East. Like the photographic image, which slips easily across disciplinary boundaries, our roundtable is interdisciplinary and brings together the voices of practicing photographers, anthropologists, historians, and art historians. It critically evaluates photographic representations in and of the modern and contemporary Islamic world by asking questions such as: What scholarly frameworks should we be engaging with when discussing Middle Eastern and African photographies? How crucial are geographic contexts in the making of the image? In what ways does contemporary art engage with the complex heritage of modern Middle Eastern and African photography? What does the itinerancy of the lens-based medium and its cross-pollination between different geographies tell us about colonial and imperial modernism of the period?
Bios
Erin Hyde Nolan is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bates College. Her research focuses cross-cultural histories of photography from across the Islamic world. She has published articles in Art Orientalis, Trans-Asia Photography, among others and her work has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, Historians of Islamic Art, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, and Getty Research Institute.
Mira Xenia Schwerda is a historian of modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art, specifically print and photography. Currently a Getty/ACLS postdoctoral fellow, she is at work on her first monograph, titled Between Art and Propaganda: Photographing Revolution in Modern Iran (1905–1911). She is the co-editor of Art in Translation, has taught courses in the history of photography and Islamic art history at the University of Edinburgh, and has curated the photography section of the exhibition Technologies of the Image: Art in 19th-Century Iran at the Harvard Art Museums.
Hala Auji is the Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair for Islamic Art and associate professor of art hIstory at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. She is the author of Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth Century Beirut (Brill, 2016), guest editor of Special Issue: Rupture and Response, International Journal of Islamic Architecture 12.2 (2023), and co-editor (with Raphael Cormack and Alaaeldin Mahmoud) of The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment: Mass Culture and Modernity in the Middle East (Bloomsbury Academic, Dec. 2023).
Gohar Dashti is an Iranian-American artist and a visiting professor at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). She is recognized for her impactful large-scale photography that delves into social issues, drawing inspiration from history, contemporary culture, and anthropological perspectives. Dashti has been honored with several prestigious art fellowships and prizes, including the DAAD Award, the V&A Parasol Foundation, and the ISP Research Residency Grant at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin-Museum für Islamische Kunst.
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is a media anthropologist and Associate Professor in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. She is the author of Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (University of California Press, 2016), an ethnography of the international photojournalism industry. Currently she is investigating photography during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamit (1876-1909) from medical imagery to prison portraiture to understand emerging forms of the state and the changing contours of Ottoman subjecthood.
K.J. Hickerson is a historian of the nineteenth-century Nile Valley and is an Assistant Instructional Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Her research uses visual sources and addresses the politics of photography in and beyond the Sudans during the Ottoman-Egyptian, Mahdist, and Anglo-Egyptian imperial eras. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Middle East Center and the Sir William Luce Fellow at Durham University. She has received fellowships and grants from the Huntington Library, the Boston Athenæum, the British Academy, and the African Studies Association, among others and has published in Durham Middle East Papers, Journal of Northeast African Studies, and Sudan Studies Bulletin.
Gohar Dashti, Untitled, Home series, 2017.
This program is generously supported by the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation
Photography Network membership is required to attend. To become a member, sign up here: Registration Link for the event on Friday, September 29, 9 AM PST / 12 Noon EST / 5 PM BST.