2023
Celebrating our Members’ Professional Achievements
Member Books Published in 2023
Throughout the apartheid era, South Africa maintained a wide-reaching propaganda apparatus. At its core was the information service that strongly capitalised on photography to visually articulate the minority regime’s racist political messages, promote Afrikaner nationalism, and consolidate White rule. By unearthing a substantial corpus of photographs that so far have been hidden in archives, this book offers a distinctive perspective on the institutional context of the regime’s photographic production and how it was tightly linked to the objective to build a White nation.
Tracing the shifting meanings of photography in the early Soviet Union, Aglaya K. Glebova reconsiders the relationship between art and politics during what is usually considered the end of the critical avant-garde.
In A Nimble Arc, Emilie Boone considers Van Der Zee’s photographic work over the course of the twentieth century, showing how it foregrounded aspects of Black daily life in the United States and in the larger African diaspora. Boone argues that Van Der Zee’s work exists at the crossroads of art and the vernacular, challenging the distinction between canonical art photographs and the kind of output common to commercial photography studios.
An absorbing exploration of Soviet-era family photographs that demonstrates the singular power of the photographic image to command attention, resist closure, and complicate the meaning of the past.
Photography in Canada, 1839 – 1989: An Illustrated History is the first comprehensive book on the history of photography in Canada. It is available open access online in English and French and will be published in print in the coming months.
Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination is an edited volume that explores the intersections of photography and citizenship, as observed in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Greece, India, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria and Sri Lanka.
This book explores domesticity and ideas about the self, placing them into conversation with debates about photography and examples of contemporary photographic art. Each chapter focuses on a cluster of artists to explore themes including everyday objects, diary practices, domestic time, the relational self, and intimate modes of displaying photographs.
This book completes the trilogy on the history of the documentary idea in photography, started with "The Worker Photography Movement, 1926-1939. Essays and documents" (2011) and "Not Yet. On the Reinvention of Documentary and Critique of Modernism. Essays and Documents, 1972-1991" (2015), also previously published by Museum Reina Sofia.
Published on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, this book presents photographs from the period when Cohen switched from printmaking and sculpture to photography, combining the lessons of Minimalism, Pop Art and Conceptual Art with the documentary tradition of photographers, such as Eugene Atget and Walker Evans
Caroline Riley's new book MoMA Goes to Paris in 1938 (UC Press, 2023) explores MoMA’s first international exhibition, Three Centuries of American Art, and discusses Beaumont Newhall's transcultural history of American photography, which included sixty-one daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, stereoviews, gelatin silver prints, and unlabeled processes.
Member Exhibitions
Memoryscapes is a solo exhibition by the German artist Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, realised in collaboration with Lucy Rogers.
This exhibition was centered on the seminal but little-known visionary engineer Paul Jaray, who designed the first truly aerodynamic automobiles in the 1920s but was ignored (and later written out of history) by the German Nazi government because he was Jewish. The exhibition includes artworks based on aerodynamic automobiles, among these the "Cadillac Ranch" public sculpture by Ant Farm. Blaise Tobia’s series of photographs of Cadillac Ranch (made in 1974 just after completion of the work) was featured. An earlier version of the exhibition took place at the Arsenale Institute for Art and Politics in Venice, in 2022.
The exhibition Mélloncene serves as a symbolic reminder of our disconnection from the natural world, and the underlying grief stemming from the ongoing daily loss of hundreds of species who coexist with us on this planet. In her most recent body of work consisting of photographs and videos, Seeing a Tiger Didn't Change Who I Am, Elisabeth Smolarz grapples with the current age of mass extinction. In an effort to address the dire situation faced by the most endangered species, she inserts instructions on how to prevent their extinction into the source codes of public domain images. The resulting photographs and videos appear fragmented, evoking the sense of artifacts unearthed by future archaeologists many centuries from now.
Criss-crossing the globe from Chicago to Tokyo, via Prague and Mumbai, with a stop-over in Toronto, Cities in Flux is a wide-ranging exploration of the city told through a selection of 100 photographs from the AGO Collection. Highlighting various economic, political and cultural realities underpinning the urban experience, the exhibition showcases photographs, post cards and albums – many on view for first time - made since 1850. Berenice Abbott, Bhupendra Karia, Paul Kodjo, Diane Liverpool, Danny Lyon and Gillian Wearing are among the more than 45 artists included in the exhibition. Curated by Marina Dumont-Gauthier, AGO Curatorial Fellow, Photography, Cities in Flux invites us to consider cities and the role of images in their growth and evolution.
Struck by Light represents the largest survey of Ellen Carey’s experimental photo-objects and lens-based art opening at the New Britain Musuem of American Art (NBMAA) showcasing iconic works spanning decades of her career (1991-2022), all from NBMAA collection as well as the artist’s own. In Lacock, England, home of photography, The Fox Talbot Museum, Light Struck features a solo exhibition by Ellen Carey (May 2023-March 2024); it complements the New Britain Museum of American Art. Collectively, the works trace Carey’s enormous contributions to the field of photography through her ongoing and ever-innovative experiments in light and color, dings and shadows, dark/negative versus white/positive.
Ellen Carey’s Light Struck takes the viewer through two centuries of photographic play and discovery. Showcasing key pieces from her career, the exhibition also features a completely new artwork (2023) created in response to one of Talbot’s 19th-century photograms titled: Crush & Pull with Hands, Penlights & Spruce Needles. Many of the artworks in Light Struck are from the artist’s collection on exhibit for the first time in England.
This installation highlights the collaboration between two free, Black artists working in Cincinnati, Ohio, during the antebellum period—photographer James Presley (J. P.) Ball and landscape painter Robert Seldon Duncanson. It features three paintings from SAAM’s collection by Duncanson alongside nine works by Ball. Eight of the photographic works were recently acquired by the museum from the L. J. West Collection and the Dr. Robert L. Drapkin Collection and are on view in SAAM’s galleries for the first time.
Defiant Visions showcases women photographers’ resistance to the apartheid regime through the lenses of their cameras. During decades of oppression, these women took photographs to expose not only racist but also gender-discriminatory social, economic and political structures. This exhibition explores the work of practitioners employing black and white imagery to focus on the women surrounding them.
In the fall of 1930, Stanford biology professor Laurence Bass-Becking used a curious phrase to describe the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream.” Few people today would associate dreaminess with the Great Depression, yet Bass-Becking penned this statement one year into the economic turmoil that would last until the nation’s entry into World War II.
In Dialogue is a series of temporary installations in the Museum’s collection galleries. Inspired by points of visual symmetry between works, this presentation places contemporary portraits by international photographers in conversation with European paintings and sculpture created before 1900. Through compelling and sometimes unexpected juxtapositions, these installations invite visitors to explore diverse approaches to portraiture and see both historical and contemporary works anew.
Nadya Bair, “Made for Distribution: Robert Capa und John Steinbecks Reise in die UdSSR” Fotogeschichte 168 (2023), 31-40.
Nadya Bair, “Suitcases, Stamps, and Paper: Piecing Together the Story of Black Star’s Nazi Photographs” in Thierry Gervais and Vincent Lavoie, Facing Black Star (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023), 66-91.
Nadya Bair, “Collaboration,” in Antawan Byrd and Elizabeth Siegel, eds. The Art Institute of Chicago Field Guide to Photography and Media (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 112.
Susan Laxton, "Le Mot d'esprit et sa relation au composite," Transbordeur 7, 2023.
Susan Laxton, “Play,” in Antawan Byrd and Elizabeth Siegel, eds. The Art Institute of Chicago Field Guide to Photography and Media (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 286.
Darren Newbury, "Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage, the United States Information Agency, and the cultural politics of race in the Cold War.” In Cold War Camera, edited by Erina Duganne, Andrea Noble and Thy Phu, 33-65. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2023.
Kate Manlik, Jane Simon, and Nicole Matthews, "The Fabric of Resistance: Care, Domestic Objects, and HIV Self-Narratives in the Work of Kia LaBeija and Jessica Whitbread," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 48, no. 3, (2023): 683–707. https://doi.org/10.1086/723269.
Sarah Parsons, “Domesticating Jefferson Davis: Family Photography and Postwar Confederate Visual Culture,” American Art 37, no. 1 (Spring 2023), 82-105.
Jessica Williams Stark, “From Hamburg to Cape Town: The Denizen Photography of Else and Helmuth Hausmann.” In Urban Exile: Theories, Methods, Research Practices, edited by Burcu Dogramaci, Marieke Hetschold, Laura Karp Lugo, and Helen Roth, 601-631. Bristol: Intellect, 2023.
Alise Tifentale, “Completing an Unfinished Sentence: On the Collaboration between Sophie Thun and the Archive of Zenta Dzividzinska.” In Sophie Thun: Trails and Tributes (ex.cat.), edited by Christin Müller and Torsten Scheid, 49-55. Hildesheim: Kunstverein Hildesheim and Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2023.
Alise Tifentale, "Working the Labor-Leisure Machine: Proposal for a Photography Museum without Images." In Riga Technoculture Research Unit, edited by Elizaveta Shneyderman and Zane Onckule. Published online, February 2023: https://www.rtru.org/under-the-hood/participants/alise-tifentale.
Andrés Zervigón, “Visible Yet Transparent: The Lens in Nineteen-Century Photographic Cultures,” Critical Inquiry 49, no. 4 (Summer 2023): 626-662.
Andrés Zervigón, Review of Juliet Hacking and Joanne Lukitch, eds., Photography and the Arts: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Practices and Debates, London, Bloomsbury, 2020. In 19th-Century Art Worldwide 22, no. 1 (Spring 2023). Available at http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring23/zervigon-reviews-photography-and-the-arts-edited-by-hacking-and-lukitsh.