York Seminar for Advanced Research
2006-2007


The Circulation of Photographs


This seminar builds on existing studies within the history of photography that have focused on the institutional and discursive spaces of photographic production and circulation. Work by John Tagg and Robin Kelsey, for example, has helped to illuminate the historical construction of photographic meaning, and it has shown that the spaces of photographic circulation are not simply institutional but are also disciplinary and discursive. However, much of the literature on the circulation of photographs has insisted on the primacy of the photograph's original context. For instance, Rosalind Krauss has argued that Timothy O’Sullivan’s expeditionary photographs should be treated as historical objects rather than as art objects. Likewise, Allan Sekula has suggested that the missing original context, erased when photographs are inserted into an archive, must be recovered. An underdeveloped topic within this area of study has been the effect of photography’s circulation. This seminar and the proposed journal issue at its end will focus on this issue to examine the way meaning is constituted as photographs circulate and operate across a range of different discursive and disciplinary boundaries.


To explore these issues, the seminar will bring together photographic historians whose work employs a range of methodologies and investigates a variety of photographic practices. Drawing on the group’s expertise in the study of photographs from diverse fields, including medical, biological, forensic, artistic, documentary, wildlife, and performance, the seminar will search for both points of commonality and disjuncture in the interpretation and analysis of photographs. Three guests will enrich our discussions through research presentations and participation in group discussions. The primary outcome of the seminar will be a series of papers that will form the basis for a guest-edited issue of a journal. Possible journals include History of Photography, Art Journal, or Revue d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review (RACAR). An application to the SSHRC Clusters Development Grant is another possible outcome of the research group.


PARTICIPANTS


Organizers:
Sarah Parsons, Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Arts, York University
Matthew Brower, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Arts, York University
Sarah Bassnett, Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Arts, University of Western Ontario
Linda Steer, doctoral candidate, SUNY Binghamton and Lecturer, Brock University

Other Participants:
Marta Braun, Professor, School of Image Arts, Ryerson University
Elspeth Brown, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Toronto
Deepali Dewan, Associate Curator South Asian Art, Royal Ontario Museum and Assistant Professor, Department of Fine Arts, University of Toronto
Blake Fitzpatrick, Dean of Arts, Ontario College of Art and Design
Laura Levin, Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre, York University
Thy Phu, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Western Ontario
Sharon Sliwinski, Postdoctoral Fellow, English and Cultural Studies Department at McMaster University
Dot Tuer, Professor, Faculty of Liberal Studies, Ontario College of Art and Design
Kelly Wood, Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Arts, University of Western Ontario
Carol Zemel, Professor and Chair, Department of Visual Arts, York University


Seminar Guests


John O’Brian, Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia
Professor O'Brian has published extensively on modern art history, theory and criticism, particularly on the institutionalization of modernism in North America. His current research is directed at visual responses in art and popular culture to the atom bomb during the Cold War period from 1945 – 1972. A significant portion of this research focuses on “photographic atomica.” Among Professor O’Brian’s 12 books and more than 50 articles focusing on the institutionalization and reception of modernism are: Ruthless Hedonism: The American Reception of Matisse (University of Chicago Press, 1999), which won an American Association of University Press Book Award; Voices of Fire: Art, Rage, Power, and the State, which was co-edited with Bruce Barber and Serge Guilbaut (University of Toronto Press, 1996); and The Flat Side of the Landscape (Mendel Art Gallery, 1989), which won the Braide Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the field of Canadian art history. He is also the editor of the four-volume edition of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism (University of Chicago Press, 1986 and 1993).


Carol Payne, Assistant Professor, Carleton University
Professor Payne’s current research project is a book-length project on the National Film Board of Canada's Still Photography Division (1941-1984) and its construction of national identity. This study has been awarded two major grants from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada: a 2005-2007 Northern Development and Research grant and a 2001-2004 Standard Research Grant. Under the present funded research project, she is collaborating with the Inuit college, Nunavut Sivuniksavut. NS students are being hired to conduct interviews with elders in Nunavut about images from the NFB collection. Dr. Payne’s forthcoming and recent publications include “’How Shall We Use These Gifts?’ Imaging the Land in the National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division" in John O’Brian and Peter White, eds. Unlearning Landscape (McGill-Queen’s University Press, Forthcoming); "Through a Canadian Lens: Discourses of Nationalism in Governmental Photographs of Canada, c.1858 to 2000" in Sheila Petty, Annie Gérin, and Garry Sherbert, eds. Canadian Cultural Poesis: An Anthology. (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Forthcoming); and the collaborative article, Carol Payne and Jeffrey Thomas, “Aboriginal Interventions into the Photographic Archives” Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation. Volume XVIII, No.2 (June 2002): 109-125. With Amy Lyford (Occidental College, California), she is co-editing "Photojournalism, Mass Media and the Politics of Spectacle" a special issue of Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation. Vol. XXI, No. 2, (Summer 2005).


John Tagg, Professor, Art History, Binghamton University, New York
Professor Tagg has published widely on photography and contemporary critical theory. He is the author of Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics, and the Discursive Field (Minneapolis,1982) and The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis,1988), as well as many essays, chapters, and other contributions on photography. His current project is an analysis of the discursive and institutional relations of power that frame photographic meaning.

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