Seminar Participants

Toronto Photography Seminar Participants: 2008-09

Sarah Bassnett, Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Arts, University of Western Ontario
Professor Bassnett’s research focuses on nineteenth and twentieth-century art and visual culture in North America, with an emphasis on the cultural history of representation and the way images have been used to support social ideals and political agendas. She is currently working on a book-length study of the impact of photography on the urbanization of Toronto in the early twentieth century. Her publications include “Picturing Filth and Disorder: Photography and Urban Governance in Toronto” in the journal History of Photography (2004) and “Visuality and the Emergence of City Planning in Early Twentieth-Century Toronto and Montreal” in the Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada (2007). Dr. Bassnett has received research grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Academic Development Fund.

Marta Braun, Professor, School of Image Arts, Ryerson University. Professor Braun works on chronophotographers E.J. Marey and Eadweard Muybridge. In 1994, her book Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne Jules Marey, was shortlisted for Britain’s Kraszna-Krausz award, a prize given bi-annually for the best internationally published book in photography. She won this award in 1999, along with four other authors, for the collection of essays Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science. Professor Braun was made a Knight of the Order of Academic Palms by the Government of France in 1996 in recognition of her contributions. She is currently working on the SSHRC funded history of early film in Ontario with Professor C. Keil, University of Toronto, and on the preservation of digital records as a research member of InterPARES, a SSHRC MCRI project.

Matthew Brower, Curator and Lecturer, University of Toronto
Professor Brower teaches modern art and visual culture and the history of photography. In his research, Professor Brower works on the history of animal photography and the representation of animals in visual culture. He is currently working on a manuscript on early American animal photography for the University of Minnesota Press, a cultural history of butterflies for Reaktion Books, and a number of smaller projects including an essay on Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion. Recent publications include “Trophy Shots: Early American Non-Human Animal Photography and the Display of Masculine Prowess” in the journal Society and Animals and “‘Take Only Photographs’: Animal Photography’s Production of Nature Love,” in the online journal Invisible Culture.

Elspeth Brown, Director, Centre for Study of the United States and Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Toronto.Prof. Brown’s research and teaching focuses on U.S. social and cultural history from the Gilded Age through the 1960s, with an emphasis on gender, sexuality, visual culture, and the history of American industrial and commercial culture (including consumption). She has received fellowship support for her research from the Getty Research Institute, the Library of Congress Kluge Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Smithsonian Institution, the American Philosophical Society, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is the author of The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929 (Johns Hopkins 2005) and co-editor of Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877-1960 (Palgrave, 2006). Professor Brown has published work in the History of Photography, Gender and History, the Journal of American History, Enterprise and Society, and afterimage. Her current research is an analysis of the commercial modeling industry in the 20th century United States, exploring the complex relationship among visuality, identity formation, and the commodification of the self in modern American history and culture.

Deepali Dewan, Curator of South Asian Art, Royal Ontario Museum and Assistant Professor, Department of Fine Arts, University of Toronto. Deepali Dewan teaches, curates and conducts research on various aspects of South Asian visual culture. Dr. Dewan is currently working on nineteenth-century Photography in Colonial South Asia with a particular focus on the work of Raja Deen Dayal. Among Dr. Dewan’s recent publications are “Producing the ‘Native Craftsman’ in Colonial South Asia: Art Education and the Decline of South Asian Art” in Satadru Sen and James Mills, eds., Confronting the Body: The Experience of Physicality in Modern South Asia (London: Anthem Press, 2003) and “Producing ‘Tradition’ through Illustrations of South Asia’s Visual Past and Present: ‘The Journal of Indian Art and Industry’ and the Production of Knowledge in the Late Nineteenth Century” in Julie F. Codell, ed., Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press (Associated University Press, 2003). Dr. Dewan’s research has been supported by a range of prestigious associations including the Social Science Research Council in 1997, the American Institute of Indian Studies in 1998-99, and the MacArthur Foundation in 1998-2001. Dr. Dewan was also awarded a College Art Association Professional Development Fellowship in 2000-02.

Blake Fitzpatrick: Professor, Documentary Media Program (MFA) and Director of Research and Publications, School of Image Arts, Ryerson University. Blake Fitzpatrick is a Professor in the Documentary Media MFA program and Director of Photographic Studies, School of Image Arts at Ryerson University. His research interests are in the area of photographic history and theory, documentary and photojournalistic photography, photographic responses to the nuclear era and archival image storage and recirculation. His career as an exhibiting photographer is informed by a number of scholarly publications and curatorial initiatives. He has authored one book, numerous refereed articles, invited conference papers and artist presentations. He has held a number of senior academic administrative appointments including the position of Dean, Faculty of Art, at the Ontario College of Art & Design and Dean, School of Design and Communication Arts, Durham College.

Sophie Hackett is the Assistant Curator, Photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Prior to this, as a writer and independent curator, she published writing in Lola, Saturday Night magazine, Xtra!, C Magazine, Canadian Art and Prefix Photo. She has curated five exhibitions independently, including The Found and the Familiar: Snapshots in Contemporary Canadian Art, co-curated with Jennifer Long (2002), Flash Forward (2005), and Wallpaper (2005). Her research interests include modernism and formulations of the history of photography; history of photography exhibitions; fashion and advertising photography; and vernacular photography. The photography collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario, includes 18,000+ press images from the Klinsky Press Agency; material from the French magazine Informations et Documents; and works by well-known documentary photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Larry Towell, Michel Lambeth, and John Gutmann, among others.

Laura Levin, Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre, York University. Professor Levin’s research examines histories of interdisciplinarity in the arts, with a particular focus on the convergence of multiple disciplines in contemporary performance art practices. In particular, she is looking at the ways in which the photograph repeatedly unsettles dominant accounts of performance genres, and helps to imagine alternate disciplinary genealogies. She is currently working on a book project entitled Blending into the Background, which explores feminist strategies of camouflage within a range of contemporary performance genres, including performative portrait photography. Her essay, “Environmental Affinities: Naturalism and the Feminine Body,” which looks at connections between naturalist theatre and surrealist photography, was published in an anthology on English-Canadian Theatre by Playwrights Canada Press (2005), and was awarded the Robert G. Lawrence Emerging Scholar Prize by the Association of Canadian Theatre Research. She also received the Ogden Prize in Theatre History for her essay on the photographic self-portraits of Janieta Eyre. A recent essay entitled “Can the City Write?: Letting Space Speak after Poststructuralism,” asks what photographic theory, and in particular Walter Benjamin’s theory of the optical unconscious, can contribute to the study of site-specific performance. It will appear in an anthology on “performance and the city,” published by University of Michigan Press in 2007. Dr. Levin has received research fellowships from UC Berkeley, the Townsend Centre for the Arts, and the Fulbright Foundation.

Sarah Parsons, Associate Professor, Department of Visual Arts, York University. Professor Parsons’s current research examines the way the production and circulation of documentary photography constructs and confuses the boundary between public and private space. Professor Parsons has published articles and a catalogue essay on a range of contemporary photo-based artists including Rodney Graham, Stan Douglas, Arnaud Maggs, Angela Grauerholz, Christian Boltanski and Bernd and Hilda Becher. Her work has been supported by grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Kress Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Faculties of Graduate Studies and Fine Arts at York University.

Thy Phu, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Western Ontario. Professor Phu’s research focuses on the representation of race and gender in contemporary America, particularly the intersection of and productive tension between literary and visual cultures. Her current major project is Visual Multiculturalism: Asian North American Photography and the Politics of Visibility, a book-length study of the links between visual culture and multicultural discourses. Focusing on selected photographic representation of Asian North Americans — including the work of Arnold Genthe, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Toyo Miyatake, Theresa Cha, Joy Kogawa, among others, the project explains how, rather than providing the means towards the end of substantive political recognition, visuality instead often substitutes for visibility. Professor Phu’s recent publications include “Decapitated Forms: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Visual Text and the Politics of Visibility,” Mosaic (2005) and “Photographic Memory, Undoing Documentary: Obasan’s Selective Sight,” Essays on Canadian Writing (2003). From 2003-5, she was a Mellon Post-doctoral Research Fellowship.

Sharon Sliwinski, Assistant Professor of Visual Culture in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. Professor Sliwinski’s research and teaching focuses on photography, visual culture, and contemporary theory, in particular psychoanalytic thought. She is currently working on a book called Human Rights In Camera which investigates the visual dimensions of human rights discourse. Through a series of examples that range from the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 to the recent Rwandan genocide, the book traces how spectator’s encounters with pictures has helped bring into view the notion of a shared humanity. Her latest research project investigates questions about visual testimony using Aby Warburg and Sigmund Freud’s work as as a guide. Recently published essays include “On Photographic Violence” in Photography and Culture, “The Aesthetics of Human Rights” in Culture, Theory and Critique, “New York Transfixed” in a special issue of the Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies devoted to 9/11 and “The Kodak on the Congo” in the Journal of Visual Culture.

Linda Steer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts and the Great Books/Liberal Studies Program, Brock University. In general, Dr. Steer’s research addresses the ways in which meaning is constructed in art and visual culture, particularly through the circulation of images. She recently defended her dissertation, “Found, Borrowed and Stolen: The Use of Photographs in French Surrealist Reviews, 1924-1939,” at Binghamton University. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this work focused on the transformation of photographic meaning when nineteenth-century found photographs were published in surrealist periodicals in the early twentieth century. Her dissertation uncovered new connections between modern art and literature, the development of French scientific and cultural institutions, and the history of photography. In another project, Steer is investigating the use of avant-garde visual strategies drawn from Dada and Surrealism by a 1960s French revolutionary architecture group, Utopie, in their journal of the same name. While much of her work addresses French art and visual culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she also writes about contemporary art, architecture and photography.

Dot Tuer, Professor, Faculty of Liberal Studies, Ontario College of Art and Design. Professor Tuer is a writer, cultural historian and theorist whose research focuses on the intersection of technology, memory, identity, and post-colonialism in the art and history of the Americas. She has published widely and lectured on the relationships between photography, new media, film and installation art. Her numerous essays on such artists as Governor General’s Award winners David Rokeby and Vera Frenkel, Geoffrey James, James Coleman, Char Davies, Sorel Cohen, Nell Tenhaaf, Tanya Mars, Eugenio Tellez, Anna Gronau, Sarah Charlesworth, and John Massey, have been published by the Art Journal, DIA Centre for the Arts, National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Kunsthalle Vienna, Art Gallery of York University, and C Magazine. Professor Tuer was awarded the INCO Limited 2004 Curatorial Writing Award for “The Heart of the Matter: The Mediation of Science in the Art of Catherine Richards” in a catalogue for the Ottawa Art Gallery. A book of her selected essays, Mining the Media Archive: Essays on Art, Technology, and Cultural Resistance was published by YYZ Press in December 2005.

Carol Zemel, Professor, Department of Visual Arts, York University. Professor Zemel’s current book project Graven Images: Visual Culture and Modern Jewish History focuses on modern Jewish visual culture and on images or art made in extremis. In this research she explores a range of so-called documentary photo practices, such as atrocity photographs, clandestine or hidden camera imagery, with a view to probing their relationships with other aesthetic or iconographic codes. Ethical modes of seeing or looking and the enduring iconocization of experience via the photograph is a central research concern. A portion of this research appeared in Image and remembrance: representation and the Holocaust ed. Shelley Hornstein (Indiana University Press, 2003). Professor Zemel’s books include The Formation of a Legend - Van Gogh Criticism 1890-1920 (UMI Research Press, 1980) and Van Gogh’s Progress: Utopia and Modernity in Late Nineteenth-Century Art (University of California Press, 1997). Her articles have appeared in The Art Bulletin, Art History, Artscanada, Art in America, Jong Holland and several scholarly anthologies. From 1995-98, she served as co-editor of RACAR (Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review). She has also curated several exhibitions of modern art, most recently Art in Poland: New Directions (University Art Gallery, SUNY Buffalo, 1997).