Meet The Image Centre's 2025 Photography Research Fellows
Jan. 18, 2025
Four new fellows will be welcome into The Image Centre's (IMC) Peter Hidgon Research Centre this year to explore themes in the IMC's photography collection, ranging from Native American activism from the 1960s-70s to early colour photography and synthetic dyes influence on biological research.
The Nadir Mohamed Postdoctoral Fellowship
Dr. Ileana L. Selejan | Central America in the Black Star Collection
Dr. Ileana L. Selejan is a photography scholar and curator, currently Lecturer in Art History, Culture and Society at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. A member of the PhotoDemos research collective, she was previously Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at University College London and contributor to the European Research Council (ERC) funded project, "Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination". She has held curatorial, research and teaching positions at various institutions including Central Saint Martins and the Decolonising Arts Institute, University of the Arts London, The Davis Museum at Wellesley College, New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, the Parsons School of Design, and the Fine Arts Department at West University, Timisoara, Romania. Dr. Selejan is a member of the experimental arts collective kinema ikon.
Tell us about your project.
My project focuses on Central America related materials from the Black Star collection, observed within the greater context of Latin America during the Cold War. This research will contribute towards my current monograph, “The Insurgent Archive: Photography and Politics in Nicaragua” which looks at the intersections of photography and politics in Nicaragua, from the 1978-79 popular insurrection and the Sandinista Revolution, through to the 2018 civic rebellion. One of the main arguments I put forth, is that the Nicaraguan insurrection of 1978-79 and the ensuing Contra War (1981-1990) must be considered within a greater regional and transnational context. While massively impacting on a local level, these conflicts became global events not least due to their mediatisation but also due to the great number of photographers and international correspondents who travelled to Nicaragua, and Central America, during the 1980s especially. The ways in which the region was imagined and photographically represented, contributed to shaping public opinion at a local, regional and transnational level, having long-term political consequences.
How would you describe your research interests and methods?
I specialise in Latin American photography and am interested in global photographic practices, from the 19th century to date. I trained as an art historian and visual anthropologist, and am deeply committed to interdisciplinarity, building upon postcolonial and decolonial approaches.
What initially drew you to your particular area of research?
I have always been interested in global photographic practices, the history of protest and civic action via images especially. During my PhD (2007-2014) I focused on the Sandinista revolution, and this led me deeper into the field.
How has your research changed over time?
My research has become more and more interdisciplinary, and I have been very motivated to develop scholarship that expands the field of photography studies from this perspective. I have also become more aware of the potential implications of photography research and am interested in exploring challenging ethical questions, finding methods that suit subjects which might be politically charged or contested.
What is the goal of your research project?
I am eager to explore the Blackstar collection and gain more in-depth knowledge about the representation of Central America / Latin America during the Cold War. The insights gained will contribute towards the writing of my upcoming monograph.
The Penny Rubinoff Fellowship
Nicole Liao | “Truth to Nature”: Synthetic Colour, Biology and Photo Media in the 19th century
Nicole Liao is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. Her interests lie at the intersection of the history of photography and film, history of science and technology, and aesthetics. Prior to pursuing a doctorate, Nicole worked in the field of architecture and design at firms like Bruce Mau Design and Moriyama & Teshima Architects. She has previously exhibited art installations at ArtSci Salon at The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, Nuit Blanche Toronto, and ODD Gallery at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City, Yukon.
Tell us about your project.
This project investigates how early photo media and synthetically derived colour intersected in the field of early biology. My research will focus on experimental imaging between 1870 and 1930 when France becomes a centre for biomedical research and Germany the centre for the chemical dye industry. While recent scholars of modernity have studied the history of colour photography and aniline dye in their popular, commercial, and documentary contexts, little attention has been paid to their experimental applications in the life sciences. If we are to critically understand how colour and photography came to be so closely identified with nature, life, and alterity then we must understand how these terms were reconfigured according to the following key developments: the synthetic replication of nature instigated by the discovery of aniline dye from coal tar waste; and the upending of the fixed, classificatory, visible order of natural history for what Foucault calls the “Modern Episteme” of hidden, functional, temporal relations in the study of life.
In the context of these developments, my project asks how theories on evolution, race, heredity and disease came to be naturalized through synthetic colour – not by their “objective” recording to better copy or correspond to the known world - but by making an invisible world visible. Specifically, I am interested in how scientists actively seized upon the artifice, plasticity and chemical properties of aniline dye and photo media to discover, reveal and even alter once mysterious processes and agents operating amidst the milieux of the body. I ask how experiments in colour photography linked to studies on human and animal perception, the classification of organisms, and the visualization of living tissues, cells and microbes were intertwined with larger biopolitical nation-building initiatives and colonial projects in the race sciences, tropical medicine and disease control.
How would you describe your research interests and methods?
My project thus brings together the following fields: the history of photography, where interest in the topics of both colour and materiality has recently begun to expand; the history of science, where aesthetics and imaging are recognized as playing key roles in the culture of scientific experiment and innovation; and colonial history, wherein geographic and economic occupation cannot be fully understood without the role visual technologies play.
Choose a work from the IMC collections and explain its significance to your research.
The case studies for my project will focus on early forms of photographic imaging that aimed to discover and quantify biological origins, growth, and pathology in the fields of ethnography, zoology, comparative physiology and microbiology. As such, I am particularly interested in exploring the Dr. Martin J. Bass and Gail Silverman Bass Collection at IMC which contains both colour prints and objects from scientific fields directly pertaining to my project.
What is the goal of your research project?
By joining the history of photography, biology and empire through colour, I hope to track how longstanding relations to “nature” were reconfigured by experimental image media as boundaries between inside and outside, local and foreign, human and animal were no longer fixed in a rapidly globalizing world.
The Howard Tanenbaum Fellowship
Cheryl Mukherji | Untitled (Learning to Look at My Father's Medical Photographs)
Cheryl Mukherji (b. 1995, India) is a visual artist and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. In her work, Cheryl explores the idea of origin and inheritance, which is embedded in the figure of her mother and her presence in the family album, using photography, text, video, printmaking, and installation.
Cheryl was awarded the New Generation Prize (Honorable Mention) at the PH Museum Women Photographers Grant (2024) and was the winner of the 97th Annual at the Print Center, Philadelphia (2023). She was a finalist for the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture (2024) and the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition (2022) at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian.
She has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Penumbra Foundation (2024), Stoneleaf Retreat (2023), Center for Photography at Woodstock (2022), and Baxter Street at Camera Club of New York (2021).
Her work has been exhibited, both solo and in group shows, at museums, festivals, and galleries such as the Brooklyn Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian, Museum of the City of New York, Minnesota Museum of American Art, International Center of Photography, Museum of the Moving Image, Capture Photography Festival, Format Photo Festival, The Print Center, Baxter St. at Camera Club of New York, among others. Cheryl’s works are included in collections at the Harvard Art Museums and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Cheryl holds an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from ICP-Bard College, New York (2020), where she was awarded the Director's Fellowship."
Tell us about your project.
My artistic practice explores origin and inheritance, dealing with memory, transgenerational trauma, and personal and collective histories—and how these factors inform identity. Utilizing interdisciplinary mediums such as photography, installations, printmaking, writing, and video, I engage with family albums that I brought with me to the United States from India upon immigrating.
My father, a hand surgeon based in a small town in Uttar Pradesh, Northern India, has maintained a private photographic practice documenting some of his patients for research and cataloging purposes. During my childhood, these medical photographs were often made on the same roll of film as family photographs and curated together in a family album—e.g., a photograph of a severed hand reconstructed by my father alongside an image of me cutting my birthday cake upon turning ten. These medical photographs represent an inheritance as significant as the family portraits. Together, they depict both the life of my father as a doctor and the uncanny intersection of medicine and photography. When viewed as a separate sub-archive, these images reveal the work of a skilled surgeon and photographer, focused on observing and documenting subjects with precision. Medicine and photography, in this regard, rely on the objectivity of seeing and observing the body or subject. I hope to research for a new artistic project, which explores my father’s decades-long medical photography practice alongside his surgical practice with the help of Dr. Martin J. Bass and Gail Silverman Bass Collection housed at the Image Center. My primary research question is: How does the historical and scientific context of medical photography inform the personal and professional intersections seen in my father’s photographic practice?
How would you describe your research interests and methods?
My artistic practice explores origin and inheritance, dealing with memory, transgenerational trauma, and personal and collective histories—and how these factors inform identity. Utilizing interdisciplinary mediums such as photography, installations, printmaking, writing, and video, I engage with family albums that I brought with me to the United States from India upon immigrating. My artistic practice informs my archival research and vice versa, allowing me to explore and apply creative methods for analyzing, curating, and presenting archival materials outside of traditional research and scholarly frameworks.
What initially drew you to your particular area of research?
My father's personal archive of medical photographs made by him for research and cataloguing purposes.
How has your research changed over time?
My research is at the early stages. This fellowship will provide an invaluable research opportunity that will allow me to build a foundation for my proposed project and gain knowledge that will continue to help me build my artistic practice.
What is the goal of your research project?
My primary research question is: How does the historical and scientific context of medical photography inform the personal and professional intersections seen in my father’s photographic practice? To deepen my understanding of my father’s photographic practice and integrate it with my work, I propose researching the broader context of medical photography—its emergence and roots—using the Dr. Martin J. Bass and Gail Silverman Bass Collection housed at The Image Centre. I am particularly interested in Dr. Martin J. Bass’s medical background and how it influenced his collection of photographic objects related to medical and clinical sciences. The opportunity to work with stereographs in this collection is particularly exciting for me as an artist, especially for viewing microscopic layers of the human body as a single three-dimensional image in a stereoviewer. I aim to investigate the convergence of visibility, language, and power in framing human bodies as subjects of medical and photographic investigation within the archive.
The Elaine Ling Fellowship
Kristie Kahns | “Expressions of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination in the Black Star Collection”
Kristie Kahns works in the photographic field as an educator, teaching artist, writer, and independent researcher, based in Chicago. Her research addresses the methods of presentation, interpretation, and collection policies that circumscribe photographs with contested histories or culturally sensitive content, and the ways that different institutions implement these protocols, ultimately seeking reparative methods for unsettling entrenched historical narratives. She recently received an MA in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds a BA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago.
Tell us about your project.
This project will examine photographs of Native Americans found in the Black Star Collection, made predominantly in the late 1960s and into the 1970s––a time of pronounced Native activism and political resistance. After enduring generations of systemic discrimination at the hands of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, including assimilation policies and failure to uphold treaty obligations, Native communities galvanized to address their concerns, seen in the activism of the American Indian Movement and intertribal political organizations. Documentation of notable events of this era, including the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969, the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, and numerous demonstrations in Washington, D.C., can be found in the Black Star Collection, underscoring the amount of media attention that Native Americans had strategically sought and finally achieved through these audacious acts of defiance. Considering these photographs in their historical context, as the Red Power movement towards sovereignty emerged, is the self-determination of Native people visible in ways that were previously marginalized in published and widely circulated photographs? How did the media coverage of Native activism contribute to a shift in the national consciousness, and what role did the Black Star photographs play? I propose these questions regarding Native agency within visual archives amidst observable recalibrations in Native American representation in cultural, political, and academic spheres. Guided by themes of survivance and visual sovereignty, a close study of photographs of Native Americans found within the Black Star Collection can contribute to this shifting historiography of Indigenous peoples and their place in modern America.
How would you describe your research interests and methods?
I am most interested in the cultural and temporal malleability of photographs; how different contexts can elicit new interpretations. My current research explores the fraught relationship between the history of photography and Indigenous representation in visual culture, primarily focusing on nineteenth-century photographs of Native Americans made during a period of violence, dispossession, and forced resettlements. While understanding the historical context is essential, my approach is informed by decolonizing methodologies that unsettle the colonial gaze and consider the photographic encounter through alternative perspectives. The analysis in my recent thesis work was guided by the concept of visual sovereignty, as articulated by Tuscarora scholar Jolene Rickard, and my research has been influenced by the perspectives of many Native scholars, curators, and writers.
What initially drew you to your particular area of research?
My research into historical photographs of Native Americans emerged from a number of experiences and encounters, but one that stands out is the first time that I saw Wendy Red Star’s 1880 Crow Peace Delegation series at the Brooklyn Museum in early 2019, in the Museum’s Center for Feminist Art. Those photographs and Red Star’s incisive annotations really struck me; they laid bare just how much information was absent from the prevailing historical record, underscoring the value of analysis that foregrounds the perspective of the sitter of the portrait rather than the photographer.
The appropriation and repurposing of historical photographs is a ubiquitous practice in contemporary art, but I find the work of Native artists utilizing this method to be incredibly effective. Though made during a time of social turbulence and dispossession, historical photographs of Indigenous people continue to hold value for their communities, and the reclaiming of these photographs has become a pivotal intervention into the historiography of photography and its relationship to Indigenous subjects.
How has your research changed over time?
I have spent many years in the darkroom, as a practitioner and an instructor, so I maintain a proclivity towards photo-based works that engage in photochemical processes. My research interests have often included contemporary approaches to photographic materiality, particularly camera-less works that explore photosensitivity as an agent in the artmaking process, and I attribute this to my longstanding interest in the work of László Moholy-Nagy and the methods of the New Bauhaus. I think my background as a photographer also informs my interest in the material history of photography, and the ways that contemporary artists and scholars are drawing out those histories and their connections to environmental studies and systems of extraction.
In my graduate studies at SAIC, my interests in museum studies, exhibition development, and the history of photography converged, and this transformed the way that I think and write about the presentation and interpretation of photographs in museum spaces. My experience as a teacher, and specifically visits to museums with my students, also shifted my research interests, as I found ways to emphasize visual literacy and developed activities for students to explore historical photographs.
Choose a work from the IMC collections and explain its significance to your research.
Hoop Dancer by photographer Ralph Pierson (Accession # BS.2005.255147/157 619) is one of several notable photographs in the Black Star Collection that caught my attention during my preliminary research. I am very drawn to the photographs of Native American dances, which appear to have been photographed in numerous places and circumstances––perhaps powwows or other traditional ceremonies. These photographs are striking examples of Indigenous self-expression and pride, yet they are also representative of the challenges that Native communities faced to maintain sovereignty over their cultural practices. In the late nineteenth century, the intrusive cameras of non-Native photographers attempting to capture traditional dances led to photography bans in the Pueblos, and Native dances and ceremonies––especially those of the Pueblos––were suppressed through Bureau of Indian Affairs policies. For this reason, I was surprised to find a photograph of two Pueblo Eagle Dancers (Accession #: BS.2005.255672/157 1144); this is the kind of photograph that makes me question the positionality of the photographer and the purpose of their presence. Yet, considered in their historical context, the photographs of Native dances found in the Black Star Collection represent a resurgence in this form of Native cultural and spiritual expression, amidst the broader evidence of resistance and activism of the Red Power movement.
What is the goal of your research?
The goal of my project is to understand the significance of the photographs of Native activism found within the Black Star Collection, but also to place those photographs in a continuum of Native sovereignty, self-presentation and agency found throughout the history of the medium. Eventually, I hope to publish some of my thesis work, and I am excited by the possibility of incorporating some comparative analysis which places photographs of Natives from the 1870s and 1880s in conversation with photographs found in the Black Star Collection, made about a century later.
This research will contribute to my broader goals of tracing moments of Indigenous agency––on both sides of the camera––extending from delegation portraits made in Washington D.C. in the nineteenth century, through the activism of the twentieth century, to contemporary moments of survivance, presence, and artistic expression.