Research

Jonathan Dentler is currently a postdoctoral researcher in Paris associated with the Early Conflict Photography and Visual AI project (EyCon) and the Laboratoire d’Excellence “Les passés dans le présent.” He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Southern California, where he also earned a graduate certificate in Visual Studies. His primary research interest is in the history of telecommunications media, the press, and visual culture, set in a transnational perspective. His dissertation, defended in 2020, is a global history of wire photography services. His next project will explore how artists, archaeologists, ethnographers, and the press theorized and imagined a prehistoric cultural diffusion around the Atlantic basin from the legendary continent of Atlantis, helping them make sense of deepening transoceanic connections from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.

Abstract
The Wired Image: Phototelegraphy, News Agencies, and the Reinvention of the World Picture, 1917–1955

Building on efforts in photography studies to write the medium into the history of communications media, my forthcoming book (based on a dissertation defended in 2020) will show how wire photography services combined photojournalism and telecommunications to reshape the everyday experience of global events. The book begins with the first consistent use of wire photography by the press in the 1920s and follows its development through the 1950s, when it had spread globally and looking at wirephotos had become an everyday practice for millions. At The Image Centre, I want to use the collections to compare and contrast faster wire photography services with slower and sharper picture agencies that primarily worked for illustrated magazines such as Life. I will contrast the circulation networks of picture agencies that primarily served weekly illustrated magazines with those of wire photography services, analyzing how different kinds of circulation were mediated by formal and material aspects of the photographs themselves.

I am also at work on a smaller project on Life magazine’s position in an intermedial cultural field during the 1930s that will use the Image Centre’s related collections. The project’s point of departure is the way in which “Ferdinand the Bull” was represented across a host of media in the late 1930s, including, notably, illustrated magazines like Life. Ferdinand, I argue, demonstrates the intensifying links between burgeoning media conglomerates such as Time-Life, Disney, and the Radio Corporation of America, and helps us look at the illustrated press in new ways, underlining its intermedial relations.

Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe is an art historian who writes and curates. She is currently a PhD candidate at Birkbeck University, London where she is completing a dissertation on British documentary photography from the 1970s and 1980s. She writes regularly for the international art press and has organised and contributed to exhibitions and events programmes at organisations including Halle für Kunst Lüneburg (DE), Four Corners (UK), MayDay Rooms (UK), Gallery 44 (CA), Cabinet Magazine (DE), The Kitchen (US) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (US).

Abstract
Terry Dennett: Subject to History

Dennett’s lifetime maps onto a significant period in British political history. He experienced the machinations of the post-’68 Left’s move from workerist and class-based analysis, through communitarian engagement, towards an identity-lead political outlook. Concurrently, the end of post-Second World War growth and the rise of Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal government fundamentally changed the material conditions of working people’s lives, and the landscape in which he was able to produce and distribute political photography. Dennett was affected by and responded to these changes, though not always moving with the tide in the manner available to some of his peers. It is this asynchronicity as well as his own commitment to historical work which marks Dennett’s biography as a vector through which to understand the stakes and consequences of British documentary practices in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Rowan Red Sky (member of Oneida Nation of the Thames) graduated with an advanced degree in Fine Art from Fanshawe College in 2010, where she studied a breadth of media but took a focus on digital photographic imagery. The same year, she completed a certificate in Photo Arts at Haliburton School of The Arts at Fleming College, where she specialized in historical and experimental cameras and chemical darkroom processes. She earned her BFA at OCAD University in 2015 where she studied Cross-disciplinary Art with a specialization in Publications, and then went on to practice as an artist based in Toronto for the next five years. In 2021 she graduated from her SSHRC-funded MA program and is currently continuing with her SSHRC-funded PhD at University of Toronto, where she studies Art History with a collaborative specialization in Book History and Print Culture.

Abstract
A Woman’s Pictorial Frontier: Photographic Strategies of Minna Keene’s Travels through Western Canada, 1914-1915

Photographic images made by Minna Keene during her travels through Western Canada in 1914-1915 are part of a broader group of nation-building images about Canada that advance the political, economic, and social imperatives of settler-colonial Europeans. My study of this collection opens questions about how the westward expansion of the Canadian frontier demanded new, yet familiar, forms of visual representation. This research project will analyse how Keene’s pictorial images of North American landscapes and the Indigenous ‘other’ compare with the synthetic ‘realism’ of early engravers, the portraits and landscapes made by nineteenth-century painters, and the masculine pictorialism of early-twentieth-century ethnographic photography. The collection offers insight into how photographic media was used by women during travel at a time of intense colonial expansion. A material exploration of the archive introduces potential for new understandings of these photographs by looking beyond the surface and borders of the image. The size and large scope of the collection, variant prints, original negatives, scrapbooks, and published reproductions in The Image Centre’s collection provide a resource for thinking through questions about Keene’s motivations and working methods. Another issue to investigate in this collection is what can be learned about the Indigenous subjects in Keene’s photographs, and what information might be available in the collection that would help to understand their lives at the ‘moment of capture’. Keene’s collection is point of focus to think about colonial representations of land and Indigenous bodies, and the transformation of land into material culture and nation-building narratives.

Nicole Cartier Barrera is a Toronto-based researcher, writer, and curator from Bogotá, Colombia. Her interests involve contemporary visual culture in Latin America and the consolidation and circulation of narratives of resistance, emerging in themes of witnessing, spectatorship, digital journalism, forensic media, and surveillance. Exploring collective memory and post-conflict reconstruction, she investigates the ethical position of the spectators of violence inflicted on others.

Nicole holds a double BA in Visual Art and Art History from Los Andes University (2018), and a graduate degree in Curatorial Studies from the University of Toronto (2022). She is the recipient of the Reesa Greenberg Award for Curatorial Studies, the Benjamin Hart Lobko Memorial Travel Award, the Latin American Studies Engagement Award, the Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC), among others. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and books. She is part of the interdisciplinary research-creation group Hemispheric Encounters Network and a board member of artist-run centres Art Metropole and Pleasure Dome in Toronto.

Abstract
Thresholds of Liberty and Democracy

On February 27, 1980, the guerrilla group M-19 (Movimiento 19 de abril) crashed a cocktail party at the embassy of the Dominican Republic in Bogotá, Colombia and, by means of force, sieged the building. The occupation lasted 61 days, during which 18 people, including 15 ambassadors, remained hostages inside the small house, while the negotiations with the government took place. An emcampment of journalists established itself next to the military convoy enclosing the house, and for weeks, they observed patiently. The Black Star Collection contains a series of photographs resulting from those months.

Instead of insisting on the situations developing inside of the embassy, or outside of it, my research looks directly into the building’s architectural structure and explores how it becomes a threshold for the encounter of both groups: on one side, the State, the military, the public; on the other, the guerrilla members and the hostages. The divisions that are usually delineated by a house—the private and the public, the intimate and the social spheres—are disrupted by the exceptionality of the siege, the nature itself of the building—which was a regular house that had been adapted for diplomatic use— and the constant presence of media and members of the public.

Harmony Trowbridge is a multi-disciplinary artist working in Toronto, ON. She holds a Bachelor’s in Drama from The Dan School at Queen’s University, and is about to complete her MFA in Documentary Media at TMU’s Image Centre. In 2023/24 she will embark on her second Master’s degree when she joins the cohort in the FPPCM program (MA). Harmony is honoured to have received the Elaine Ling Fellowship and wishes to express her appreciation to Charlene Heath, Katy McCormick, Blake Fitzpatrick, Kai Trowbridge-Wolters and the Peter Higdon Research Centre at The Image Centre for supporting her passion for The Black Star Collection.

Abstract
The Valley of Ashes: Rising Tide

Multidisciplinary artist Harmony Trowbridge presents her debut art installation as a part of the Doc Now Documentary Media Festival, hosted by Toronto Metropolitan University’s Doc Media MFA program. This multi-media piece will expose the dark side (and the aesthetic and rhetorical resistance it faced) of the 1939 World’s Fair in NYC by juxtaposing archival materials from some of NA’s most prestigious collections with her own photography from the site.

Dr. Stephen Broomer is a media artist and film historian. He teaches at the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, and is the host of the video essay series Art & Trash, on cult and underground cinema. He has been a Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of California Santa Cruz and the Prelinger Library, has held a postdoctoral fellowship at Brock University's Centre for Canadian Studies, and is a past recipient of the Chalmers Art Fellowship. As a media artist, he has been the subject of retrospectives at the Canadian Film Institute and Anthology Film Archives. His books include Hamilton Babylon: A History of the McMaster Film Board, Codes for North: Foundations of the Canadian Avant-Garde Film, Moments of Perception: The Canadian Experimental Film, Imprints: The Films of Louise Bourque, and Exovede in the Darkroom: The Films of Rhayne Vermette.

Abstract
Wendy Snyder MacNeil: Extended Portraiture

Complex forms of critical theory emerged in the 20th century, and with their arrival, painterly traditions in portraiture became limiting and reductive. In order to bring portraiture into the modern era of complex representations, fuller views of the subject would have to come into being: views that penetrated beyond typology, that expanded beyond the criteria traditionally conveyed in portraits (class, age, gender), that reached the core of their subjects by integrating content beyond visual perception, such as biographical elements, into the image itself, transforming the image from an instant into an interval. For American photographer and filmmaker Wendy MacNeil, such questions of portraiture and its potential narrative extensions led to a body of photographic portraits that appropriate past images – images taken from other contexts, such as passports, employment IDs, and family albums – and integrate them with contemporary portraits taken by the artist. These contrasts of past and present convey information about the subject uncommon in traditional portraiture. In making them, MacNeil reflects on the history and nature of portraiture.