Join Gruber Curatorial Fellow Ileana L. Selejan for an introduction to the challenges and possibilities of working with photographic materials brought from around the world into the space of the museum. 

 

Join NYU professor Shelley Rice to explore the “visual geography” of the year 1900, the moment when amateur cameras, half-tone reproduction processes and multinational corporations expanded photographic production and distribution exponentially, and quite literally set the stage for a “world culture” of imagery based on mobility, deracination and reproducibility. Focusing on three separate projects (Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine Camera Notes, Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet and the PhotoGlob AG collection of scenic travel views), the lecture will highlight how the image economy of this historical period—with its emphasis on networks, franchises, portability and outreach, its inherent tension between the domestic and the international, the artistic and the commercial, the elite and the mass—laid the foundations for our contemporary visual environment and its dependence on the mutability and transportability of images.