photO-
graphic
futures
symposium
Photography exists at a dynamic juncture between fields, serving as both a tool and a subject of inquiry, an art form and a medium of communication, a technological apparatus and a set of relationships.
“Photographic Futures” is a one-day symposium at Dartmouth College on Friday, January 31 that brings together a group of interdisciplinary scholars to explore how contemporary approaches to photography illuminate pressing issues of our time.
The symposium is organized by Martina Broner, Kimberly Juanita Brown, and Tory Jeffay as part of a Leslie Center for the Humanities Venn Vision Grant.
Schedule
All events take place at the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life, Haldeman 246
9:00 AM – 9:30 AM
Breakfast and Welcome Remarks
Welcome remarks by Kimberly Juanita Brown
9:30 AM – 11:00 AM
Panel 1: Reimagining Photographic Histories
- Emilie Boone: “Writing Photography’s History after Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers”
- Carolina Sá Carvalho: “The Not-so-Still Life: Trees and the Unbounded Nature of Photography”
- Tanya Sheehan: “Medical Photography as Limit Case”
11:15 – 12:45 PM
Roundtable Discussion: New Work in Photography at Dartmouth
Matteo Gilebbi, Laura Ogden, Israel Reyes, Tory Jeffay, Martina Broner
12:45 PM – 2 PM
Lunch
Lunch is open to all registered participants.
2:00 PM – 3:15 PM
Panel 2: Intimate Visions
- Leigh Raiford: “Black Habits of Photography (A Fugue for Tyre Nichols)”
- Bakirathi Mani: “Dwelling in the Family Album Archive”
3:30 PM – 5 PM
Panel 3: Beyond the Visible
- Natalia Brizuela: “Broken Cameras”
- Balbir Singh: “Nazar: Towards a Photographic Theory of the Evil Eye”
- Patty Keller: “Photography, Alchemy, Radiation”
Visiting Participants
Emilie Boone
Emilie Boone is an assistant professor of African American/African Diaspora Arts in the Department of Art History at New York University. She researches and teaches the art and visual culture of the African Diaspora with a focus on vernacular photography and global encounters. She is the author of A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography (Duke University Press, 2023) and the recipient of recent fellowships from the Clark Art Institute, Perez Art Museum Miami Caribbean Cultural Institute, and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Natalia Brizuela
Natalia Brizuela works across visual studies, literature, epistemologies from the Global South and Indigenous studies. She is the author of Fotografia e Imperio (2012), Uma fotografia fora de si (2014), Photography at its Limits (2019), and is the co-editor of, among others, The Matter of Photography in the Americas (2018), and Listening to Others (2023). Most recently she has co-curated the online experiment Bits of the Planet (2024). Brizuela is currently completing a manuscript titled Unlearning Time. She is a professor of Film & Media and Spanish & Portuguese at UC Berkeley.
Carolina Sá Carvalho
Carolina Sá Carvalho is an Associate Professor of Latin American and Lusophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Toronto. Before joining the University of Toronto, she was a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of the award-winning book Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America (Northwestern UP, 2023), and several articles on modern and contemporary Latin American and Brazilian arts, photography, film, and literature. She is currently working on the book-length environmental humanities project Mosquito Aesthetics and the Politics of Contagion in Brazil.
Patty Keller
Patty Keller is Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where she researches and teaches cultural studies, visual literacy, media and theory. She is the author of Ghostly Landscapes (U Toronto Press, 2016) and is currently working on a book about photography, ethics and grief; that project is called Photography’s Wound: Exposing Belief in Times of Uncertainty.
Bakirathi Mani
Bakirathi Mani is the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, and core faculty in the Asian American Studies Program and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program. She is the author of Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America (Duke UP, 2020) and Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America (Stanford UP, 2012). More recently, she has written on the circulation of photographs of anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, and photography’s relation to imperial and settler-colonial archives in the U.S. and South Asia for Aperture, PIX, Brooklyn Rail, and other public venues.
Leigh Raiford
Leigh Raiford (she/they) is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches, researches, curates and writes about race, gender, justice and visuality. At Berkeley, Raiford is also Co-Director of the Black Studies Collaboratory, an initiative to amplify the world-building work of Black Studies. Raiford is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (2011); co-editor of Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture (2017); co-author of Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography (2024); and series editor of the Vision and Justice Series. Raiford has just completed a monograph entitled When Home is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World, forthcoming from Duke UP.
Tanya Sheehan
Tanya Sheehan is Ellerton M. and Edith K. Jetté Professor of Art at Colby College. She has been a research fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research since 2012, and has served as executive editor of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art Journal since 2015. Sheehan is the author of Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2011) and Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor (2018). Her edited books include Photography, History, Difference (2014), Photography and Its Origins (2015, with Andres Zervigon), Grove Art Guide to Photography (2017), Photography and Migration (2018), Andrew Wyeth: Life and Death (2022), and Modernism, Art, Therapy (2024, with Suzanne Hudson). She is writing a book that explores the subjects of medicine and public health in twentieth-century art by African Americans.
Balbir Singh
Balbir K. Singh is Canada Research Chair in Art and Racial Justice, as well as Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. She is the Director of Dark Opacities Lab, a hub for BIPOC political and aesthetic study and strategy. Using anti-colonial methods of reading and sensing, Singh builds on theories of opacity in her in-progress manuscript “Militant Bodies: Racial/Religious Opacity and Minoritarian Self-Defense,” which takes a materialist feminist approach to explore questions that center post-9/11 racial and religious hyper-policing of Muslim and Sikh bodies. Currently, she serves as Reviews Editor for Art Journal and is part of the Journal of Visual Culture’s Editorial Collective.
Dartmouth Participants
Martina Broner
Martina Broner’s research focuses on environmental cinema and media in 21st century Latin America. Her book project, Forest Formats: Media and Environment in the Amazon, engages with Indigenous thought and feminist frameworks to examine new cinematic formats that emerge from entanglements between human and other living entities, such as trees and rivers, in the transnational Amazon forest. Before joining Dartmouth’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese as assistant professor, Broner was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Film & Media Studies and Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies and Screen.
Kimberly Juanita Brown
Kimberly Juanita Brown researches and teaches at the intersection of African American/African diaspora literature and visual culture studies. In particular, she is interested in the relationship between visuality and black subjectivity. Her first book, The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Duke University Press, 2015) examines slavery’s profound ocular construction and the presence and absence of seeing in relation to the plantation space. Her most recent book, Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual (MIT Press, 2024) explores the relationship between photography and histories of antiblackness on the cusp of the twenty-first century.
Matteo Gilebbi
Matteo Gilebbi is Senior Lecturer in the Department of French and Italian and Affiliated Faculty in the Comparative Literature Program at Dartmouth College. He is an environmental posthumanist whose research focuses on the connections between literature, cinema, and philosophy, using theories from ecocriticism, new materialism, and animal studies. He translated two books of poetry by Ivano Ferrari, published in the single volume Slaughterhouse (Legas, 2019), and co-edited the volumes Italy and the Ecological Imagination: Ecocritical Theories and Practices (Vernon, 2022) and Waste and Discard in Italy and the Mediterranean (Peter Lang, 2024). At Dartmouth he also co-directs the “Anthropocene Research Group” and he is an active member of the “Environmental Humanities Initiative”.
Tory Jeffay
Tory Jeffay is a postdoctoral fellow at the Dartmouth Society of Fellows and a 2025 ACLS Fellow. Her book manuscript, Contested Vision: Race and the Limits of Visual Evidence argues the controversial status of photographic images as evidence from Rodney King to George Floyd is not a product of the so-called “digital turn,” but rather stems from a much older distrust of non-white voices and denigration of human interpretation in favor of data analysis. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film Quarterly, and the New Review of Film and Television Studies.
Laura Ogden
Laura Ogden is a cultural anthropologist interested in the politics of environmental change and conservation. Her work contributes to theoretical discussions in political ecology, environmental anthropology, as well as post-humanist philosophy. She has conducted ethnographic research in the Florida Everglades, with urban communities in the United States, and she is currently working on a long-term project in Tierra del Fuego, Chile, exploring the ways introduced species are remaking the landscape and the ethics of living and dying in a changing world. She is on the faculty in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College and is affiliated with Dartmouth’s Program in Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies.
Israel Reyes
Israel Reyes is a Professor and the Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth College, the former Chair of the Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies Program. He holds an Adjunct Appointment with the Comparative Literature Program. Reyes teaches and conducts research on Latin American, Puerto Rican, and US Latinx literature and culture. His current book project, Between Two Flags: Puerto Rican Visual and Performance Cultures on Chicago’s Paseo Boricua, engages with the visual language of art and architecture as well as the forms of embodied performance and cultural expression that have contributed to the political and economic interests of Chicago’s Puerto Rican community in the Humboldt Park neighborhood.
RSVP
The symposium is open to members of the community. Lunch is available to guests who RSVP by January 24.
