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PhD supervisor: Stephanie Schwartz
Working title for PhD: Photography and the American Carceral State, 1964-1980
This dissertation analyses the relationship between American documentary and the reorganisation of the carceral state in the United States between 1964 to 1980. Centring on the work of Bruce Jackson, Danny Lyon, and Leonard Freed, this project examines how these photographers used their cameras, as well as the magazine page and the photobook, to investigate the shifting terrain of prisons and policing alongside the civil rights movement and after. This project not only historicises documentary and its work against the shifting visual landscape of the period, but also re-evaluates the relationship between American photography and racial politics. Rather than figure the civil rights era as a moment of rupture with America’s history of racial domination, these photographers, I argue, make visible the ways in which, even during the 1960s and after, the circumscribed humanity of the slave was remapped and reinscribed. This project is funded by the UCL Graduate and Overseas Research Scholarships.
Publications:
- Review of Chad Elias, Posthumous Images: Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post-Civil War Lebanon. Object: Graduate Research and Reviews in the History of Art and Visual Culture, January 2019.
- Forthcoming. “Kodachrome Plantation: Bruce Jackson’s Colour Prison Photographs,” Photography and Culture. 2021.
Teaching:
- Spring 2019: Teaching Assistant for HART0001, History of Art and its Objects
- Autumn 2019: Course Tutor for Modern and Contemporary Art in London ('Photography and the Nation'
- Autumn 2020: Art in the Public Sphere
- Spring 2021: Documentary and its Reinventions, Slade School of Fine Art
- Spring 2021: Modern and Contemporary Art in London, Widening Participation
