Tom Cornelius

PhD supervisor: Dr Stephanie Schwartz
Working title for PhD: ‘Uncommon Places: Photography in and of the New Western Landscapes, 1969–1982’

My project takes the photographer Stephen Shore’s oeuvre as a framework through which to rethink canonical histories of American landscape photography. I eschew a monographic lens to interrogate the work’s relationship to the institution, centring on three exhibitions held during the 1970s. My work uses these exhibitions to think through curatorial strategies and reflect on the interventions made by photographic re-presentation and the artist’s book. I am interested in how photographers and conceptual artists figured the American landscape in the 1960s and 1970s as part of a burgeoning visual language of snapshots, lavish colour, and theretofore overlooked vernacular scenes. My PhD is funded by the UCL Critical Histories of Art Studentship. 
 
Before joining UCL I studied at the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge, and abroad at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I have also worked in galleries and museums, most recently Tate and the Founding Museum in London.

Awards:

• University of Manchester Dennis Welland Prize for Exceptional Academic Achievement
• University of Manchester George Gissing Memorial Prize for Literature