Dr Stephanie Schwartz

Stephanie Schwartz’s research and teaching focus on photography and its histories, with a particular emphasis on American documentary. Stephanie is the author of Walker Evans: No Politics (University of Texas Press, 2020) and the editor of Modernism After Paul Strand, a special issue of the Oxford Art Journal (2015). She is currently completing Allan Sekula’s War Work for the MACK Books Discourse series.

In 2023, she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for ‘The Native and the National: Film and Fascism in the Era of the New Deal’, a study of the work of the international anti-fascist film collective Frontier Films. 

Research

Stephanie is interested in photography and its histories, with a specific focus on the emergence of American documentary in the 1930s. Her first book, Walker Evans: No Politics (University of Texas Press, 2020), offers a sweeping reinterpretation of the photographer’s prolific work. Taking seriously Evans’s refusal to act or work politically, his 1935 insistence ‘NO POLITICS whatever’, Walker Evans challenges the established claim that American documentary finds its origins in the politics of the New Deal. Likewise, it questions the assumption that Evans’s work is necessarily about the Great Depression. Framed by a study of the work Evans completed in Cuba during the revolution of 1933, the book situates Evans’s work and documentary in a long history of Americanisation. 

Stephanie’s writing on the work of Allan Sekula extends her study of documentary as well as her ongoing research on the relationship between photography and protest. With Allan Sekula’s War Work, she considers the artist’s sustained attention to war stories, including Mark Twain’s postbellum tales about antebellum America. By taking stock of Sekula’s long-held obsession with the writing of America’s favourite humourist, Stephanie addresses how and why stories about America’s reunification and ‘rebirth’ are not only to central to but have gone missing from the study of Sekula’s war work. 

Stephanie’s current research considers the work of the anti-fascist collective Frontier Films. Focusing on the collective’s final production, Native Land (1942), a film about industrial espionage, it addresses documentary practices contending with Langston Hughes’s insistence that fascism is ‘native’ to America. A study of how nativity was reimagined in the wake of Depression, when the nation needed, once again, to represent itself as unified, Stephanie’s research speaks to contemporary concerns about how to address recent nativist impulses and the emergence of new or late fascisms in America.

Specialisms
Photography and its Histories, Documentary, American Art 

Selected Publications

Books

Allan Sekula’s War Work. London: MACK Books, forthcoming.

Walker Evans: No Politics. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020.

Journal Articles

‘The Physiognomy of a Nation’, October 158 (Summer 2023): 50-66.

‘Martha Rosler’s Protest’, Arts 9, 92 (2020): 1-20.

‘Waiting for Tear Gas’, Tate: In Focus, November 2016.

For a full list of publications, visit Stephanie’s RPS Profile.

Teaching and Supervision

Stephanie teaches undergraduate courses on photography and American visual culture, including:

• American Geographies: Figuring the West, 1848-1914
• Histories of Photography
• On Property: Land, Labour, and Photography in the United States
• On Property: Art, Work, and Personhood in America (with Dr Nicholas Robbins)

She also teaches a MA Special Subject entitled ‘American Documentary: Inventions, Reinventions, and Afterlives’.

Stephanie is interested in supervising doctoral dissertations on photography and its histories, documentary film and photography, photographic books and illustrated magazines, and American art, including film, video, theatre, performance, and dance. 

Prospective students should contact her directly to discuss their proposals at: stephanie.schwartz@ucl.ac.uk.

Current Research Students:

Daniel Ward, ‘Antinomies of Video: Collective Filmmaking and State Apparatus in the UK 1982-2000’.

Tom Cornelius, ‘American Surfaces: Topographies of the New West’.

Jacqueline Mabey, ‘This Must Be the Place: Mapping Artistic Kinship and Economic Change in Downtown New York, 1973–1987’.

Previous Research Students:

Rebecca Van Straten, ‘Olivetti and Photography in the 1960s: An Untyped History’, awarded January 2025

Freya Field-Donovan, ‘A Strange American Funeral: Dance and Technological Reproduction in 1940s America’, awarded June 2022.

Kimberly Schreiber, ‘Still Lives in Changing Times: Documentary and the American Carceral State, 1964-1980’, awarded June 2022.

Stephanie King, ‘The Less Acceptable Face of Capitalism: A Study of British Documentary During the Rise of Thatcherism’, awarded December 2019.

Andrew Witt, ‘On the Edge of Catastrophe: California and the Dystopian Image, c. 1970’, awarded November 2016.

Larne Abse Gogarty, ‘Rehearsals, Reproduction, and the Art of Living: Historicising Social Practise in the USA’, awarded June 2015.

Contact

Office: 407, 21 Gordon Square
Office hours: Term 3, Thursdays 3-4pm. Book here.
Email: stephanie.schwartz@ucl.ac.uk