RAVE: Reconnecting Metadata: Race, Labor, and the Corporate Body through the History of the Eastman Kodak Company
In April 1967, protesters from Rochester, New York, all along the east coast, and at least as far west as Chicago gathered outside of Eastman-Kodak’s annual shareholder meeting to demonstrate against the company’s racialized hiring practices. Despite the increasing diversity of Rochester--the company town where Kodak had been based since 1880--most of Kodak’s employees were white. Through their connections with Kodak, many white residents of the area had access to healthcare, pensions, and the promise of jobs for life, whereas Black Rochesterians were excluded from the workers’ utopia that Kodak had built-in Rochester over the years.
The events in the Reconnecting Metadata series take this protest as a starting point to explore the history of U.S. racial capitalism, how mass commodities and labor practices shaped twentieth-century racial ideologies, and how these ideologies take material from within photographic technologies and the chemical structure of film, with critical lessons for our current digital paradigm. We’ll also consider how archival materials are loaded with productive potential for revisitation and invite participants to help us activate and re-animate these images.
Lucia Cantero, Ali Feser, Jason Lazarus, and Heather Smith will introduce this material in a panel discussion.
Lucia Cantero (Associate Professor of International Studies, University of San Francisco)
She is an anthropologist of Latin America and the Black Atlantic, aesthetics, affect, infrastructures, data and urban ethnography. Her research focuses on branding, advertising and markets as sites for the construction of political subjectivity and the ways this process inflects constructions of race, class, and gender/sexuality. She is currently completing a monograph, Olympic Afterlives: Global Spectacles of Space, Race and Inequality in Rio de Janeiro, and journal article “Canned Latinx: Goya Food Politics, Globalization and the Branding of Diaspora” is also forthcoming. Precarious Democracy: Ethnographies of Hope, Despair and Resistance in Brazil, her co-edited volume, has been recently published by Rutgers University Press.
Ali Feser (Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Science Core, The University of Chicago)
Ali Feser is a cultural anthropologist trained at Bard College and the University of Chicago. Her work is situated at the intersection of visual studies, science studies, queer and feminist theory, and the anthropology of late industrialism. Her book manuscript, Reproducing Photochemical Life in the Imaging Capital of the World, is an ethnography of U.S. visual culture, industrial capitalism, and political fantasy through a material history of Kodak film. In addition to teaching at U of C, she has lectured at the University of Rochester and Loyola University.
Jason Lazarus (Assistant Professor of Art and Art History, University of Southern Florida)
Jason Lazarus is an artist exploring vision and visibility. His expanded photographic practice seeks new approaches of inquiry, embodiment, and bearing witness through both individual and collective research and image production. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at the University of South Florida. Selected exhibition venues include SF MOMA, Art Institute of Chicago, MASS MoCA, MCA Chicago, George Eastman Museum, Queens Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, Renaissance Society, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Ryan Lee Gallery NYC, Exgirlfriend Gallery Berlin, Contemporary Jewish Museum SF, Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Columbia University, Stadtgalerie Kiel 9, Kunstlerhaus Behanien Berlin, Gallery 400, bitforms Gallery NYC, Blaffer Art Museum Houston, Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts Belgium, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. His work has been covered in outlets including Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic, The Guardian, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and National Public Radio and written about by Martha Rosler, Hamza Walker, Abigail Solomon Godeau, Christopher Knight, Carment Winant, and Michelle Grabner among many others. Public lectures include Yale University, International Center of Photography, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; George Eastman Museum, California College of the Arts, Columbia University (NYC), the Art Institute of Chicago, University of California Berkeley, and Artists/Designs/Citizen (US Pavilion, 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale) among many others. Selected permanent collections include the Art Institute of Chicago, SFMOMA, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, High Museum of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago.
Heather Kai Smith (Collegiate Assistant Professor, DoVA, The University of Chicago)
Heather Kai Smith is a visual artist and educator. Rooted in drawing as a practice, her work includes collaborative animation and illustration. Through observational attention and installation, Smith seeks to activate archival images as a way to rearticulate revolutionary desires and activism in a contemporary context. Smith is currently a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago, previously instructing at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver BC. Recent exhibitions include: Tallinn Art Hall (Estonia), Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff, Alberta), studio e gallery (Seattle, WA) and The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (Vancouver, BC). www.heatherkaismith.com
You can register here to attend virtually on Zoom.