Department of Art History

Desires, so Joel Snyder wrote in a noted critical review from 1999, “cannot emerge prior to a network of specific practices—to the contrary, they are elicited by these practices.” Snyder was then commenting on the application of Michel Foucault’s ideas; but that conjunction of philosophically informed critique and attention to specificity speaks centrally to his own work. Tenured professor in the University of Chicago’s Department of Art History since 1990 (having taught at the university since 1970), Snyder is renowned as a world-leading expert in nineteenth-century photographic history whose analytic acumen has inflected the pages of Critical Inquiry as contributor and editor for some four decades. Yet, the attention to practices underscored in that 1999 review also highlights a crucial dimension of Snyder’s approach and enduring influence. An accomplished photographer himself, Snyder has long practiced and instilled in his students ways of integrating intellectual rigor with the maker’s passionate knowledge.  

To celebrate his work, “Critique/Desire/Practice” draws together Snyder’s former doctoral students and his long-time collaborators for a two-day symposium. Our aim is neither hagiographic nor to replay the debates on photographic indexicality in which Snyder has been immersed for decades. Instead, we treat his approach as a means by which to consider the history of pictures most broadly, above all, the questions they pose about relations between concrete practices (in the darkroom, the laboratory, the museum, the studio) and the ways we think (about photographs, scientific knowledge, historical narratives, the nature of perception). This conference opens out some of the main lines of investigation in Snyder’s work, seeking to develop the unusually fertile perspectives it contains. As the provisional schedule of speakers and session chairs below indicates, we anticipate that these could include the historiography of photography, the practice of criticism, photography’s crossings with new media, and landscape representation.

SCHEDULE:

Friday, June 1, 2018

9:15 AM: General Introduction (Christine Mehring, Department Chair and Professor of Art History and the College, UChicago)

9:30-11 AM: Session 1) Making Photography’s Histories (Chair: Douglas Nickel, Andrea V. Rosenthal Professor of Modern Art, Brown University)

1. Joanne Lukitsh (Professor, Massachusetts College of Art and Design), “Visualizing Pictures: Histories of the Art of Julia Margaret Cameron”
2. Liz Siegel (Curator of Photography, Art Institute of Chicago), “Hugh Edwards, Robert Frank, and Reading Photographs”
3. Britt Salvesen (Curator and Head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, Los Angeles County Museum of Art), “Flim-flam or Fact?: Advertisements as primary sources in the history of photography”

11:30 AM-12:30 PM: Session 2) Photography’s Mediation (Chair: W.J.T. Mitchell, Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago)

1. Carl Fuldner (PhD Candidate, U Chicago/Yale University Art Gallery Fellow), “P.H. Emerson’s Virtual Reality: Naturalistic Imaging for 21st-Century Students of the Art”
2.  Lisa Zaher (Lecturer, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), “Natural Magic and Auto-generated Systems: Learning from Hollis Frampton’s ‘R’”

Saturday, June 2, 2018

9:30-11:00 AM: Session 3) The Fine Art of Argument (Chair: Michael Fried, Professor Emeritus of the Humanities and Academy Professor, Johns Hopkins University, J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in the Humanities) 

1. Emily Godbey (Associate Professor, Iowa State University, College of Design), “On the Art of Being Contrary: A Small Meditation”
2. Leslie Wilson (Assistant Professor, SUNY-Purchase, Art History), “Explaining Everything, Explaining Nothing: When Photographs Can’t”
3. Sarah Miller (Assistant Professor, Mills College, Dept. of Art and Visual Culture), “The Index: New Problems in New Photography”  

11:30 AM-12:30 PM Session 4) Practicing Landscape (Chair: Tom Cummins, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art, Harvard University)

1. Stephen Pinson (Curator of Photographs, Metropolitan Museum of Art), “Fieldwork: the Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey”
2. Matthew C. Hunter (Associate Professor, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University), “How to Draw a Risk: Frederic Edwin Church's South American Landscapes”

2:00-3:30 PM) Session 5) Concluding Discussion

Joel Snyder (Professor of Art History and the College, U Chicago) with Marta Braun (FPPCM Program Director and Professor, School of Image Arts, Ryerson University), Josh Ellenbogen (Associate Professor, History of Art & Architecture, University of Pittsburgh), and Dan Morgan (Chair, Department of Cinema and Media Studies; Associate Professor, Department of Cinema and Media Studies and the College), moderated by Christine Mehring (Department Chair and Professor of Art History and the College, UChicago) and Richard Neer (Professor of Art History and the College, UChicago)

Photo caption: Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Parabola Optica (Optic Parable), 1931, Gelatin silver print. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Gift of Joel Snyder, 1981.83