Department of Art History

In Memoriam

Professor Emeritus Joel Snyder passed away Friday, June 5th, 2026. Born in 1940 and raised in Manhattan Beach in the borough of Brooklyn, New York, Joel graduated from the College in 1961 and pursued graduate study in the Department of Philosophy. Opening a photography studio in Chicago in 1965, Joel split his time between commercial assignments for magazines, galleries, and advertising agencies, and challenging original work, such as a series of eighty prints shot in the Chester Mental Health Center. This work was exhibited and collected by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian. Assignments from the Smithsonian and from Time-Life Books to recreate historical photographic techniques led Joel to found Chicago Albumen Works with Doug and Dorothy Munson; together they produced albumen prints for major museum exhibitions at MoMA and elsewhere. Joel’s practice ranged even more widely, from collaborations with Walker Evans to set photography on Star Wars and other films.

 Joel began teaching studio courses in the Art Department (now Art History) in 1969, at the invitation of noted poster designer Virgil Burnett and English Professor Stuart Tave, then starting out as Dean of the College. Joel added history of photography and criticism to his teaching in 1973, and in 1976 was invited to join the Committee on Art and Design, which included Charles Cohen, Ted Cohen, Vera Klement, Richard Shiff and Laura Volkerding, as one of the first academic professors of photographic history. This environment set the stage for what may be Joel’s most renowned work: a series of essays in Critical Inquiry that combined philosophical insight, technical expertise and conceptual originality on subjects ranging from realism and the ‘camera-eye’ (“Photography, Vision, and Representation,” with Neil Walsh Allen, 1975, and “Picturing Vision”, 1980), to the nature of perspective (“Las Meninas: Paradox Lost,” 1980, with Ted Cohen, and “Las Meninas and the Mirror of the Prince,” 1985). Many of these essays went on to become much-anthologized classics—and, on the way, helped to usher in a golden age of visual theory at Chicago.  “It is unfortunate that art historians have not provided us with a critical history of the camera,” Joel observes in the 1980 “Picturing Vision,” and he dedicated much of his scholarly labor for the following decades, including classic essays like "Territorial Photography,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago, 1994), exhibitions with scholarly catalogues like One/Many: WesternSurvey Photographs by Bell and O’Sullivan and American Frontiers: The Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan, 1867-1874 (which led to substantial gift to the Smart Museum) to this project.  Many of his projects were collaborative, in keeping with Joel’s distinctive combination of collegiality and tough-mindedness—a quality that was no less apparent in his four decades of service as a co-editor at Critical Inquiry. After retirement he devoted considerable time to a project on Leibniz and perspective, working as much with philosophers as with historians of art.

Joel was also a great citizen of our University, having been associated with Chicago since his undergraduate years.  In 1980 he chaired the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities, in 1985 he was full professor; guest professorships at Northwestern and Harvard followed. When studio art (later DoVA) split from Art History, he steered the latter through multiple terms as chair, as recently as 2009-2013 (an exceptional four-year term). As five of his former students wrote in the introduction to a celebratory “JoelFest” in April 2018, “An accomplished photographer himself, Snyder has long practiced and instilled in his students ways of integrating intellectual rigor with the maker’s passionate knowledge.” His commitment to the department was equally passionate: in 2001, a group of anonymous donors endowed the department with a major gift, the Joel Snyder Research Fund, to support faculty and graduate student research travel in perpetuity. His own interest in photographic processes, and the handheld paper supports of both photographs and various earlier printing technologies, inspired the department to found the Joel Snyder Materials Collection. Housed in the Visual Resources Center within Art History, Joel generously donated to this effort, including rare photos in many formats, prints, and other artistic materials such as Robie House bricks. All are resolutely meant to be handled—as well as thought and written about. That might well sum up his impact on our community. In a 2004 note in Critical Inquiry, “Notes on the Ground,” in appreciating the editors’ refusal to commit to one theoretical party line, Joel formulated a maxim that could stand for much of his life work: “theory and practice stand to each other in reciprocal relation; each assumes and responds to the other.”