Global Studies Forum / Global France Seminar
Free and open to the public
Local Space/Global Visions: Albert Kahn in Context
Shelley Rice, Professor of Art History, NYU
Rice will explore the “visual geography” of the year 1900, the moment when amateur cameras, half-tone reproduction processes and multinational corporations expanded photographic production and distribution exponentially, and quite literally set the stage for a “world culture” of imagery based on mobility, deracination and reproducibility. Focusing on Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet, the lecture will situate this extraordinary project within the context of other experiments in image distribution at the time: among them, Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine Camera Notes and the PhotoGlob AG collection of scenic travel views. Rice’s discussion will highlight the ways in which the image economy of this historical period — with its emphasis on networks, franchises, portability and outreach, its inherent tension between the domestic and the international, the artistic and the commercial, the elite and the mass – laid the foundations for our contemporary visual environment and its dependence on the mutability and transportability of images.
About the speaker
Critic and historian Shelley Rice has lectured on photography and multi-media art in the USA, Europe, South America, Asia, Australia and Africa. She is the author of Parisian Views (MIT Press, 1997; shortlisted for the Kraszna-Krausz Award, 1999); Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman (MIT Press, 1999), Xing Danwen (Prestel: 2015) and the major essayist of The Book of 101 Books (2001).
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