Martha Langford

Martha Langford is the Research Chair and Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art. She is an associate professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University in Montreal where she has taught courses on photographic history and theory, Canadian art, and institutional frameworks. Langford’s professional background includes nearly two decades in Ottawa where she served as Executive Producer of the Still Photography Division of the National Film Board of Canada and as Founding Director and Chief Curator of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, an affiliate museum of the National Gallery of Canada where she was concurrently an Assistant Director. As an institutional and independent curator, she has organized exhibitions of Canadian art that have been shown across Canada, in Europe and the United States.

Langford’s major works include Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (2001) and Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art (2007), as well as an edited collection, Image & Imagination (2005), all from McGill-Queen’s University Press. A Cold War Tourist and His Camera, co-written with John Langford, was also published by MQUP in 2011. Recent essays include “A Short History of Photography in Canada, 1900–2000,” in Anne Whitelaw, Brian Foss, and Sandra Paikowsky, eds., The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2010); “The Child in Me: A Figure of Photographic Creation,” in Loren Lerner, ed., Depicting Canada’s Children (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009); “Imagined Memories: On Rafael Goldchain’s Family Album,” in his I Am My Family: Photographic Memories and Fictions (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008); and “Strange Bedfellows: Appropriations of the Vernacular by Photographic Artists,” Photography & Culture 1:1 (July 2008).

Langford is editor-in-chief of Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d’histoire de l’art canadien and co-editor, with Sandra Paikowsky, of the MQUP/ Beaverbrook Foundation Series on Canadian Art History. She is also a contributing editor for Border Crossings (Winnipeg), Exit (Madrid) and Photography & Culture (London), an advisory board member for Ciel variable (Montreal), and a regular book reviewer for Source (Belfast). She is the organizer of the Department of Art History’s lecture series, Speaking of Photography, which has welcomed photographic scholars from Canada, Britain, and the United States, since 2007-8. http://speakingofphotography.concordia.ca

Current research projects on Canadian art and photography include an intellectual biography of multidisciplinary Canadian artist Michael Snow and a team research project involving graduate students in the creation of a common research tool on Canadian photographic history to be made available on-line. This project is designed to break the mould of Euro-American accounts. The burning question is: what did Canadians know about photography and when did they know it?