Speaking of Photography 2011-12
A Series of Lectures at Concordia University
Speaking of Photography is an ongoing, annual series of public lectures on the history, theory, and practice of photography organized by the Department of Art History. Since 2007-08 we have welcomed photographic scholars from across Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
We are pleased to announce the 2011-12 lecture series.
Please note that fall 2011 lectures will be held on Tuesday evenings, and winter 2012 lectures will be held on Friday evenings.
Deborah Willis
Tisch School of the Arts, New York University
Posing Beauty in African American Culture
Friday, 10 February 2012, at 18:30 in EV-1.605
Book cover image: Ken Ramsay, Susan Taylor, c.1970s.
This lecture will explore the contested ways in which African and African American beauty have been represented in art. Deborah Willis will look at notions of black beauty through the eyes of the photographer, using a variety of artistic and theoretical positions about beauty to suggest diverse readings that challenge conventional perspectives on identity, beauty, and cosmopolitanism. She aims to stimulate a lively conversation around diasporic art that is both regionally and globally thematic. Throughout the Western history of art and image-making, and within contemporary art and popular culture, the relationship between beauty and art has become increasingly complex. The images considered in this lecture challenge idealized forms of beauty in art by examining a variety of attitudes about race, class, gender, popular culture, and politics in relation to the aesthetics of representation.
Deborah Willis is an artist, a professor in the Department of Photography and Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and is University Professor of Africana Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, also at New York University. Pursuing a dual professional career as an art photographer and as one of the nation's leading historians of African American photography and curators of African American culture, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fletcher Fellow, and a MacArthur Fellow and is a recipient of the Honored Educator award from the Society for Photographic Education. She is the author of Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photography 1840 - Present (W.W. Norton, 2000); A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. DuBois and Portraits of Progress (Amistad, 2003); and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (W.W. Norton, 2009). She is also the co-author of Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs (W.W. Norton, 2009), the editor of Black Venus 2010: They Called Her 'Hottentot' (Temple UP, 2010); and co-editor of The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Temple UP, 2002). Her curated exhibition, Posing Beauty in African American Culture has been touring the United States and will be at the Everhart Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania, from February through April, 2012. Her own photographic work will be exhibited at the Johnson Center Gallery, George Mason University, from February through March, and at the Zora Neale Hurston Museum, Florida, from January through March, 2012.
Shelley Rice
Arts Professor, Department of Photography and Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU
Local Space/Global Visions: Archives, Networks, and Visual Geography Around 1900
Friday, 9 March 2012, at 18:30 in EV-1.605
Speaking of Photography 2011-12 is made possible by the generosity of an anonymous donor, with additional support from the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art; members of the Art History Graduate Student Association; Ciel Variable magazine; and Château Versailles Hotel.
For more information on individual lectures closer to their dates, visit
Speaking of Photography.
All lectures in the 2011-12 series are to be held in EV-1.605, the York Amphitheatre, on the ground floor of the Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Complex, 1515 Ste-Catherine Street West. Metro Guy-Concordia (map).
Lectures are free and open to the public.
Past lectures:
Tanya Sheehan
Assistant Professor, Art History Department, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
National Expressions: Rethinking the History of the Photographic Smile
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 18:30 in EV-1.605
Anthony W. Lee
Professor of Art, Mount Holyoke College
A Shoemaker's Story
Tuesday, 4 October 2011, at 18:30 in EV-1.605
Kelly Dennis
Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and the History of Photography, University of Connecticut
Digital Proximities: Internet Art and the Economies of Porn
Tuesday, 8 November 2011, at 18:30 in EV-1.605
