Civic Views: The Image of the City

Civic Views: The Image of the City

A conversation on photography’s relationship to the public’s imagination of the urban landscape, local photographic history, and the diverse powers of representation. This talk will include Dr. Michelle Smiley, Curator of Photography at the Library of Congress and Dr. LaCharles Ward, Curator of Photography and Film at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. This event is a part of Civic Views, a temporary public art project celebrating the city’s municipal employees and their diverse perspectives on Philadelphia through a poetic picturing of their office windows by artist Emilio Martínez Poppe and curated by Jameson Paige.

Michelle Smiley is a photography researcher and curator whose work examines the early history of photography in Philadelphia and intersections among science, art, and image-making. She attended Bryn Mawr College for both undergraduate and graduate studies, earning her PhD in History of Art. She has written on subjects ranging from early photography at the U.S. Mint, which you will hear about today, chemical experimentation and scientific aesthetics, and the stop-motion photographic studies of Eadweard Muybridge conducted at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has been supported by the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University. Her talk today will consider the themes of historical origins and place in the Civic Views installation.

LaCharles Ward is a scholar, curator, and writer whose research and curatorial work centers on photography, time-based media, and Black studies. His current research rethinks the grounds of evidence–as a concept, question, and practice–by drawing on Black studies, history of photography, and the law. This work has appeared in History of Photography and Black Camera. His curatorial work has been focused on preserving and archiving works of time-based media and vernacular photography collections that document the expanse of Black life. He received his PhD from Northwestern University and completed a 4-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.