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 scholar of 19th-century photography and visual culture whose research investigates the intersection of aesthetics and scientific practice in the antebellum United States. Her current book project, Daguerreian Democracy: Art, Science, and Politics in Antebellum American Photography, examines how the daguerreotype became an object of technological, scientific, and commercial innovation for antebellum scientists, artisans, and political thinkers. By chronicling the contributions of these often-overlooked actors, she explores how the daguerreotype was an object of transatlantic scientific experimentation, a key component of government projects of nation-building, as well as an object of fascination for theorists of democracy. Before coming to Rutgers, Michelle held the Wyeth Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, D.C. She holds an A. B., M.A. and Ph.D. in History of Art from Bryn Mawr College.
LaCharles Ward, Ph.D., is Supervisory Museum Curator of Photography and Film and Director of the Earl W. and Amanda Stafford Center for African American Media Arts (CAAMA). Dr. Ward is a cultural theorist of African American photography and scholar of Black visual culture, which includes film, video, and media arts across the Black diaspora. His writings on photography, legal history, and Black people’s relationship to law have appeared in museum catalogues and journals such as Black Camera and the History of Photography. He continues to present research at conference associations such as the American Studies Association and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies as well as at convenings focused on photography more specifically. Prior to the Smithsonian, Dr. Ward was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA where he researched and drafted forthcoming book projects related to law (specifically, evidence law), photography, and Black Life. He received his PhD from Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) in Rhetoric and Public Culture, with graduate certificates in African American Studies and concentrations in film theory, history of photography, and cultural studies.