Faculty News: Catherine Zuromskis, PhD authors new essays
Catherine Zuromskis, PhD authors new essays
by Therese Mulligan
October 13, 2017
Congratulations to Dr. Catherine Zuromskis, who introduces two new essays on contemporary photography this fall season. Read a synopsis about each publication below and get reading to gain new insights into our evolving medium:
“Crimes Seen and Unseen: Fantasies and Failures of Photographic Truth in Joel Sternfeld’s On This Site and Trevor Paglen’s Limit Telephotography” in Photography and Failure: One Medium’s Entanglement with Flops, Underdogs, and Disappointments, edited by Kris Belden-Adams (Bloomsbury, 2017).
This essay explores the unstable status of the photograph as evidence in the contemporary moment through the work of two contemporary artists. Joel Sternfeld and Trevor Paglen comment on contemporary photography’s evidentiary capabilities through their versions of crime scene photography. Sternfeld’s photographs of sites related to crimes and tragedies in American culture offer a wealth of incidental details but deny us any substantive visual information pertaining to the crime. Trevor Paglen’s inscrutable long distance photographs of American military “black sites” show us precisely our inability to see itself. Both artists seek to highlight the failures of the photograph by constructing images that function simultaneously as ciphers and meta-commentaries on the limitations of their medium. Yet these projects also reveal an ongoing faith in photographic truth. By examining the different ways that Sternfeld and Paglen employ the authority of photography to construct critiques of that same medium’s limitations, this essay complicates understandings of photographic accuracy, highlighting both photography’s failures as an evidentiary form and its remarkable tenacity as a medium through which we imagine a sense of nationalism, political voice, and social control through technology.
“All One Life”: Celebrity and Intimacy in the Photographs of Annie Leibovitz,” published in the journal Photography & Culture.
Few photographers are as well known or as representative of American celebrity culture in the contemporary media age as Annie Leibovitz. This essay analyzes Leibovitz’s influential style by situating it within the complexities of both celebrity and snapshot photography. Taking as its jumping off point Leibovitz’s 2006 retrospective, A Photographer’s Life, which pairs the photographer’s iconic celebrity portraits with dramatically personal photographs of her family, friends, and lover Susan Sontag, it examines the interrelations between celebrity artifice and interpersonal intimacy intimated by Leibovitz’s claim that together, her photographs represent “one life.” This essay offers an analysis of key shifts and contradictions in Leibovitz’s work: the evolution from the gritty realist style of her early Rolling Stone work to the highly manufactured “conceptual” work that characterizes her Portraits campaign for American Express and her more recent work for Vanity Fair, and the contradiction between Leibovitz’s iconoclast reputation and the surprisingly normative politics it supports. Yet despite these contradictions, it argues, there is a coherence in Leibovitz’s work in its reliance on manufactured intimacies. In both her personal and her professional work, Leibovitz offers a visceral, sensational image experience, but one that tells us little we didn’t already know.
About Catherine Zuromskis
Catherine Zuromskis is Assistant Professor of Fine Art at RIT with a focus on photography, contemporary art, and twentieth-century American visual culture. Prior to coming to RIT, she taught at University of New Mexico and University of California Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester in 2006. She also has an M.A. from the University of Rochester, as well as an M.A. in Art History and Criticism from State University of New York at Stony Brook. In addition to her academic experience, she has worked at Pace Gallery in New York and at the ICA in Boston.
Catherine is the author of Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images (MIT Press, 2013), a finalist for the College Art Association 2015 Charles Rufus Morey Book Prize, and the author and editor of The Factory (La Fabrica, 2012), the catalog for the exhibition From the Factory to the World: Photography and the Warhol Community, which she curated for PhotoEspaña 2012. Her writings on photography, film, and visual culture have appeared Art Journal, American Quarterly, The Velvet Light Trap, Photography & Culture, Criticism and the edited volumes Photography: Theoretical Snapshots (Routledge: 2009) and Oil Culture (Minnesota: 2014). She is also currently working on a new project on citizen journalism, feeling, and the rise of neoliberalism in the US.
Her teaching interests center on histories and theories of photography, visual culture, contemporary art and critical theory. She has also taught courses on Public Art in Twentieth-Century America, Photography and Celebrity Culture, The Snapshot Aesthetic, and Contemporary Art and New Media.
About the Author
Therese Mulligan is a professor and Administrative Chair of the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY. She also directs the School’s Gallery. Previously, she served for eight years as the curator of photography at George Eastman House, where she organized numerous exhibitions, as well as authored and edited articles and publications on historical and contemporary photography. Highlights of these activities include the 1999 comprehensive guide to the Museum’s photography collection entitled Photography from 1839 to Today; and the exhibition and exhibition catalogue The Photography of Alfred Stieglitz: The Legacy of Georgia O’Keeffe (2000). At the Eastman House, she also curated Telling Stories: The Narrative Impulse in Contemporary American Photography; Mexicanidad: Tina Modotti and Edward Weston; and Digital Frontiers: Photography’s Future at Nash Editions. In 2002, she organized the first one-person exhibition of the work of contemporary photographers Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison. Most recently, Dr. Mulligan contributed the keynote essay to the exhibition catalogue The Collective Moment: The Photography Collection at the Norton Simon Museum (2006); organized the traveling exhibition Bernie Boston: An American Photojournalist (2006) and authored and edited the accompanying exhibition catalogue. She continues to contribute essays and articles to various publications and journals.