“This is a great honour, which recognizes not just my work, but the field in which I work — the history of photography in Canada,” she says. “I am especially excited to join a society of scholars that places so much emphasis on interdisciplinarity and transnational exchange, which are also key aspects of photographic studies.”
Langford is delighted this year’s induction ceremony will take place at Dalhousie University in Halifax. The city is home to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, now NSCAD University, which is where she studied photography in the early 1970s.
“It seems somehow fitting to be returning there, on the wings of my Concordia nomination to the Royal Society of Canada,” says Langford.
In 2010, Langford published “A Short History of Photography, 1900-2000,” the first comprehensive survey of modern Canadian photographic art, in The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century. She is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d'histoire de l'art canadien and co-editor of the Beaverbrook Foundation Series on Canadian Art History.
Langford’s writing on photography and video addresses mediated experience in relation to constructs of memory and imagination, as well as vernacular photography — the study of images that take everyday life and common things as subjects.
She is an also an active independent curator whose exhibitions include Unmasking: Arthur Renwick, Adrian Stimson, Jeff Thomas for the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, as well as Preoccupations: Photographic Explorations of the Grey Nuns Mother House for Concordia’s FOFA Gallery. During her career, Langford has held fellowships at the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University and the National Gallery of Canada.
Quebec in the past century
Sociology professor Jean-Philippe Warren investigates the history of Quebec’s people, places and culture in order to identify ways in which the province has changed over the last 100 years. He will become a member of the RSC’s Academy of Social Sciences.
Photo by David Ward
