Local Space/Global Visions: Archives, Networks, and Visual Geography Around 1900

Shelley Rice

Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

Local Space/Global Visions explores the “visual geography” of the year 1900, the moment when amateur cameras, half-tone reproduction processes, and multinational corporations expanded photographic production and distribution exponentially, and quite literally set the stage for a “world culture” of imagery. Shelley Rice’s lecture will highlight three separate projects: Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine Camera Notes; Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet; and the PhotoGlob AG collection of scenic views. She will show how the image economy of this historical period – with its emphasis on networks, franchises, portability, and outreach, and its inherent tension between the domestic and the international, the artistic and the commercial, the elite and the mass – laid the foundations for our contemporary visual environment.

Shelley Rice is an Arts Professor, Department of Photography and Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts, and Department of Art History, College of Arts and Science, at New York University. She is the author of Parisian Views; the editor of Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman; and the co-author of numerous books and catalogs, including The Book of 101 Books: The Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century and Paris et le Daguerréotype. Her essays have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, The Village Voice, Tate Papers, French Studies, and Études photographiques, among others. Shelley Rice has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Fulbright Grants, National Endowment for the Humanities and the Arts Awards, a Hasselblad Research Fellowship, and the PEN/Jerard Award for Non-Fiction Essay. In 2009 she was named a Chevalier in France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

A version of this lecture has been published in Amerian Photography: Local and Global Contexts (Akademie Verlag, 2012), edited by Bettina Gockel.

Of related interest:

• Shelley Rice's faculty page
• Jeu de Paume blog
•  American Photography: Local and Global Contexts
• About Albert Kahn and the Autochrome
• Library of Congress Photochrom Collection
• In Tate Papers: "Lawrence Alloway’s Spatial Utopia: Contemporary Photography as ‘Horizontal Description’"
• Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman
• Parisian Views
• Review of Parisian Views in Études photographiques
• Book of 101 Books