AHCS Speaker Series: Krista A. Thompson "Performing Visibility: Street Photography, Black Youth and the Art of Being Seen"

The Department of Art History and Communication Studies welcomes Krista A. Thompson, Associate Professor, Northwestern University, as the first speaker in our annual lecture series (follow this link for a complete list of this year's speakers).

Title: "Performing Visibility: Street Photography, Black Youth and the Art of Being Seen"

Abstract: Since the mid-1980s photographers working in a genre known as street photography have erected makeshift photography studios across black urban communities in the United States and the Caribbean. The studios are comprised of hand or spray-painted canvases against which photographers take Polaroid and digital pictures. Typically the backdrops portray either landscapes of leisure or high-end consumer goods. In the genre, intriguingly, the process of posing publicly and being seen being photographed has become as important, if not more so, than the creation of a physical image. This paper examines how and why the street photographs seem to occasion a transformation in the physicality and temporality of photography. It also frames the street photograph as inhabiting a space between the photographic and painted, the still and moving image, the real and artificial, digital and analogue, the material and ephemeral, the hyper-visible and unvisible.

Biography: Krista A. Thompson (Ph.D., 2002, Emory University; Associate Professor) teaches courses on the arts of the African diaspora, critical race theory, visual cultures of colonialism and postcoloniality, and global histories of photography, as well as courses on contemporary Caribbean and African art. She is the author of An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Duke University Press, 2006), an examination of the colonial imaging of the Anglophone Caribbean in photographs and its effects on landscape, history, race, governmentality, and contemporary art. Thompson has published in Art Bulletin, American Art, The Drama Review, and Small Axe (where she serves on the editorial collective). She is co-editor, with Huey Copeland and Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, of a special issue of Representations on New World Slavery and the Visual Imagination (Winter 2011). She is currently working on a book titled The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Practice on visual culture and black urban youth in the Caribbean and United States, which is forthcoming from Duke University Press. The publication investigates the intersections among vernacular forms of photography, performance, and contemporary art. Thompson has received postdoctoral fellowships from the J. Paul Getty Foundation (2008), the Institute for the Humanities, University of Illinois, Chicago (2004), and the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora (2003). In 2009, Thompson received the David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, which recognizes “original and important contributions to the field of African-American art or art history.”