Monographs:
Picturing the Air: Photography and the Industrial Atmosphere (In Progress)
Picturing the Air: Photography and the Industrial Atmosphere tells a history of the air–and air pollution–as a photographic problem. Foregrounding the materiality of air and photographic object alike, it asks how photographers, photochemists, and photographic manufacturers grappled with smoke, dust, and smog of industrial modernity. How did the elements of the industrial atmosphere seep into aesthetic discourse and material practices, even when they appear most absent? What strategies did photographers develop to negotiate and at times even negate this environment’s influence? How did environmental problems become aesthetic ones, and how did aesthetic solutions begin to take on the character of environmental interventions? Attending to these questions, I argue, not only discloses the photographic medium’s sensitivity to its environment. It also reveals how the the industrial atmosphere shaped the aesthetic forms of photographic modernism and, in the process, transformed the way we perceive the air around us.
Articles and Book Chapters:
“The New Woman as Ethnographer: Lola Kreutzberg in the Dutch East Indies,” Feminist Media Histories 11, v. 2 (forthcoming in Spring 2025).
“Verre et poussière: l’hygiène photographique à l’ère industrielle,” Transbordeur 8 (Winter 2024): 52-65.
(Feel free to contact me for an English version)
“Feather War with the Camera: Women, Bird Protection, and the Films of Hermann Hähnle,” Wild-Tier-Fotografie: Ökologische, postkoloniale und ästhetische Perspektive, eds. Martin Bartelmus and Maurice Saß (Berlin: Springer Nature, 2024), 137-154. Co-Authored with Katharina Loew.
“Calico-Worlds: Weimar Set Photography and the Spectacle of Environmental Design,” Photographica 7 (Fall 2023): 16-35.
(Feel free to contact me for an English version)
“The Air of Objectivity: Albert Renger-Patzsch and the Photography of Industry,” Representations 157 (Winter 2022): 90-114.
Awarded the 2023 Emerging Scholars Publication Prize by the Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art.
“Blue Like the Mediterranean: The Work of the Monochrome in the Atlas Group Archive,” Journal of Visual Culture 20, no. 2 (August 2021): 455-477.
Awarded the 2020 Early Career Researcher Prize by the International Association of Visual Culture and Journal of Visual Culture.