Books by Kate Palmer Albers
The before-and-after trope in photography has long paired images to represent change: whether aff... more The before-and-after trope in photography has long paired images to represent change: whether affirmatively, as in the results of makeovers, social reforms or medical interventions, or negatively, in the destruction of the environment by the impacts of war or natural disasters.
This interdisciplinary multi-authored volume examines the central but almost unspoken position of before-and-after photography found in a wide range of contexts from the 19th century through to the present. Packed with case studies that explore the conceptual implications of these images, the book's rich language of evidence, documentation and persuasion present both historical material and the work of practicing photographers who have deployed – and challenged – the conventions of the before-and-after pairing.
Touching on issues including sexuality, race, environmental change and criminality, Before-and-After Photography examines major topics of current debate in the critique of photography in an accessible way to allow students and scholars to explore the rich conceptual issues around photography's relationship with time and imagination.
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The compulsion to dwell on history—on how it is recorded, stored, saved, forgotten, narrated, lo... more The compulsion to dwell on history—on how it is recorded, stored, saved, forgotten, narrated, lost, remembered, and made public—has been at the heart of artists’ engagement with the photographic medium since the late 1960s. Uncertain Histories considers some of that work, ranging from installations that incorporate vast numbers of personal and vernacular photographs by Christian Boltanski, Dinh Q. Lê, and Gerhard Richter to confrontations with absence in the work of Joel Sternfeld and Ken Gonzales-Day. Projects such as these revolve around a photographic paradox that hinges equally on knowing and not knowing, on definitive proof coupled with uncertainty, on abundance of imagery being met squarely with its own inadequacy. Photography is seen as a fundamentally ambiguous medium that can be evocative of the historical past while at the same time limited in the stories it can convey. Rather than proclaiming definitively what photography is, the work discussed here posits photographs as objects always held in suspension, perpetually oscillating in their ability to tell history. Yet this ultimately leads to a new kind of knowledge production: uncertainty is not a dead end but a generative space for the viewer’s engagement with the construction of history.
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Papers by Kate Palmer Albers
Oxford Art Online
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Photography and Culture, 2012
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Earlier this year, the New York-based artist Penelope Umbrico started an Instagram feed devoted t... more Earlier this year, the New York-based artist Penelope Umbrico started an Instagram feed devoted to her project, " A Proposal and Two Trades, " which was initially conceived two years ago for the 2013 Alt+ 1000 Festival de Photographie, a biennial event in the Swiss Alps village of Rossinière. The continuous stream of images struck me as a natural home for this ongoing project: a perfect example of an artist taking seriously both the possibilities and parameters of a currently popular platform, and, in a particularly mobile manner, extending the project's commitment to moving images through material and immaterial spaces, touching a range of strangers and audiences along the way.
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Recently, I Googled a friend's name, and the first search result was the public record of her sal... more Recently, I Googled a friend's name, and the first search result was the public record of her salary. This was not information I wanted to know: I felt awkward, and like I had crossed a line in our relationship by asking an inappropriate question—no matter how inadvertently it had happened. I tried to forget, I remembered when a student had told me she didn't want to become a professor because she'd looked up my salary, I read some other stuff about her to distract the issue. What do other people know about us today, and how do they learn it? What does Google know? What friend knows more than I realize? What do they get right, and what do they get wrong … whether " they " is the NSA, a close friend, or a prospective student? Mostly, the incessant collection of metadata about each of us, every day, is blissfully abstract, coming into focus only in brief and forgettable moments as we go about our online business.
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I was introduced to the Large Format Selfie Stick via Snapchat which, in hindsight, seems just pe... more I was introduced to the Large Format Selfie Stick via Snapchat which, in hindsight, seems just perfect. I almost never save Snapchats, but I did screenshot the LFSS because, like everyone else, I like to think I know genius when I see it:
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Earlier this year, Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman published their collaborative project Geoloca... more Earlier this year, Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman published their collaborative project Geolocation with Flash Powder Projects. As they describe the project, ongoing since 2009: " We use publicly available embedded GPS information in Twitter updates to track the locations of user posts and make photographs to mark the location in the real world. " Along with the short essay I contributed to their book, we had a conversation about the series.
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There is no shortage of short biographies of Alec Soth. Most of them follow standard art world pr... more There is no shortage of short biographies of Alec Soth. Most of them follow standard art world protocol for any artist biography: brief personal background; significant bodies of work; notable exhibitions and publications; awards, fellowships, and accolades; and institutions that have collected the artist's work. Some seek to provide an overarching thematic arch, others aim to humanize with a short anecdote. They're necessarily brief, and meant to provide an overview of a career to ground the reader, listener, or viewer to whatever fraction of that career is presented to them at that moment. In my roles over the last twenty years as gallery assistant, label-writer, researcher and lecture series organizer, I've written plenty of these short bios for others. And, a few months ago, I was asked to write one about Soth, to contribute to a forthcoming edition of a scholarly art encyclopedia. But as I thought about the dozens and dozens of short biographies that already exist
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Environmental History, 2015
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Photographs have long been recognized as providing a surfeit of information. This article takes ... more Photographs have long been recognized as providing a surfeit of information. This article takes up the recent emergence of gigapixel photography in its various forms as a technology in which the appeal of maximum image density is taken for granted. The article considers the “snapshot” mode of gigapixel photography as it reconfigures the conventional relationship of the viewer of a photograph to the place depicted. By providing an extraordinary quantity of photographic information for a viewer within every single frame, gigapixel “snapshots” produce images that anticipate the active participation of a future viewer, expect multiple reconfigurations of framing edges, and rely on unanticipated content for value and meaning.
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Books by Kate Palmer Albers
This interdisciplinary multi-authored volume examines the central but almost unspoken position of before-and-after photography found in a wide range of contexts from the 19th century through to the present. Packed with case studies that explore the conceptual implications of these images, the book's rich language of evidence, documentation and persuasion present both historical material and the work of practicing photographers who have deployed – and challenged – the conventions of the before-and-after pairing.
Touching on issues including sexuality, race, environmental change and criminality, Before-and-After Photography examines major topics of current debate in the critique of photography in an accessible way to allow students and scholars to explore the rich conceptual issues around photography's relationship with time and imagination.
Papers by Kate Palmer Albers
This interdisciplinary multi-authored volume examines the central but almost unspoken position of before-and-after photography found in a wide range of contexts from the 19th century through to the present. Packed with case studies that explore the conceptual implications of these images, the book's rich language of evidence, documentation and persuasion present both historical material and the work of practicing photographers who have deployed – and challenged – the conventions of the before-and-after pairing.
Touching on issues including sexuality, race, environmental change and criminality, Before-and-After Photography examines major topics of current debate in the critique of photography in an accessible way to allow students and scholars to explore the rich conceptual issues around photography's relationship with time and imagination.