Archival Program Information
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Symposium


Groupe des ulémas (Docteur en religion) / Béchard
 
Getty Research Institute Lecture Hall, The Getty Center

Reservations are now full.

Thursday, May 6, 2010 1:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m.
Friday, May 7, 2010 9:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

Admission is free. Separate reservations are required for each day of the symposium.

The Middle East and North Africa—identified by 19th-century European travelers as "the Orient"—played essential roles in the development of photography, both as a new technology and as an art form. At the same time, photography played a central role in developing and maintaining Europe's distinctively Orientalist vision of the region.

Fellahines portant de l'eau / Seébah
 
This two-day symposium examines how the Middle East and North Africa were represented through photography by Europeans and non-Europeans who traveled or resided in the region during the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Scholarly presentations and moderated discussions explore the relationship between Orientalist photography and other artistic media; the impact of traveling photographers on tourism and commercial photography; the connection between resident photographers and the rise of official photography (local and nationalist); and the ways in which both local and foreign artists, as well as patrons and collectors, contributed to the making—and unmaking—of the Orient.

The symposium is a joint project of the Getty Research Institute and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant for Transforming the Humanities at UCLA.

SYMPOSIUM SPEAKERS

Ali Behdad Department Chair, UCLA Department of Comparative Literature
Anne Lacoste Assistant Curator, Department of Photographs, Getty Museum
Christopher Pinney Professor, Department of Anthropology and Visual Culture, University College London
Darcy Grigsby Professor, History of Art, University of California at Berkeley
Esra Akcan Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago
Hannah Feldman Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Northwestern University
John Tagg Professor of Art History and Comparative Literature, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Kathleen Howe Professor, Art History, Pomona College & Director of the Pomona College Museum of Art
Luke Gartlan Lecturer, School of Art History, University of St Andrews
Mary Roberts Associate Professor, Department of Art History and Film, University of Sydney
Nancy Micklewright Senior Program Officer, Getty Foundation
Robert Linrothe Associate Professor, Department of Art History, Northwestern University