SESSION: Where Photography Happened: Sites of Photographic Experimentation and Pedagogy, 1950–1980

This session seeks to provoke new questions about postwar photographic history by foregrounding the overlooked and decentralised spaces where photography was taught, made, theorised, and exhibited globally. What happens when we shift our gaze away from familiar narratives centred on national canons, major metropolitan art markets, and celebrated individuals? How might our understanding of photographic practices transform when we consider regional art schools, technical colleges, artist-run spaces, community darkrooms, activist collectives, and experimental pedagogical sites between 1950 and 1980? What critical insights emerge when the institutional, geographic, and infrastructural contexts are placed at the heart of photographic inquiry?

By focusing on these diverse infrastructures and geographies of photographic education and experimentation—rather than established centres of cultural capital—we aim to recover the institutional contexts that acted as crucibles for creative and conceptual innovation. Photography responded not merely to aesthetic considerations but also to pressing social, political, and environmental realities. Exhibitions, syllabi, critiques, publications, and ephemeral or informal practices became key sites for critical discourse.

Session Convenors:

Mark Rawlinson, University of Nottingham

Session Speakers:

Ellen Yiwei Wang, University of Oxford

Darkroom to Copy Room: Reproduction and Print Medium in Image Shop CAMP (1976-1984)

In 1976 Tokyo, two years after the dissolution of the renowned Workshop Photography School, Daidō Moriyama founded the photography collective Image Shop CAMP—a hybrid space that simultaneously functioned as darkroom, gallery, publishing house, and print lab. This paper situates CAMP within a post-Provoke genealogy and examines it as a locus for experimenting with photography as a reproductive and print medium, where the act of dissemination became both a material process and a conceptual critique. CAMP’s copy-based practices are considered within a broader lineage of mechanical and performative duplication: from Moriyama’s Printing Show (1974), in which a monochrome duplicator inside the exhibition produced copies to be added live, to Keizō Kitajima’s Photo Express: Tokyo (1979), a year-long project presenting a new installation and accompanying dōjinshi (mini-communication magazine) each month. Produced through daily shooting, immediate printing, and on-site xerographic duplication, Photo Express transformed the gallery into a publishing apparatus and the act of copying into an aesthetic method. This paper argues that CAMP’s ‘copy-art’ aesthetic functioned not only as an artistic language but also as an infrastructural strategy: copying became both the medium and the message, turning exhibition into publication (and vice versa), the original into iteration, and the gallery into a site of circulation. Accordingly, this paper underscores photography’s significance in postwar Japan as a print medium rather than solely a photographic one, while revealing how networks of independent photography galleries facilitated the flourishing of experimental practices at a time when institutional collecting of photography was scarce.

Josh Ellenbogen, University of Pittsburgh

Adam Jolles, University of Pittsburgh

Storefront Education: Community Self-Representation in Photography Workshops in East Harlem and Washington, D.C., 1966–1971

In the late 1960s, a new, grassroots network of community-based photography workshops sprang up in the United States. These workshops sought to put the means of photographic self-representation into the hands of marginalized groups (the incarcerated, the impoverished, racial minorities, etc.), thereby establishing a crucial alternative venue for photo-education, one that enrolled thousands of students across the U.S.A. While our forthcoming book addresses the full gamut of such programs, this paper focuses on two related cases: the photography programs of the East Harlem Community Resource Center in New York City and the New Thing in Washington, D.C. The physical location and spatial environment of these two programs help make them a unit, both operated out of abandoned commercial spaces that the local Black and Puerto Rican communities repurposed into arts and cultural centres. In doing so, they participated in a vital new trend of the time: “storefront education.” Because the display windows of storefronts offer only a glass, see-through barrier between interior space and the surrounding neighbourhood, progressive pedagogues saw the repurposed storefront as an advantageous site for community-based educational centres, since their layout reconfigured relations between neighbourhoods and schools. Although storefront education originally had no photo-specific purpose, its framework easily accommodated itself to the goals of community self-representation that the photography workshops we study envisioned. The physical space of these workshops thus illuminates much broader questions about artistic self-representation, the nature of community, and the meaning of marginality in the 1960s, the very moment these ideas assumed their present contours.

James Swensen

The Only Site in the World that Matters: Experimentation and Education in the American West during the Photo-Boom (c. 1965-1980)

The American West has always played an oversized role in the history of photography. From Timothy O’Sullivan to Ansel Adams and Elliott Porter, the West was (and continues to be) a place that lured photographers to its dramatic scenery, open roads, and deep contradictions. Less known, however, is the critical role that it played for the next generation of photographers. For those of the Photo-Boom like Robert Adams, Richard Misrach, and Mark Klett, the West was far more than a location; it was a site of exploration, a form of expression, a locus of photo-history, a pedagogical experiment, and an institution that was critical to photography itself. It was, for them, the only site in photography that mattered.

This paper will explore the American West less as place and more as a multivalent space where young photographers could create and insert themselves into their medium and its traditions. It will, moreover, look at how a “traffic of photography” was fostered in places like the influential program at the University of New Mexico (under Beaumont Newhall and Van Deren Coke), which encouraged students to make their own “western” road trips to not only see and document the places that their photographic heroes had worked, but to create new images and to find new expression in its diverse landscapes and people. Thus, for everyone from those associated with New Topographics to the Rephotographic Survey Project, the West was more than mere geography; it was a central institution of photography.

Brendan Fay, Eastern Michigan University

The Other Hidden Curriculum: Minor White at MIT

In 1965, the photographer Minor White arrived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an unusual mandate. White was hired to teach photography, but not necessarily to train photographers: The university worried that its intense technical culture was producing narrow, inflexible students who would struggle to adapt in a world of rapidly changing technology and imagined that courses in photography might enhance any student’s long-term capacity for creativity and growth.

White responded by focusing on audiences and reception, preaching that viewing photography could be a creative act. From his platform at MIT, moreover, he aimed to broadcast this vision of “creative audience” far beyond his own classroom. As he did, three mundane technologies—the slide projector, tape recorder, and typewriter—anchored his vision of photographic pedagogy as networked practice.

Drawing upon little-seen aspects of White’s archive, this paper explores White’s charismatic, in-person teaching at MIT and his efforts to reproduce that teaching for distant audiences. He deployed colour slide projections, including a major work called Slow Dance, as real-time exercises in collective audience response. He audio-recorded class meetings, gathering a deep trove of student reactions, then mined transcripts as source material for a series of book manuscripts. Those manuscripts offered self-directed exercises for groups or individual readers, and they circulated among White’s network of contacts for many years. White’s pivot toward everyday viewers hinged on both direct encounters and textuality—and thus aligned, in surprising ways, with two major artistic transformations of the 1960s and 1970s.