To commemorate fifty years of collecting photography at the Smart Museum of Art, renowned UChicago Professor Emeritus Dr. Joel Snyder explores noteworthy objects, artists, and inquiries in the field of photography. The program features an intimate presentation of photographs from the museum’s permanent collection, displayed in the Feitler Center Education Study Room (ESR). Free, register online here.

Presented as a part of Humanities Day, organized by UChicago’s Division of the Humanities.

Dr. Joel Snyder is Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. Tenured professor in the University of Chicago’s Department of Art History since 1990 (having taught at the university since 1970), Snyder is renowned as a world-leading expert in nineteenth-century photographic history whose analytic acumen has inflected the pages of Critical Inquiry as contributor and editor for some four decades. An accomplished photographer himself, Snyder has long practiced and instilled in his students ways of integrating intellectual rigor with the maker’s passionate knowledge. His books include: Gentlemen Photographers: the Work of Loring Underwood and Wm. Lyman Underwood (Solio Foundation, 1987); American Frontiers: The Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan, 1867-1874 (Aperture, 1981); The Documentary Photograph as a Work of Art: American Photographs, 1860-1876 (David and Alfred Smart Gallery, 1976), and with three co-authors, On the Art of Fixing A Shadow, (National Galler of Art, 1989. His is articles include: "Res Ipsa Loquitur," in Things that Talk (Zone books 2004); "Enabling Confusion," History of Photography (Summer 2002); "Nineteenth-century photography of sculpture and the rhetoric of substitution," in Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension (Cambridge UP, 1998); "Visualization and Visibility," in Picturing Science/Making Art (Reaktion Books, 1997); "Territorial Photography," in Landscape and Power (U of Chicago Press, 1994); "Fenetres, Miroirs, et transparence picturale," Cahiers du Musee National d’Art Moderne (Autumn 1992); and "Réflexions sur Les Ménines: le paradoxe perdu," with Ted Cohen, Cahiers du Musee National d’Art Moderne (Summer 1991). Articles published in Critical Inquiry include: "Notes from the Ground" (Winter 2004), "Las Meninas and the Mirror of the Prince" (June 1985), and "Picturing Vision" (Spring 1980).

Image: Timothy O’Sullivan, South Side of Inscription Rock, 1873, Albumen print. Smart Museum of Art. The University of Chicago, Purchase, Gift of the Smart Family Foundation in honor of the 30th
Anniversary of the Smart Museum, 2003.147.5.