The Developing Room is a working group devoted to the study and practice of photography. Founded in 2008, the Developing Room is based at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Our mission is to promote innovative work in the field of photography studies by organizing public projects and fostering international collaboration.
Events
The last ten years have seen a burgeoning interest in the photography of the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic. In these decades, the Sultan embraced the medium as a means to disseminate images of his quickly modernizing realm and to catalogue its dissidents, while popular periodicals printed copious amounts of photographic reportage, much as was being done in Western Europe. The first decade of the Republic then saw a further explosion of this popular visual culture in the press, while portrait studios flourished more than ever. Investigations into this copious amount of material have revealed a thriving and multidimensional photographic culture that had yet to be critically digested. Our symposium takes stock of this new scholarship and explores new directions. It features presentations by senior academics and emerging scholars, and responses from specialists in the field. To borrow a term from the recent book, we will ask what made the Camera Ottomana modern?
The Developing Room, a photography working group at Rutgers University’s Center for Cultural Analysis, and the Art & Art History Department at Hunter College announce a book launch of Print Matters: Media and Modernity in Illustrated Magazines, to be held in Manhattan.
On occasion of her recently published book, Dr. Brier will discuss the history and meaning of Typofoto, an avant-garde fusion of photography and modern graphic design largely developed in interwar Germany.
In this roundtable, students will inquire into the relationship between AI-generated photography and the subjective agency of authorship, creativity, intention, and believability involved in the making and consumption of the technology-based image, which photography has always been.
The Futures of Photography: Developing Room, in collaboration with the Essen Center of Photography, holds its ninth graduate student colloquium, an event for Ph.D. candidates from any field of study who are working on dissertation topics in which photography--its histories and theories--play a central role.
The Developing Room, a photography working group at Rutgers University’s Center for Cultural Analysis, announces its eighth graduate colloquium in collaboration with the positions: asia critique journal and New York University.
A workshop that explores how photographs have also been used to unbind nationals, to undo citizenship, make non-citizens or even construct no-man's lands. It will tackle four very different historical moments and geographies.
The Developing Room holds its seventh graduate student colloquium. The event is for Ph.D. students from any field of study who are working on dissertation topics in which photography—its histories and theories—plays a central role. This year we particularly encourage contributions on the subject of photography and resistance writ large.
Paoletti’s talk focuses on the earliest photographic records produced between the 1810s and the 1860s in the city of Saint Louis by the African -American Augustus Washington and commissioned by an emancipated class of Senegalese women.
The Developing Room holds its sixth graduate student colloquium, an event for Ph.D. candidates from any field of study who are working on dissertation topics in which photography--its histories and theories--play a central role.
This roundtable, called in celebration of the launch of the new book, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2022), focuses on the transformational role of photography in four careful case studies from the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire.
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