a collective celebration of research with Professor Nadine Attewell (Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies & Global Asia, Simon Fraser University), Professor Zeynep Devrim Gürsel (Anthropology, Rutgers University-New Brunswick), and Professor Julie Stephens (History, Rutgers University-New Brunswick) on Wednesday, September 30, 2026.

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.

The Developing Room holds its fifth semi-annual 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.

Fred Ritchin, Dean Emeritus of the International Center of Photography (ICP) School, will be our guest at the CCA seminar “What is Photography?” which runs through the academic year 2020-2021.

The Developing Room holds its fourth annual 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.

Laura Wexler is Professor of American Studies, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Co-Chair of the Women’s Faculty Forum at Yale University.

One of the distinctive characteristics of photography is that most analogue photographs are positive prints that have been made from a negative. Nevertheless, the negative is almost always regarded as a secondary entity in discussions of photography, if it is discussed at all. Looking at work by a range of practitioners, including William Henry Fox Talbot, Man Ray, Dorothea Lange, Richard Avedon and Andreas Gursky, this talk will offer a little history of the negative, tracing some of the ways that history complicates our understanding of the photograph.

Professor Nicole Fleetwood of Rutgers University will be our guest at the CCA seminar “What is Photography?” which runs through the academic year 2020-2021.

The symposium will consider one of the most prevalent but unseen uses of the medium: the recording and documentation of civilian life around the world.

This workshop aims to take stock of conceptions of photography that have existed outside the dominant paradigms of the West. A range of historians, curators and a photographer will inquire into photography’s identity in major cultural centers such as India, Turkey, South Africa, and the Middle-East, and within constituencies of the West who forged uses and understandings of photography that have only recently begun to receive critical attention, such as immigrant family photos in Canada.

The Developing Room holds its third annual 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. 

Professor Kaja Silverman, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, will be our guest at the CCA seminar “What is Photography?” which runs through the academic year 2020-2021.

Professor Steffen Siegel of the Folkwang Universität der Künste will be our guest at the CCA seminar “What is Photography?” which runs through the academic year 2020-2021.

The Developing Room holds its second annual 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 workshop aims to take stock of profound changes in the collecting, archiving and—most importantly—exhibition of photography. Prominent initiatives such as the Museum of Modern Art’s Object/Photo have explored ways in which photographs can be foregrounded as unique materials in display, rather than mere surfaces for images.

One of the distinctive characteristics of photography is that most analogue photographs are positive prints that have been made from a negative. Nevertheless, the negative is almost always regarded as a secondary entity in discussions of photography, if it is discussed at all. Looking at work by a range of practitioners, including William Henry Fox Talbot, Man Ray, Dorothea Lange, Richard Avedon and Andreas Gursky, this talk will offer a little history of the negative, tracing some of the ways that history complicates our understanding of the photograph.

The Developing Room holds its first annual 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. 

After having powered the postmodern critique of photography and a profound rethinking of the historical avant-gardes, is photomontage exhausted? Has its use as a point of critical inquiry, an object of research, and a contemporary practice run its course? Or have new ways to discuss and engage in the practice emerged?