Wesleyan University • Fall 2008

EYE OF HISTORY The Camera as Witness

Talks

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Opening Reception & Gallery Talk
Document or Art? Photography in the Long 19th Century, 1839–1914

Reception: Thursday, October 16, 5–7 pm
Gallery Talk by Curator Clare Rogan and Associate Professor of History Jennifer Tucker
at 5:30 pm
Davison Art Center
Free and open to the public

Jacob August Riis, Street Arabs—Night Boys in Sleeping Quarters (Newsboys)

Jacob August Riis (American, born Denmark, 1849–1914), Street Arabs—Night Boys in Sleeping Quarters (Newsboys), ca. 1880s, printed 1947, gelatin silver print, Gift of Russell G. D’Oench, Jr., 1991.30.47 (photo: R. J. Phil).

Can photography be art? Art historian Clare Rogan and historian Jennifer Tucker explore competing ideas about photography from the invention in 1839 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

Presenters

Clare Rogan, Curator of the Davison Art Center, teaches history of photography in the Department of Art and Art History at Wesleyan.

Jennifer Tucker, Associate Professor of History at Wesleyan, specializes in the study of social and cultural practices of science and technology. She is the author of Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Johns Hopkins University, 2005), a study of the historical forces and conditions that led to the emergence of photography as a new form of scientific evidence in the nineteenth century.