Current Book Project

Instructive Documents: Art, Documentary, and Political Education in the San Diego Group centers on the work of four artists—Fred Lonidier, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, and Phel Steinmetz—and their collective attempts to reformulate documentary practice under the sign of conceptual art, resulting in an embrace of documentary's use value as a form of radical, political pedagogy unique within the postwar period. In the early 1970s, these artists met as graduate students and junior faculty members at the University of California, San Diego, where they convened regular meetings to discuss photography, art criticism, and political activism. A faculty member at the time infamously referred to the group as a "Marxist cabal" congregating in the university darkroom. Through their long-term collaborative exchange, the San Diego Group developed a distinct form of documentary practice that wedded hybrid, conceptual forms to a radical social critique, often taking the form of lengthy text-image sequences, experimental videos and performances, and montaged discursive installations.

Instructive Documents advances the claim that the San Diego Group's adherence to the instructive capabilities of documentary was conditioned by the historical conjuncture which they found themselves in throughout the 1970s. This conjuncture includes events beyond the well-known socio-political developments of that era, such as the end of the American War in Vietnam, the OPEC oil embargo and attendant economic stagflation, the ongoing movements for Civil Rights at home and Third World decolonization abroad, and the later political dominance of the Reagan and Thatcher regimes. Instead, I focus my analytical energy on a different set of conjunctural references of this era, such as the rediscovery of alternative conceptions of political documentary such as Soviet Factography after decades of American ideological suppression; the dominant position of conceptualism within the discourse of art and its focus on the meta-conditions of artistic production, reception, and distribution; and finally, the increasing importance of the university as a site of both artistic training and political activism, as well as the resulting integration of young, New Left activists into the ranks of the so-called "middle classes" of the professional and managerial strata. This represents a broad and complex array of forces, to be sure. However, Instructive Documents ultimately demonstrates how the general effect of these conditions on the San Diego Group was to catalyze a desire to recapture the instructive use-value of documentary in the service of describing, and combatting, the subjectivities engendered by the economic exploitation and social domination of late capitalist ideology.

Publications

Peer Reviewed Articles

“Obligations to the Local: Solidarity as Method in LaToya Ruby Frazier’s The Last Cruze,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 8, no. 1. (2022).

"Floating on a Chemical Sea: Lucas Samaras’s Psychedelic Emulsions," American Art 35, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 32-47.

 "The Courbet of England: Peter Henry Emerson's East Anglian Photographs and the Imperial Ordering of Labour," History of Photography 39, no. 1 (February 2015): 18-32.

 "Sojourner Truth's Fugitive Images and the Disruptive Power of Circulation Anxiety," Athanor 31 (July 2013): 63-69.

Book Chapters and Contributions

“David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Buffaloes),” in Philadelphia Museum of Art: Highlights, 402-03, edited by Sarah Noreika and Katie Brennan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023).

“’Let Me Die, Or I’ll Perish’ : Dissolution and Resurrection through the Photographic Double,” in Psychosomatic Imagery: Photographic Reflections on Mental Disorders, 81-92, edited by Ali Shobeiri and Helen Westgeest (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2023).

"Line" and "Blindness and Vision," in Drawing: Birth of a Modern Medium, 76-85 and 152-161, ed. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Elizabeth Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2017).

Web-Based Publications

“The Montgomery Family Photography Album: An Art Historical Perspective,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 2022. [https://www.dh-mdah.org/crowe-album-history]

Book and Exhibition Reviews

Review of Photography of Protest and Community: The Radical Collectives of the 1970s, by Noni Stacey, History of Photography 46 (2022): 202-204.

Interviews

“Jack T. Franklin: Philadelphia’s Chronicler of Black Life and Protest” (interview with Dejáy Duckett, Director of Curatorial Services at the African American Museum of Philadelphia and Richard J. Watson, artist) Philadelphia Museum of Art website, 2022. [https://blog.philamuseum.org/jack-t-franklin-philadelphias-chronicler-of-black-life-and-protest/]

"On Chance and Photography" (interview with Robin Kelsey), Aperture Blog, May 18, 2015. [http://www.aperture.org/blog/chance-and-photography/]