Supported as a Sloan Fellow in Photography at Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Trinity College) 2023-2024, this project will study part of the substantial collection of over 2000 photobooks generously donated in 2020 by Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey. The project will study photobooks in the collection by select photographers/artists whose work engages with modernist aesthetics and modes of representation to image the everyday. This ranges from surrealist aesthetics of the extraordinary in everyday life to representations of work, machines, industry, science, nature, and advertising, indicating the plethora of photographic output and diversity of practice in the modernist period.

The second intersecting area of inquiry is to study the photobook’s capacity for reproduction and vast dissemination, utilising modernist aesthetics with political messaging or propaganda. This double-faceted research inquiry offers a unique means to study the interconnections between Modernism, photography and the public sphere. Donna will take up the Fellowship in the Hilary Term 2024.

Image: Germaine Krull, Métal (Metal). Paris: Librairie des Arts Décoratifs, 1928.

On the Street: Photography & the City. In Routledge Handbook on Street Culture, ed. Jeffrey Ross (New York: Routledge, 2021), 295-309.

IMAGE: Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Boulevard du Temple by Daguerre, 1838. Private Collection. Photo © GraphicaArtis / Bridgeman Images

Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images was awarded Best Anthology in the Association of Australia and NZ AWAPA Awards in December 2020.

“This fascinating and deeply researched anthology contains significant and original critiques concerning the photographic and filmic medium as evidence of social, cultural, and political states of being. Including essays by an international group of researchers, it brilliantly contributes to knowledge and debates associated with the photographic archive. … The editors Donna West Brett and Natalya Lusty have produced an extremely important book which will have profound repercussions in debates about photography for years to come.”

The Conversation Article 6 November 2019 (c.46,000 readers): Policing the Berlin Wall: the ghostly photos taken by the Stasi’s hidden cameras and in the French edition of The Conversation 8 November, 2019 (c.65,000 readers) Derrière le mur de Berlin : les clichés fantômes pris par les appareils photo cachés de la Stasi and Danish translation in Videnskab, 22 November 2019. 30 år efter Berlinmurens fald: Forsker fortæller om de spøgelsesagtige Stasi-fotos

Stasi Surveillance Photographs and Extra-archival Legacy,’ in special issue ‘Photography in Transitioning European Communist and Post-Communist Histories,’ Photography and Culture, 12.2 (2019). (Photo BStU Stasi Archive).