Sloan Fellow in Photography

Sloan Fellow in Photography, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford 2023-24.

In early 2024 I took up the Sloan Fellow in Photography at Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Trinity College) 2023-2024, to 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.