Book Talk! Good Pictures: Finding History at the Limits of the Archive

April 24 on Zoom | 12 pm EST • 9 am PST • 4 pm GMT

Event held via Zoom • Registration Link

Photography Network membership is required to attend.

Please join us on April 24 at 12 PM EST as Louise Siddons reflects on her experience working in Laura Gilpin’s archive. She will discuss the way the archive’s origins, location, structure, past use, and modes of access shaped the stories she told in her publication Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon—and her future research.

How do we approach photographic archives? Laura Gilpin’s archive, held at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, is made up of photographs, negatives, personal documents, objects, and published material. Less tangibly, there is an oral archive associated with Gilpin — a more fugitive archive that is only partially documented in video and audio recordings. Siddons spent a month with the physical archive and much more time with its digitized avatar over the course of writing her book, and she interviewed countless people over the course of her research. In this talk, Siddons will reflect holistically on her experience in Laura Gilpin’s archive to consider the ways in which its origins, location, structure, past use, and modes of access contributed to the stories she chose to tell in Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon, and those she hopes to tell in the future.

About the speaker:

Louise Siddons is Professor of Visual Politics and director of The Winchester Gallery at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. She is the author of Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) and Centering Modernism (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018); her work has appeared in American Art, Frontiers, Panorama, the British Art Journal, and African American Review. Her research focuses on intersectional visual resistance to structures of marginalisation.

Photography Network membership is required to attend. To become a member, sign up here.