Josef Breitenbach Research Fellowship

Awards up to $5,000 to support research into the art and career of Josef Breitenbach (1896-1984) and as his work and archive relates to other works and archives in the Center's collections.

Recipients:

2019

• Julie R. Keresztes, is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Boston, University. Her dissertation, Cameras for the Volk: Photography, Community and Society in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945, examines how state and non-state actors used photography as a communal practice to conceptualize belonging and exclusion during the Nazi years.
• David Silver, associate professor and chair of Environmental Studies at the University of San Francisco, has been researching, writing, and building a multimedia history of the farm at Black Mountain College. With help from a Josef Breitenbach Research Grant, he is exploring Black Mountain College during the war years, when the college was (mostly) female. Through an analysis of photographs taken during Breitenbach's Summer 1944 stay at the college, Silver is exploring the ways in which Black Mountain College women learned new skills, took on leadership roles, and expanded the college's farming enterprise.

2018

• Jeehey Kim, PhD, is a photo historian working on a book titled, Imagining Korea through Photography. She will study Josef Breitenbach’s photographs taken in Korea when he was the Chief of Still Photography for the United Nations Reconstruction Agency, 1952-1953.  In addition, she will explore Breitenbach’s photographs taken in other parts of Asia.
• Audrey Sands, a PhD candidate in Art History at Yale University, will conduct research on her dissertation, Lisette Model: A Career in Photography. Her research at CCP will focus on photographic pedagogy at the New School and the rise of the art market for photography in the second half of the twentieth century.

2017

• Caitlin Ryan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. Her dissertation centers on the photographic exhibitions held at the Galerie de la Pléiade in Paris during the 1930s. Her project aims to reconstruct the Pléiade exhibitions, providing a critical history of this little-studied venue for photography in France.

2016

• Helen Trompeteler is an independent scholar and curator living in London. Her research project titled, Shared Vision: Experiments in Photography Education: 1945-1975, seeks to examine the history of photography education in the United States in the post-war period with emphasis on the tensions between commercial and art practice, as well as the growing emergence of visual literacy as a recognized discipline during this time.

2015

• Julie J. Thomson, Independent Scholar and Curator, Durham, NC. Project: Photography at Black Mountain College, 1944-1953

2014

• Michael Berkowitz, Professor in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College of London: The ultimate goal of his research is to write a book that will problematize and perhaps increase appreciation for previously unknown or undervalued relationships between Jews, photography, and modernism.
• Thomas Stubblefield, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, MA: A study of the life and work of Josef Breitenbach. His research situates the history of photography within a broad historical frame of visual expression that not only includes fine art and popular imagery, but also the larger social and political context of the work. He will study the life and work of Josef Breitenbach, a photographer whose images bring together the experimentation of Modernism, the psychoanalytic base of Surrealism and the tumultuous political landscape of the early 20th century.

2012

• Kristen Adlhoch, doctoral candidate, History of Photography, School of Art History, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland, United Kingdom for a study of Josef Breitenbach and Francis J. Bruguière abstract photographs and archival materials. Adlhoch’s dissertation, The Transformation of Vision: Abstract Photography Between the Wars, will identify the personal and artistic motivations for their experiments, place their photographs in context of the socio-cultural and artistic environments in which they were produced, and draw general conclusions from their specific works about our common conceptions of abstract photography and the possible uses of the medium.