Current and Past CCP Fellows

Ansel Adams Research Fellowship

• Molly Kalkstein is an Art History PhD student at The University of Arizona. Funding supports work on Kalkstein's dissertation, The Discerning Eye: Materiality and the 1970s American Market for Photographs.

Kenneth J. Botto Research Fellowship

• Ariel Evans, Visiting Assistant Professor, School of Photographic Arts and Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology, to support a current research project entitled, Pussy Porn and Other Arguments in American Feminist Photography, 1968-1988.

Photographic Arts Council - Los Angeles (PAC-LA) Research Fellowship

• Isabel Wade is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California. Funding supported research for Wade's dissertation, Glossy Buildings, Planned Images: Architectural Photography across Contested Spaces in Los Angeles, 1940-1980.

Harold Jones and Frances Murray Research Fellowship

• Paulina Banas, Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Funding supported current research entitled, Between Artists, Publishers, and Printmakers: Art, Technology and the Marketing of Islamic Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Books.

Adolf Fassbender Travel Fellowship Award

• Lauren Graves is a PhD student at Boston University. Funding supported her dissertation entitled, The Politics of Place: Photographing New York City During the New Deal.

Josef Breitenbach Research Fellowship

• 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.

Ansel Adams Research Fellowship

• Miriam Oesterreich is a post-doctoral researcher in art history at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. Her research is on the transcultural entanglements of Mexican modernism focusing on indigenous subjects.

Photographic Arts Council - Los Angeles (PAC-LA) Research Fellowship

• Jackson Davidow is a PhD candidate in the History, Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His project titled, Picturing a Pandemic: Global AIDS Activism in Brian Weils’ "Every 17 Seconds", examines HIV/AIDS, art and activism. 

Harold Jones and Frances Murray Research Fellowship

• Adam Jolles, Associate Professor and Department Chair, Department of Art History, Florida State University and Josh Ellenbogen, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture, the University of Pittsburgh, are conducting research for a book about the institutional history of photography since WWII.

Adolf Fassbender Travel Fellowship Award

• Aaron Turner is a Research Fellow in Photography and the Coordinator for the Center for Photographers of Color in the School of Art at the University of Arkansas. Aaron’s research here at the Center for Creative Photography looks into the relationships fostered personally and in the work of photographers Roy DeCarava, Dawoud Bey, and Carrie Mae Weems. The first tier of his research will focus on each artists philosophy, approach or stance on documentary photography and how one another’s work influenced those positions and how it ties into the trajectory of their life’s work. Mainly DeCarava’s effect on the life and work of Bey and Weems.

Josef Breitenbach Research Fellowship

• 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.

Ansel Adams Research Fellowship

• Heather Diack is an Assistant Professor, Contemporary Art, Department of Art and Art History, at the University of Miami. Her project titled, Between States: The Art of Documentary in American Photography, explores the ways that documentary was rethought as an artistic practice in the 1970s, as a means of probing the formal conditions of photography, proposing an aesthetics of indeterminacy, and complicating how meaning itself is created and disseminated.
• Dan Leers is Curator of Photography, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA.  He will conduct an in-depth study and comparison of the W. Eugene Smith Pittsburgh photographs at the CCP with the Carnegie’s holdings to better understand Smith’s working methods at the time.
• ​Mariah A. Postlewait is a PhD candidate in Art History at Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York. Her project will examine the exhibition and catalog, In the American West: Photographs by Richard Avedon.

Kenneth J. Botto Research Fellowship

• Catherine Barth is a PhD candidate at Emory University, Atlanta. She will conduct research for her dissertation titled, Frederick Sommer: At the Limits of Avant-Garde Photography. Combining various techniques in photography, drawing, painting, and collage, Sommer created avant-garde works that challenged conventional standards and offered a new model of photographic expression. Drawing on the wealth of original sources in the Sommer and related archives at the CCP, this project aims to provide a richer understanding of his work and the debates around alternate visions of the medium at mid-century.
• Eric Goldfisher is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at the University of Minnesota. His dissertation project entitled, The Difference that Seeing Makes: Homelessness and Visuality in Urban Ecology, examines how the visual representation of homelessness structures knowledge of urban public spaces, and how that knowledge produces material impacts both in urban environments in the in the lives of homeless people themselves.

Photographic Arts Council - Los Angeles (PAC-LA) Research Fellowship

• Emilie C. Boone is an Assistant Professor of Art History, Department of African American Studies, CUNY New York City College of Technology. During her time at the CCP, she will advance her book manuscript Reconfiguring Time: James Van Der Zee’s Photographs in the 20th Century by engaging in research and writing about photography theory related to what it means to consider a photographer’s work overtime.

Harold Jones and Frances Murray Research Fellowship

• Alana Wolf Johnson is a PhD candidate in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Her dissertation is titled, Sensational Atlases of New York City: Mapping Perception between the Wars. Her research at CCP will focus on her chapter, Mediating the Metropolis: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s "Manhatta" and how the rhythmic organization of Manhatta is anything but accidental.

Gary Metz Research Fellowship

• Lauren Walden is a PhD candidate in Art History at Coventry University in the United Kingdom. Her research re-frames the photographic output of the surrealist movement through cosmopolitan political theory. One chapter will be devoted to placing Lola Álvarez Bravo as a surrealist photographer ensconced in a cosmopolitan network of worldwide artistic exchange.

Josef Breitenbach Research Fellowship

• 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.

Todd Walker Research Fellowship

• Syl Arena is the Department Chair, Visual and Performing Arts, Mission College Prep, San Luis Obispo. Mr. Arena studied with Todd Walker at the University of Arizona in the 1980s. His project will focus on Todd Walker’s exploration of digital imaging technology that began in the early 1980s.

Ansel Adams Research Fellowship

• Nadiah Rivera Fellah is a PhD art history scholar at the City University of New York (CUNY). One chapter of her doctoral dissertation titled, Stills of Passage: Photography and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1978-1992 focuses on the photographs of Louis Carlos Bernal’s familial and domestic spaces. 
• Mark Rawlinson is the Head of the Department of History of Art, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. Dr. Rawlinson’s book project reconsiders post-war American photography as “minor” histories, specific to geographical places. His aim is to write a series of simultaneous narratives that capture the spirit of experimentation, comradeship and organizational complexities refashioning the photographic medium from 1960 - mid-1980s.

Kenneth J. Botto Research Fellowship

• Nadya Bair received her PhD in Art History from the University of Southern California in 2016. Her current research is for a book, The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market, a history of the international picture agency Magnum, founded in 1947.
• Jeanne Dreskin is a PhD scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Her dissertation titled, Left of Center: Displacements and intersectionalitities in Photographic Practices of New York and Los Angeles, 1970-1990 examines the photographic work of Lorraine O’Grady, Patrick Nagatani, and the collective Asco. 

Photographic Arts Council - Los Angeles (PAC-LA) Research Fellowship

• Jacinda Russell is an Associate Professor of Art at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Her project titled The Archival Object in the Digital Era concentrates on the Robert Heinecken Archive as inspiration for new photographic artwork and as the basis for development of an undergraduate photography class.

• Emilia Mickevicius is a PhD History of Art and Architecture scholar at Brown University, Providence. Her dissertation, Dispassionate Landscapes: Style and Spectatorship in "New Topographics", 1975, re-analyzes one of the most important exhibitions of the 20^th century. 

Josef Breitenbach Research Fellowship

• 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.

Ansel Adams Research Fellowship

• Ellen Handy is an Associate Professor in the art department at the City College of New York. Dr. Handy’s current research project is a book titled, Histories of Photography: An Introduction, which explores the photographic medium as broadly as possible, from an object-based perspective. Themes that recur throughout the book are: the continuing importance of inventions and transformations in photographic processes; audiences and applications; emerging consensus regarding a canon of photography as well as vernacular, commercial and applied photography; and photography as a practice, particularly including its institutions and organizations. 
• Thierry Gervais is Assistant Professor in the history of photography at Ryerson University and Head of Research at Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto. Dr. Thierry’s project pursues an analytic approach to photojournalism by addressing the sensitive question of retouching press photographs.  He plans to analyze the role of retouching in the dissemination of visual news from the 1840s to the present day and will consider retouching not as manipulation, but as a creative means to produce effective news images. The W. Eugene Smith Archive at the Center is a fundamental component of his research.

Kenneth J. Botto Research Fellowship

• Anton Lee is a PhD scholar, Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia, Vancouver and his doctoral dissertation research focuses on the strategic use of visual sequences by a small number of American photographers during the 1970s, whose work wielded great influence on the foundation of photographic discourse in France through the 1980s.
• David Shneer is the Louis P. Singer Chair of Jewish History, Professor of History, Religious Studies, and Jewish Studies, University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Shneer’s book project, Grief: The History of the World’s First Holocaust Liberation Photograph and the Man Who Made It, uses Dmitrii Baltermants’s early Holocaust liberation photographs to examine photography—as art, document, object of financial value, and evidence of atrocities—on a global scale. At the Center, he will study collections in an effort to understand how photographs become commodities.

Photographic Arts Council - Los Angeles (PAC-LA) Research Fellowship

• Dervla MacManus is a PhD scholar, School of Architecture, University College Dublin, will conduct research at the Center to complete PhD research for her thesis, Nature, Truth and Experience: The Depiction of Architecture in Nineteenth Century Photography (1870-1910). Her project includes the first comprehensive study of Frederick H. Evans’s lantern slides and will draw together the four largest collections of Evans’s slides (the CCP, the CCA, the Spencer Art Museum, and Nottingham University) for the first time. While at the Center, she will study Evans’s lantern slides of Lincoln Cathedral along with his annotated lecture notes.

Josef Breitenbach Research Fellowship

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

Ansel Adams Research Fellowship

• Phillip Andrew Lewis and Peter Happel Christian, Clear As Day. Project: Research that will materialize in photo book form as part of an eleven-volume series entitled Land_AA presenting new approaches to the work of Ansel Adams.
• Karli Wurzelbacher, PhD candidate, Art History, University of Delaware. Project:  dissertation research, American Modernism and Reverse Painting on Glass, and the papers of Rebecca Salsbury James in the Paul Strand Collection.
• Professor Catherine Zuromskis, The University of New Mexico, Department of Art & Art History. Project: The Crime Scene and the Archive: Reframing Evidence.

Kenneth J. Botto Research Fellowship

• Meaghan L. Beadle, Department of History, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Project: Dissertation research into the photographic language of women’s liberation in order to understand how visual culture shaped and was shaped by the movement. This is What a Feminist Looks Like! Photography and Feminism, 1968-1980
• Thom Sempere, Photographer. Project: the photographer Kenneth Botto
• Professor Mark Van Proyen, San Francisco Art Institute and Corresponding Editor, Art in America. Project: Kenneth J. Botto and the Tradition of Surrealist Photography

Photographic Arts Council - Los Angeles (PAC-LA) Research Fellowship

• Professor Edward Dimendberg, University of California, Irvine. Project: To complete research on the photography of Max Yavno as part of his book project, Picturing Los Angeles: Infrastructure, Aesthetics, Publics.

Josef Breitenbach Research Fellowship

• 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.

Todd Walker Research Fellowship

• Monica Steinberg, PhD candidate, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, NY: Wit, Mutability, and Manipulation in 1960s Los Angeles Artistic Practice. Utilizing the archives of Todd Walker and Robert Heinecken, Steinberg will conduct research for her dissertation examining the intersection of artistic practice and the mutability of identity within post-war Los Angeles. Often colored by strategies of wit, artists including Walker and Heinecken used photography and bookmaking to examine the nature of myth and reality in a manner that implicated an environment operating in the shadow of Hollywood's character producing machine.

Ansel Adams Research Fellowship

• Brendan Fay, Department of History of Art, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. Five Lessons in Photography: Abstraction and Photographic Education in the US, 1940-1960: The research is for a book-length study of the connections between photographic abstraction and photographic education in the United States during the middle years of the twentieth century. Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind and Minor White will be central figures in examining the evolution of photography as a university subject and of the photographer-teacher as a professional identity.
• ​Glenn Willumson, Florida Foundation Research Professor in Art History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL. Forging the Canon: Photography 1963-1984: The goal of the project is to show that a historical understanding of the emergence of photography during the 1960s and 1970s is critical to an appreciation of the present position of the medium today. Research at the Center for Creative Photography will focus on the institutionalization of photography in museums, universities, and the art market between 1963 and 1984.

Josef Breitenbach Research Fellowship

• 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.

Ansel Adams Research Fellowship

• Matthew Biro, Professor and Chair, Department of the History of Art, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, will research the first book-length study of Robert Heinecken, Robert Heinecken: A Life in the Mass Media. The manuscript presents a chronological account of Heinecken's life, social context, and major works in relation to art created in the United States and Europe since the 1920s.
• Marta Zarzycka, Assistant Professor, Faculty of the Arts, Department of Gender Studies, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. In Photography, Gender and Humanitarian Aid, a postdoctoral project, Zarzycka examines representations of women and ethnic minorities documenting the effects of war, conflict, and economic crisis in humanitarian reports and campaigns. At the Center, she will examine the representation of children used to signify poverty or destitution and form a substantial evidence-based thesis on the role of portraying children in US social documentary practices.

Ansel Adams Research Fellowship

• Brett Abbott, Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, for research in the Wynn Bullock Archive and photography collection in preparation for a retrospective exhibition and book project. Widely admired as one of the great photographers working in the tradition of West Coast modernist photography, Bullock's work has not been the focus of a major museum retrospective in recent years.
• Stephanie Jill Schwartz, Lecturer at Arts of the Americas, University College in London, England, will research the intersection of film and photography in the 1930s in order to contextualize Paul Strand's films in relation to his photography. Throughout his career Strand not only moved seamlessly between the two media, he often combined them. Her project, Film Stills: Paul Strand and the American Media, will focus on this particularly under-researched area of Strand's work.
• Brian Winkenweder, Associate Professor of Art History at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, will research the Hans Namuth Archive in preparation for a book, Picturing Modernism: A Study of Hans Namuth's Films and Photos. This project will present Namuth's contribution to modern art and historical reception of his photographs and films of painter Jackson Pollock, which influenced the trajectory of post-war art in the United States.