Visiting Fellowship for Photography Scholar

Art Historian and photography scholar Donna West Brett will be the Visiting Fellow at Trinity in early 2024 while she takes up the role of Sloan Fellow of Photography at the Bodleian Library. The Sloan Fellowship supports a research visit by a scholar in the history of photography.

Donna West Brett is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Art History discipline at the University of Sydney. Her research specialises in the history of art and visual culture with a particular interest in photographic history and how the medium is employed within systems of power, media, and public spectacle. Brett’s publications include Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945 (Routledge 2016), co-editor with Natalya Lusty of the award-winning anthology, Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images (Routledge, 2019), and co-editor with Deborah Ascher Barnstone of Modernist Aesthetics in Transition: Visual Culture of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany (Bloomsbury 2024). She is currently working on two book projects A Tyranny of Intimacy: The Stasi Archive and its Photographic Afterlife, and Accidents, Anarchism, Calamity: Photographing British Disaster 1865-1939.

Brett’s research at the Bodleian libraries titled Modernist Photobooks, Propaganda and the Everyday, will study part of the substantial collection of photobooks generously donated in 2020 by Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey. Conveying meaning primarily through photographs, the photobook is a radical format that enabled the widespread dissemination of modernist aesthetics. This research will take a closer look at the way modernist photobooks portrayed the ‘everyday’ - from surrealist aesthetics to objective representations of the familiar, the practical, the ordinary - and its intersection with the visual languages of politics and propaganda.