History of Art Research Seminar Series 2024

This lecture explores how the visual analysis of backgrounds, backdrops, and negative spaces in photographic compositions can reveal art’s complicity in supporting American imperialism during the late nineteenth century. Applying this method to portraits of immigrants to the United States and Indigenous Peoples engaged in diplomatic relations with the US government demonstrates how photography operated as a public platform for asserting national identity and cultural sovereignty. It also shows how both subjects and photographers negotiated terms of self-representation through figure-ground relationships, reclaiming even posed and theatrically-constructed images as evidence of complex dynamics between power, identity, and agency in visual culture.

Professor Erin Pauwels is the 2024-2025 Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art with the History of Art Department at the University of Oxford, a Visiting Fellow with Worcester College, and Senior Fellow with the Rothermere American Institute. She is also Associate Professor of American Art History at Temple University.