ANALOG PHOTO LIBRARIES AS ARCHIVES OF NARRATIVES
Thu 19 Jun
|READING GROUP
Reading Group led by Audrey Leblanc (EHESS Paris, France)
—
19 Jun 2025, 17:30 – 19:00 WEST
READING GROUP
—
The Archivo Reading Group Series invites participants to explore seminal texts in visual culture, with a particular focus on lens-based media and the archive. Led by scholars, researchers, and artists, these sessions foster engaging discussions and critical analysis. Participation is exclusive to Archivo Network members in good standing. To join the Network, visit our website or contact us at info@archivoplatform.com.
ARCHIVO READING GROUP
ANALOG PHOTO LIBRARIES AS ARCHIVES OF NARRATIVES
Audrey Leblanc
EHESS Paris, France
This reading group focuses on contemporary archival sources of photojournalism and the organization of these photographic archives within the context of press companies, in the 1960’s-1990’s – the time of analogue photography. I’m currently working on The Black Star agency's prints collection, kept at The Image Centre of Toronto Metropolitan University (Canada) and the morgue of The New York Journal-American preserved at the Harry Ransom Center, Austin (USA). This research project also aims to focus on professional practices that reveal other ways in which photographs produced in agencies and press companies are disseminated and contribute to the conditions of image visibility. Except for professions that are almost absent from the history of photography, such as librarians, iconographers and archivists, these practices are less described and little known.
To better understand how classification creates a narrative, I worked on the artistic work of Susan Dobson: her Slide|Lecture reconsiders the materiality and meaning of now abandoned university slide libraries used in art history classes. These complex analog objects reveal how these overlooked libraries produce a fundamental archive on the history of the medium and exposes the biased and oriented canonical leanings of art historical curricula during the late 20th century.
Reading Materials are available at the Archivo Network member's page.
—
Audrey Leblanc is a historian of photography, research associate at the EHESS (Paris). She is currently researcher for the collaborative project Photo-Fribourg (Switzerland, 2023-27) and Fellow at the Harry Ransom Center (USA, 2025). She has curated two exhibitions on press photography and edited the catalogues (French National Library (BnF), 2018). Her research explores the cultural history of image producers from the 1960s to the 1980s, through an archival perspective.
Cover picture: Susan Dobson: Slide | Lecture (installation view), 2021 © James Morley, The Image Centre