ARCHIVO READING GROUP

Picturing and Researching Eco-Photography

in the Present

DR. KARLA McMANUS

This reading group session will explore current methods and approaches to analyzing and interpreting eco-photography with the goal of helping researchers develop a greater awareness of their own positionality and biases. Focusing on close looking and alternative perspectives, these approaches engage, challenge, and adapt humanism to look at ecological images slant-wise and against the grain.

By exploring how photographers and photo scholars approach the visuality of the human and non-human, or more-than-human, we will continue our work of considering how we, as researchers, approach and adapt to our subjects and our times.

Current readings by emerging and established authors will inspire us to question the ways that we approach the materiality and subject of photographs. We must ask ourselves, as practitioners of close looking and deep thinking, what are we missing? What we paying too much attention to?

Karla McManus is art historian and visual theorist who specializes in the study of photography and the environmental imaginary. As Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, Karla teaches students at various levels on topics including the history and theory of photography and environmental art. Her scholarly output, in the form of curation, publications, and presentations, focuses on how historic and contemporary concerns, from wildlife conservation, to environmental disasters, to anxiety about the future, are visualized photographically. Karla’s current research project, “Flight of Fancy or Fact? Producing, Circulating, and Viewing Ornithological Photography as Ecological Knowledge,” funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, explores how bird photography and its history in print has contributed to the dissemination of ecological knowledge and wildlife species conservation. In fall of 2025, Karla was a Sassoon Visiting Fellow at the Bodleian Libraries, Centre for the Study of the Book, in Oxford, where she researched the work of early twentieth century bird photographer Emma Louisa Turner. Her writing and research on photography and the ecological turn can be found in Les Cahiers de ARIP, Journal of Canadian Art History, Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies and Captures. Figures, théories et pratiques de l’imaginaire, and RACAR as well as numerous edited collections and exhibition catalogues. She is co-editor of “The Slide Lecture” a special issue of the History of Photography (2023).

More information:

Reading Materials are available at the Archivo Intranet.