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PHOTOFILE | ESSAY
AUDREY LEBLANC and GAËLLE MOREL
SUSAN DOBSON: Slide⏐Lecture.
A Model and a (Res)source for Archival Critique in Contemporary Photography *
In 2011, Canadian photographer Susan Dobson[1] learned that the slide library used for art history courses at the University of Guelph, where she had been teaching photography since 2002, was about to be thrown away. Established in the late 1960s, slide libraries were widely used by instructors in the 1980s, when Dobson herself was a student at the School of Image Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU)[2]. Later, as a visual arts professor, she made use of this teaching resource, made available to faculty members to support their lectures[3]. The creation of these image collections was entrusted to staff responsible for reproducing images from existing publications. At TMU, this visual resource grew significantly between 1978 and the early 2000s, with the inventory expanding from 26,000 to nearly 180,000 slides. By the 1990s, these collections began to appear obsolete with the rise of digital image projection, which became the preferred method in academic teaching. Confronted with the imminent disappearance of these objects, Dobson experienced a strong emotional reaction. She stored part of the endangered slide library in her office and, between 2016 and 2021, embarked on a broader photographic project focused on the slide libraries of the universities of Guelph, York, Concordia, and Toronto. The series explores the slide carousels, cabinets, and storage drawers that were once housed in university libraries and research centres. It was exhibited in 2021 at The Image Centre, curated by Gaëlle Morel in collaboration with Valérie Matteau[4].
Dobson’s formal approach aligns with the modernist tradition of North American art history and photography, a style still dominant in academic institutions. Her color prints highlight her archaeological interest in this outdated material, approached as scientific specimens from the past. Susan Dobson’s nostalgic and fetishistic “fever,” her “allure” or “impulse”[5] for the materiality of these complex objects, reveals that these now-overlooked slide libraries are, in fact, valuable archives. Though originally conceived as educational tools for teaching art history and photography through visual content, these collections also convey other narratives embedded in their very physicality.
A MATERIAL TRADITION
Following a precise protocol, the photographer isolates, against a black background, the various material components of these slide libraries, as well as the visible traces of their organization and indexing: storage furniture, contents of drawers, and slide carousels for projectors. Photographed frontally or from above, these educational tools stand out graphically in all their imposing and cumbersome materiality. Dobson works in a studio using a large-format view camera (4x5 inches), mounted on a tripod and supported by a carefully arranged lighting setup[6]. Demanding significant technical expertise, the lengthy and meticulous shooting process becomes a ritual—a tribute to analog photography and a bygone mode of knowledge transmission.
The emphasis on this type of instruction can also be attributed to Toronto’s proximity to Rochester, New York—the birthplace of Kodak, founded by George Eastman. Toronto became central to Kodak’s development; in 1899, the company opened an industrial complex in a neighborhood later named “Kodak Heights,” solidifying its role as the primary manufacturer of photographic products in North America for over a century. In 1969, photographer, essayist, educator, and former curator of photography at the George Eastman Museum, Nathan Lyons, founded the Visual Studies Workshop—an independent artist-run centre dedicated to both the theoretical and practical study of photography. Motivated by the desire to build a structured photographic community, Lyons became a central figure in the artistic and cultural promotion of the medium[7]. His pedagogical methods—based on a technicist and material approach—resonated with instructors and students in Toronto, many of whom regularly traveled to Rochester.
Situated within a modernist tradition, the visual strategies employed by Dobson recall emblematic practices in the history of photography, engaging with an aestheticized representation of the archive and material culture through the format of photographic inventories. Informed by the documentary codes of the 1920s–1930s[8] and the conceptual approaches of the 1960s, these works are characterized by rigorous, standardized methods of image production, adopting a detached, and mechanical approach that privileges meticulous description, legibility, and seriality[9]. This clinical, repetitive, and formalist style facilitates the apparent withdrawal of the artist, foregrounding the systematic logic of the archive—further emphasized through grid arrangements or groupings of similar images.
Dobson’s use of visual citations, resonating with artistic practices concerned with the aesthetics of the archive, demonstrates a sustained attention to the physical properties of the medium and a deliberate engagement with analog photography. While the artist acknowledges the material obsolescence of these objects, Dobson also seeks to revisit traditional photographic histories and the construction of canonical narratives, which have been largely shaped by male, European, and North American figures.
THE SLIDE LIBRARY OVERWHELMED BY ITS MATERIALITY: REVISITING THE CANON
By photographing slides "as objects regardless of the images they carried, showing them as innumerable small fragments of knowledge"[10], Dobson shifts the sensory experience from projection (viewing) to the materiality of the slide library that renders it obsolete. The slide—an image of light, a device, a sequence, and a session[11]—is also an object. Trivial, vulnerable, and utilitarian—both a documentation medium and a conservation technique—it remains undervalued, and Susan Dobson’s artistic approach thus draws attention to this "little-known and somewhat neglected aspect of photographic history." [12]
In an educational context, slide projection engages the senses ; it becomes an entertaining spectacle, a social experience of sharing; and finally, as a tool for transmitting the history of art and photography, it delivers a narrative through the visual content of the images it contains.[13] Yet, "while slides have played a vital role in transmitting culture, their narratives have been overshadowed by histories described through photographic prints."[14] In response to recent scholarly interest in slides as a visual archive, Slide/Lecture adds a programmatic line: the slide library entity—the object itself—is also an archive and part of history.
The ritualized shots, governed by the meticulous protocol established by the photographer, reveal a transmission object overwhelmed by its own materiality, which exposes the construction of cultural narratives. The series of conferences offered by institutions or the juxtaposition of storage boxes unfold the curriculum of university teaching. TMU’s carousels (47) reveal a list of names dominated by Western male artists and the prevalence of certain themes, such as the "female nude," conceived as genres, following the model of art history.
The drawer dedicated to artists from Africa and 'Ceylon' contains about thirty slides, whereas some Western artists have their works represented by dozens of slides stored across numerous drawers.
The labels found on slides and bins, the titles of lectures, and the number of slides reveal the stereotypes constituting this institutionalized visual culture as well as a traditional canonical history, which conspicuously excludes a wide range of individuals, communities, and geographies. The photographic archive—the slide library as a whole—becomes an archive not only of a period in the history of photography and art history but also of the history of higher education and cultural history.
Through her project, Dobson interrogates the constitution, organization, and discourses conveyed by these archives in order to explore the dynamics at play between institutional authorities and the photographic medium.[15] This theoretical critique of the archive, based on methodological contributions developed by Michel Foucault, has permeated North American academic thought since the 1970s and 1980s.[16] As an "artist-archivist,"[17] Dobson’s archaeological approach seeks to expose the structures, systems, and conditions defining the photographic artifacts at her disposal, to reveal and question the validity of the discursive apparatus promoted by these collections, apparently governed by rational and logical order. Slide/Lecture embodies a critique of its subject itself, aiming for a historical, cultural, and material reevaluation of archival objects.
FOR A MATERIAL AND SENSITIVE CULTURAL HISTORY: THE HERITAGE OF SLIDE LIBRARIES AS PEDAGOGICAL TOOLS
Self-reflexive, Slide/Lecture is also pedagogical, demonstrating with a visual methodology the materiality of photography as a historical imperative for considering it as a source. These 'photo libraries' or slide libraries still occupy a modest place in the history of the medium, which struggles to recognize them as full-fledged archives. As an artistic proposal addressing a moment in the history of photography—both formal and material—Slide/Lecture enacts the “rich epistemological potential of photo archives of reproductions of works of art” [of slide libraries], as expressed by Constanza Caraffa.[18] A historian and Head of the Photothek in Florence, Italy, Caraffa argues that these collections of art history photographs, which hold visual documentation, constitute objects of historical interest better described as 'photo archives'.
In some of her images, Dobson wryly evaluates certain references in art and photographic history and this mise en abyme also raises the question of a cultural history closed upon itself. The images in slide libraries are reproductions taken from authoritative art history books; these canons have been naturalized by the projection device and the supposed proximity to the works generated by photographic mediation and its apparent “transparency”[19]. Slide/Lecture reveals the tautological system of cultural valorization while exposing the versatile—and historicized—value of cultural objects.
By paying tribute to these discredited objects due to their technological obsolescence, Slide/Lecture highlights the obsolescence of the cultural narratives conveyed by these same media. During this period dominated by analog photography, these photo libraries were implemented in many and diverse institutions, enterprises, art museums and media. They mark a moment in cultural history. This artistic proposal ultimately raises the question of their conservation as entities and of their heritage valorization.
* Note: A longer version of this essay was published in French:
“Obsolescence des objets et des récits? Diapothèques et enseignement de l’histoire de l’art, Canada, 1960–1990,” La Revue de la BNU de Strasbourg, no. 32, November 2025: https://journals.openedition.org/rbnu/8052.
[2] At the time known as the Ryerson Image Centre.
[3] For the history of teaching through the projection of images, see Kim Timby, “Illuminating the Science of Art History: The Advent of the Slide Lecture in France,” History of Photography, vol. 47, 2023, 72-89.
[4] Susan Dobson: Slide|Lecture, on view from September 15 to December 4, 2021, The Image Centre, Toronto.
[5] See Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive [Archive Fever], Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1995; Arlette Farge, Le Goût de l‘archive [The Allure of the Archives], Paris: Le Seuil, 1989; Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October, 110, Fall 2004, 3–22.
[6] Interview with Susan Dobson, November 3, 2021, The Image Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University. Translation by the authors.
[7] See Jessica S. McDonald (dir), Nathan Lyons: Selected Essays, Lectures and Interviews, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012.
[8] See Olivier Lugon, Le Style documentaire. D’August Sander à Walker Evans, 1920–1945, Paris: Macula, 2001.
[9] See Albert Renger-Patzsch (Die Welt ist schön, 1928); Brassaï (Sculptures Involontaires, 1932; Graffiti, 1960); Walker Evans (masques africains, 1935). More recently, see Ed Ruscha (Products, 1961); Bernd et Hilla Becher (Structures Industrielles, 1960-1970); Arno Gisinger (Invent arisiert, 2000).
[10] Alison Nordström, “The Things We Keep,” curatorial essay, 2018. See the photographer’s webpage: https://susandobson.com/portfolio/slide-lectures/
[11] See Nathalie Boulouch, Anne Lacoste, Olivier Lugon, and Carole Sandrin, Diapositive, histoire de la photographie projetée, Lausanne: Musée de l’Élysée and Éditions Noir et Blanc, 2017.
[12] Tatyana Franck, “Introduction,” Ibid., 9.
[13] Annebella Pollen, “From Art History Pedagogic Resource to Post-Digital Art Medium: Shifting Cultural Values in a Dismantled Slide Library,” History of Photography, op. cit., 5-27.
[14] Tal-Or Ben-Choreen and Karla McManus, “The Slide Lecture: Introduction to a Special Issue,” History of Photography, Ibid., 1-4.
[15] For further detail, see David Brittain (Ed.), “Photography and the Archive,” Afterimage, vol. 35, no. 3, November–December 2007.
[16] See François Cusset, French Theory: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Cie et les mutations de la vie intellectuelle aux États-Unis, Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2005.
[17] Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” op. cit., 5.
[18] Constanza Caraffa (Ed.), “From ‘Photo Libraries’ to ‘Photo Archives’. On the Epistemological Potential of Art-historical Photo Collections,” in Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History, Berlin/Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011, 12.
[19] Louis Marin, “Transparence et opacité de la peinture… du moi,“ in Vita Fortunati (Ed.), Bologna, la cultura italiana e le letterature straniere moderne, Bologna, Università/Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1992, vol. II, 123-130.
How to cite
Leblanc, Audrey. "SUSAN DOBSON: Slide⏐Lecture. A Model and a (Res)source for Archival Critique in Contemporary Photography." Archivo Photofile. 03 March 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18850460.
https://www.archivoplatform.com/post/essay-leblanc-morel-26
About the authors
Dr. Audrey Leblanc is a historian specialized in the history of photography and a research associate at the EHESS (Paris). She is currently an associate researcher for the collaborative project PhotoFribourg (Switzerland, 2023-2027) and the David Douglas Duncan Endowment for Photojournalism Fellow at the Harry Ransom Center (Austin, USA, 2024-2025). She has curated two exhibitions on press photography and edited the accompanying catalogues, including Icons of May 68: Images Have a History (French National Library (BnF), 2018). Leblanc is a lecturer in history and visual culture and her research explores the cultural history of image producers from the 1960s to the 1980s, through an archival perspective.
Dr. Gaëlle Morel has been the Curator, Exhibitions and Public Engagement at The Image Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University, since 2010. Based on extensive archival research, her most recent exhibitions include Lee Miller, A Photographer at Work, 1932-1945 (2024); Stories from the Picture Press: Black Star Publishing Co. & The Canadian Press (2023); and Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81 (with accompanying catalogue, 2023). Morel recently published “Community and Joy. The Visual Typology of the ArQuives’ Photography Collection,” in Coll., Joy. Sorrow. Anger. Love. PRIDE, Toronto: Magenta, 2023. She is currently an instructor in the Film + Photography Preservation and Collections Management graduate program at Toronto Metropolitan University.
