cca photography research fellowship: imperial exposure

It is often everyday objects and events that hold the key to understanding imperial networks of trade, influence, and harm. Photography is a technology of exposure; cameras have produced images that evidence imperial processes of conquest, enduring violence and its quotidian manifestations, while sustaining imperialism’s extended reach. Exposure suggests physical encounters between bodies and environments, the moment of photographic capture, and the systems of knowledge these practices set into motion.

The 2027 iteration of the Photography Research Fellowship Program is grounded in a collaboration between the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal (CCA) and the Paul Mellon Centre for the Studies in British Art (PMC) in London. The 2027 program foregrounds the CCA and PMC’s shared research commitments to the critical legacies of practices of imperial exposure. Applicants are encouraged to approach the CCA’s photography collection across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries as a space of experimentation and exploration. This offers the fellow an opportunity to treat the collection as a corpus of materials that articulate forms of exposure generated by imperialism as a photographic and physical enterprise.

The CCA’s photography collection comprises roughly 65,000 individual photographs, more than half of which were taken before 1900. Various techniques and formats are represented: mounted and unmounted prints on paper, cased photographs, negatives and positives on glass, stereographic prints, glass negatives, daguerreotypes, artist’s books, portfolios, and albums. Within the collection are thousands of photographs made across Asia, North and East Africa, Indigenous territories across what is now the North American West, Mexico, Peru, and elsewhere. Many of the photographs were taken by European photographers in colonial contexts, although not all were commissioned by colonial regimes. This extensive body of visual materials attest to how imperial photographic practices played a key role in violent territorial claims and expansion, through exposure, publication, and circulation of colonial documentation. Photographic mobility, of both the photographer and technologies, was an iterative practice that continuously generated a corpus of imperial material remains.

The 2027 Photography Research Fellowship Program offers the fellow the opportunity to engage in a workshop, co-organized by the CCA and the PMC, that will host a small group of international researchers working on topics between imperialism and visual culture. The workshop will take place at the CCA during the fellow’s residency period and incorporate a public research roundtable.

In addition, the 2027 CCA-PMC Fellow will have the opportunity to deliver a public talk on their research at a later stage at the Paul Mellon Centre in London. They will also be encouraged to benefit from the research networks of the PMC, and will be welcome to submit an article or propose a feature resulting from their fellowship to British Art Studies, the open access journal co-published by the PMC and the Yale Center for British Art. More broadly, the fellow will be in dialogue with and have access to support from staff at both the CCA and PMC.