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"Photosensitive Skin: Lebensreform Photography and the Open-Air Nude"
Speaker: Katerina Korola, 2022-23 MHC Postdoctoral Fellow
Respondent: Laura Frahm
Katerina Korola is an art historian and media scholar whose work focuses on the history of photography, cinema, and modern art in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, with an emphasis on the intersection of technical media and the environment. Her current book project, Picturing the Air: Photosensitive Media and the Industrial Atmosphere, investigates the strategies that German photographers and filmmakers of the early twentieth century developed to visualize ‘fresh air’ amidst the smoke, dust, and smog of industrial modernity. Drawing on the methods of technical art history and environmental media studies, this project examines the techniques that media practitioners devised to evade, negotiate with, and at times even negate the environment’s influence, giving rise to a fantasy of environmental purity that continues to perform ideological work today. Katerina received her joint-PhD in Art History and Cinema & Media Studies from the University of Chicago. Her research has been supported by the Hanna Holborn Gray Dissertation Completion Fellowship, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD), the Fonds de la recherche du Québec (FRQSC), and Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and has appeared in Representations and the Journal of Visual Culture.
Laura Frahm is the John L. Loeb Assocciate Professor of the Humanities at the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. Frahm's work explores film and media through the lens of architecture, design, spatial theory, ecological thought, and process philosophy.
Registration is required for this event.
About the Series
The Mahindra Humanities Center presents an Environmental Humanities seminar series with our 2022-23 postdoctoral fellows.