POSTPONED DUE TO HURRICANE SANDY
"Posing in Prison: Photography, Family Visits, and the Circulation of Feelings"
Board Room of the Stanford Humanities Center | Free & Open to the Public
Stanford-educated Nicole Fleetwood (Associate Professor, American Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick) shares from her current research project on visuality and incarceration. The book- length project explores visual arts and cultural practices of inmates during the era of mass incarceration. "Posing in Prison," her proposed lecture, examines vernacular photography and studio portraiture that takes place inside U.S. prisons, by investigating the production practices and the circulation of these images in and out of prisons. These photographs include snapshots that document family visits, as well as studio portraits taken by resident and outside photographers of inmates. Fleetwood considers how vernacular photography and inmate portraits circulate between inmates and their family and friends as practices of intimacy and attachment.
Nicole Fleetwood is Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She researches and teaches in the areas of visual culture and media studies, black cultural studies, gender theory, and culture and technology studies. She is the author of Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (University of Chicago Press 2011). Her articles appear in American Quarterly, Signs, Social Text, tdr: the journal of performance studies, Art Journal, and edited anthologies. Fleetwood has worked as a consultant and has collaborated with a number of arts organizations and programs, including the Ford Foundation’s Artography initiative, New Museum of Contemporary Art’s Visual Knowledge Program, Walker Art Center, Southern Exposure, San Francisco Arts Commission, and Youth Speaks.
