Anne McCauley

Position
David Hunter McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art Emeritus
Bio/Description

Profile

Professor McCauley’s interests range widely across 19th- and early-20th-century visual culture, with a particular focus on the history of photography. Her early work dealt with the institutional formation of commercial photography during the first generation of negative-positive prints in the 1850s–60s, and she remains concerned with the ways that economic and political forces shape the social status and ideological messages of the photographic. While advocating close looking at original prints and a fundamental understanding of the limits placed on imagery by the techniques used, she also probes the societal conditions that make possible the shooting, publishing, and dissemination of photographs.

Other areas in which McCauley has published include the history of caricature, American and European modernist collectors, the historiography of photography, the nude, early anthropological photography, Realism in art and photography, concepts of copyright and originality, Victorian feminism and amateur photography in the 19th century, and the impact of photography on art history as a discipline. Her most recent work has been involved with critical reappraisals of early-20th-century American photography. In The Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz, coauthored with Jason Francisco (2012), she considered Stieglitz’s role as a writer in constructing the myth of The Steerage as a modernist icon.  The catalogue and exhibition Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895-1925 located White’s contributions as a commercial and fine arts photographer and teacher within the changing aesthetic, political, and economic movements of Progressive Era America. 

Current Research

McCauley’s current research centers on American modernist photography during World War I and the role of the war in stimulating stylistic innovations and the collapse of Pictorialism.  She is preparing a book on Alvin Langdon Coburn’s vortographs (exhibited in 1917) and the multiple roots of abstract photography. Another project, undertaken with Gary Van Zante at the MIT Museum, focuses on Minor White’s career at MIT, where he taught from 1965 to 1974.

Education

Ph.D., Yale University, 1980

Selected Publications

“Beauty or Beast?: Manet’s Olympia in the Age of Comparative Anatomy,” Art History (September 2020).

"Lance Sieveking and Francis Bruguière's Beyond This Point: From Book to Exhibition," in No Two Alike: Karl Blossfeldt Francis Bruguière: The Dorothy Warren Show, London 1929, ed. Ulrike Stump (Vienna: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2018).

"From Contrivance to 'Naturalism', 1911–1929," in Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography, ed. Paul Martineau (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018).

Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895–1925 (Yale University Press, 2017).

“Sleight of Eye: Man Ray, Duchamp, and the Photography of New Sculptural Forms,” in Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction, eds. Sarah Hamill and Megan R. Luke, 153–174 (The Getty Research Institute, 2017).

“Clarence White: Progressive Pedagogy and the Teaching of Art Photography in America,” in Frame and Focus: Photography as a Schooling Issue, ed. Maren Gröning  (Albertina Museum/ Photoinstitut Bonartes, 2015).

“Ananda Coomaraswamy and the American Fascination with India, 1916–1925,” in Inventing Asia: American Perspectives Around 1900, eds. Alan Chong and Noriko Murai, (University of Hawaii Press, 2014).

“Witch Work, Art Work, and the Spiritual Roots of Abstraction: Ezra Pound, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and the Vortographs,” in Vorticism: New Perspectives, ed. Mark Antliff and Scott W. Klein (Oxford University Press, 2013).

“The ‘Big Show’ and the Little Galleries: Alfred Stieglitz and the Search for Modern Art Photography,” in The Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution, ed. Marilyn Satin Kushner and Kimberly Orcutt (New-York Historical Society, 2013).

The Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz, coauthored with Jason Francisco (University of California Press, 2012).

“Rethinking Woman in the Age of Psychoanalysis: Alfred Stieglitz’s Photographs of the Female Nude,” in American Photography: Local and Global Contexts, ed. Bettina Gockel (Akademie Verlag, 2012).

“Photography, Fashion, and the Cult of Appearances,” in Impressionism, Fashion & Modernity, exhibition catalogue, ed. Gloria Groom (Art Institute of Chicago, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Musée d’Orsay, 2012).

“Secret Seraglios: Tracking the Female Nude in the History of Nineteenth-Century Photography,” in Histoire de l’art du XIXe siècle (1848–1914): Bilans et perspectives, ed. Claire Barbillon, Catherine Chevillot, and François-René Martin (École du Louvre, 2012).

Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle, coauthored with Alan Chong, Rosella Mamella Zorzi, and Richard Lingner (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2004).

The Museum and the Photograph: Collecting Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1853–1900, coauthored with Mark Haworth-Booth (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1998).

Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848–1871 (Yale University Press, 1994).

A. A. E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph (Yale University Press, 1985).

Field(s)
19th-Century European Art
History of Photography
Home Department and Other Affiliations
Art & Archaeology