Several articles by Assistant Professor of Art History Nadya Bair have recently been published in books and a journal.
In The Art Institute of Chicago Field Guide to Photography and Media, published this spring, Bair’s entry on “Collaboration” appears with contributions by well-known critics and photographers including Dawoud Bey and Martha Rosler. The book focuses on the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection of photographs, books, and installation art, and features short essays by prominent artists, curators, and scholars, all chosen to contribute to understanding photography and media today.
Bair also wrote an essay in Facing Black Star, published last month by the MIT Press. Titled “Suitcases, Stamps, and Paper: Piecing Together the Story of Black Star’s Nazi Photographs,” the article examines the circulation of press photographs from Nazi Germany to the Black Star photo agency in New York in the late 1930s. The article appears in the section of the book on “Questioning the Origins of the Black Star Collection.”
Research for the chapter was supported by a Levitt Center Faculty Research and Innovation Grant. The grant allowed Bair to engage then-students Yenesis Alvarez ’22 and Ioannis Makridis ’22 in digital archival research and partner with the Yale Lens Media Lab to use new methods to analyze the photographic papers on which these historic photographs were printed.
Most recently, Bair’s peer reviewed article “Robert Capa und John Steinbecks Reise in die UdSSR” (“Robert Capa and John Steinbeck’s Journey to the USSR”) was published in the summer issue of German-language journal FOTOGESCHICHTE, a leading photo journal.
The article follows the 1947 journey of photographer Robert Capa and writer John Steinbeck to the Soviet Union and the photojournalistic account they produced about life in the USSR. While examining what it took to place this human-interest feature in a host of international magazines, this essay sheds light on the behind-the-scenes work of the Magnum photo agency and the workings of its international distribution system in the early days of the Cold War.
