Jonathan Dentler | Institut Catholique de Paris (original) (raw)

Conference Presentations by Jonathan Dentler

New Worlds, Old Worlds, Lost Worlds: Picturing Prehistory in American Art and Visual Culture (Paris, April 7-8), 2022

Atlantis, pre-Columbian “Mound Builders,” cave men locked in combat with T. Rex — visions of anci... more Atlantis, pre-Columbian “Mound Builders,” cave men locked in combat with T. Rex — visions of ancient, ruined, or “lost” worlds on a spectrum between fact and fantasy have long fascinated American artists and producers of visual culture. How have U.S. artists and image makers depicted prehistory, and to what ends? How have visualizations of prehistory from the eighteenth century to 1980 contributed to new conceptualizations of culture, time, and space?

From the moment of contact between indigenous Americans and people from what became the “Old World,” the Americas posed a problem for established stories about prehistory or “deep time.” On the one hand, this was a “New World,” seemingly without written history, while on the other it did not fit easily within biblical stories about prehistory. Such uncertainty, together with the cultural and technical revolutions of time and space that characterized several centuries of European commercial and imperial expansion, produced a great deal of pictorial speculation about deep time. As the “myth and symbol” school of American studies demonstrated during the 1950s and 1960s, mythic time has played an important role in U.S. culture, in visions of a mechanical Eden that would combine technology with the pastoral, evading Europe’s history and social conflict. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, developments in both the sciences and popular culture accelerated a process in which various “old” and “lost” worlds were invented to make sense of and imagine the new. These worlds might be at the bottom of the ocean, buried underground, or lost in jungles, but they could be brought back via the image.

This conference will examine images of prehistory in different media and in both artistic and nonartistic contexts. Focusing on how such images functioned as a way of “worldmaking,” we will ask about the relationships between production, circulation, and reception, as well as between image, media, form, and concepts of time.

De l’Atlantide, aux « Mound Builders » précolombiens, en passant par le combat acharné entre un T. Rex et des hommes des cavernes, les visions des mondes anciens et « perdus », flottant entre les faits et la fantaisie, ont longtemps exercé une fascination sur les artistes et les acteurs de la culture visuelle en Amérique. Comment ceux-ci ont-ils dépeint la Préhistoire et à quelles fins ? Comment l’imaginaire de la Préhistoire, du XVIIIe siècle aux années 1980, a-t-il contribué à de nouvelles conceptualisations de la culture, du temps, et de l’espace ?

Dès les premiers contact entre les Amérindiens et les peuples du « Vieux Monde », les Amériques ont posé un problème aux récits établis du « deep time ». Il s’agissait d’un « Nouveau Monde », apparemment sans histoire écrite, qui s’inscrivait difficilement dans les récits bibliques. Cette incertitude, couplée aux révolutions culturelles du temps et de l’espace qui marquèrent les siècles suivant l’expansion commerciale et impériale européenne, eut pour effet de produire une riche imagerie spéculative du temps profond. Comme l’a montré l'école « mythe et symbole » des études américaine dans les années 1950 et 1960, le temps mythique a joué un rôle important dans la culture américaine ; on en retrouve la trace dans les visions d'un Eden mécanique qui combinerait la technologie avec le pastoral, échappant à l'histoire et aux conflits sociaux de l'Europe. Au cours des XIXe et XXe siècles, l’évolution des sciences et de la culture populaire a accéléré un processus d’invention de mondes « anciens » et « perdus » , un imaginaire qui visait à donner un sens à l’idée de nouveau monde. Qu’ils soient plongés au fond des océans, cachés sous la terre ou perdus dans la jungle, ces mondes pouvaient être ramenés à la surface au travers des images.

Ce colloque abordera les images de la préhistoire et leur fonctionnement dans différents médias et dans des contextes artistiques et non artistiques. En se concentrant sur la façon dont ces images participèrent à la création d’un monde imaginaire spécifique, support pour l’invention d’origines lointaines et de temps profonds. Nous nous interrogerons sur ces questions en mettant en jeu les relations entre la production, la circulation et la réception de ces images, ainsi qu’en analysant les liens qui unissent ces mêmes images aux médias, en prenant en considération les questionnements à la fois formels et temporels qui en résultent.

Articles by Jonathan Dentler

He received his PhD, as well as a Visual Studies Graduate Certificate, from the University of Sou... more He received his PhD, as well as a Visual Studies Graduate Certificate, from the University of Southern California. His dissertation is a global history of wire photography services.

Transbordeur : Photographie Historie Société, 2019

Comment la telephotographie s’est-elle developpee dans l’entre-deux-guerres, en meme temps que la... more Comment la telephotographie s’est-elle developpee dans l’entre-deux-guerres, en meme temps que la presse quotidienne illustree et les services de photographie de presse transnationaux ? L’article de Jonathan Dentler analyse la facon dont, au lendemain de la Premiere Guerre mondiale, la telephotographie est adoptee par la presse, et comment cette nouvelle technologie est devenue un point de mediation entre les esperances et les inquietudes suscitees par l’avenement d’un monde nouveau caracterise par la reduction des distances, la multiplication des liens a l’echelle mondiale et l’acceleration du rythme de la vie quotidienne. L’article questionne l’Atlas Mnemosyne de l’historien de l’art Aby Warburg, les photographies de l’arrivee de Charles Lindbergh a Paris en 1927 et les images de l’explosion du Hindenburg envoyees de New York a Berlin et montre que la teletransmission des images a permis a la photographie de depasser la foncti

Transatlantica: American Studies Journal, 2022

Jointly funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Laboratoire d’e... more Jointly funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Laboratoire d’excellence « Les passés dans le présent », The Early Conflict Photography 1890—1918 and Visual AI (EyCon) project aims to harness AI-reliant computer vision tools to analyze a large corpus of conflict photography, particularly concerning colonial warfare. The research group is partnered with several UK and French archives and museums, including La Contemporaine, which notably holds the fonds Valois, containing the photographs produced by the Section photographique de l’armée (SPA) during World War One. Using both Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for already-digitized collections, as well as scanning of collections that have not already been digitized, Eycon has assembled a very large corpus of images, and is now advancing to the computing stage. Computation involves training a neural network to recognize various features of the images in the corpus, with the aim of enriching their associated metadata, increasing their navigability, and making them more useful for researchers and the public. This short report explains the project’s goals, with a focus on the fond Valois. In particular, it considers how machine learning holds the potential for new contributions to existing scholarship on photography, personal presentation, and emotion, as well how the SPA attempted to shape the image of the war for domestic and international audiences.

Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2024

In recent decades, archival institutions have digitized an enormous quantity of material under th... more In recent decades, archival institutions have digitized an enormous quantity of material under the rubric of open access, including from colonial archives. However, much of the most sensitive material from these collections remains undigitized or difficult to discover and use. More recently, a critical reconsideration of open digital access has also taken place, particularly when it comes to sensitive material from the colonial archive. Collectively, this has created a situation in which the colonial photography archive risks becoming overly sanitized as well as difficult to navigate and analyze. In this article, we propose that critical and transparent multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) offers a way to improve access to colonial archives for researchers and the public, without losing sight of the need for ethical approaches to sensitive visual materials. The EyCon (Early Conflict Photography and Visual AI) project assembled a large database of sensitive visual materials from colonial conflicts and developed experimental multi-modal computer vision tools with which to analyze it. Though this tool has not yet been applied at scale or quantitatively compared with other approaches, we are able to propose modes of inquiry for other researchers to explore as they create new research tools. On a more hypothetical or theoretical level, we consider how the use of computational tools to facilitate access to and analysis of sensitive historical materials is compatible with or even beneficial for more ethical approaches to such materials. We conclude with several promising areas for critically integrating AI into the digital colonial archive, while also expanding on some limitations of such techniques.

Papers by Jonathan Dentler