I am Full Professor of Art History and am also cross-appointed to the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture (ICSLAC) and the School of Canadian Studies as well as being a Research Associate with both the Carleton Centre for Public History and the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre. Since 2020, I have also served as Associate Dean (Research and International) in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. https://carleton.ca/fass/research/
My own research centres on the history of photography. While I continue to write about other areas of photography’s history, since joining the Carleton faculty, I have mainly focused on interrogating the role photography plays in both supporting and disrupting settler colonialism in Canada. Under that theme, I coedited—with Dr. Andrea Kunard, Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Canada—the collected volume The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). I am also the author of The Official Picture: The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941-1971 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013). This is the first major study of the NFB Still Photography Division, an arbiter of federal values in mid-twentieth century Canada through its archive of some 250,000 photographs (largely made independently of cinematic production), hundreds of photo stories and numerous publications.
Since 2005, I have had the privilege of collaborating with various Inuit groups on photo-based history research. I have been an affiliate of Project Naming, the photo-based Inuit history research program established by the Inuit school Nunavut Sivuniksavut (NS) and Library and Archives Canada (LAC). From 2005 to 2014, I was Principal Investigator of the research program Views from the North, which was affiliated with Project Naming in a collaboration with NS, LAC, and Carleton Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre (GCRC). It was funded through two multi-year grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC). Views from the North extends Project Naming’s photographic identification program to include oral history interviews conducted by Inuit students with Elders in their home communities. My work with Project Naming culminated in the 2022 collected volume Atiqput: Inuit Oral History and Project Naming, coedited with Beth Greenhorn (LAC), Deborah Kigjugalik Webster (Inuk anthropologist and writer), and Christina Williamson (Cultural Mediations PhD). Atiqput features Inuit participants in Project Naming as well as some southern collaborators.
Since 2017, I have been engaged in a research project (again under SSHRCC funding) that examines and brings to light a little-known body of photographs from 1951-1958 by the Inuk hunter Joseph Idlout. This project culminates in an online exhibition and a monograph. The online exhibition, Ajjiliurlagit: The Photographs of Joseph Idlout has been curated with Inuk historian and educator Augatnaaq Eccles in collaboration with the Idlout family and the Nunavut Archives. The online exhibition features a series of essays by Augatnaaq putting Idlout’s photographs in the context of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (Inuit cultural values) as well as reminiscences by Idlout family. https://www.josephidloutphotographs.ca/en/home The forthcoming monograph The Hunter, the Crown and the Cameras: Joseph Idlout (c.1911/15-68) and the Image of Sangussaqtauliqtilluta includes testimonies by Idlout family and other community members and a chapter co-authored with Augatnaaq Eccles.
My most recent research project, “Inuit Re-envisioning Arctic Photography: International Collaboration and Colonial Critique,” is being undertaken in collaboration with Inuk anthropologist and writer Deborah Kigjugalik Webster, Inuk artist and Knowledge Keeper Bernadette Dean, and Dr. Michael Bravo, Professor of the History of Science and Geography, University of Cambridge. This research project addresses climate change in the Arctic through visual culture. This project engages Inuit artists to re-envision historic expedition photography from the collection of the University of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute. This project was initiated during a Cambridge Visual Culture fellowship that I held at the University of Cambridge during the fall 2023. https://www.cvc.cam.ac.uk/people/professor-carol-payne/
I supervise graduate theses and directed readings courses on topics related to the history of photography, settler colonialism, and visual culture in Canada. In addition, I teach a range of courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, including but not limited to the history of photography.