An exploration of orientalist photography

Event Date: Friday, June 13 · 5 - 7pm CDT

Join us in Breasted Hall for a conversation with Liz Siegel, Chief Curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum; Nicolas Revire, the Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Research Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago; Laetitia Zecchini, senior researcher at the CNRS and director of the UChicago-CNRS Humanities International Research Lab and Marc Maillot, Director and Chief Curator of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures Museum.

Elizabeth (Liz) Siegel leads the Curatorial and Collections departments at the Milwaukee Art Museum, spearheading the exhibitions program and overseeing acquisitions for the collection. As Chief Curator, she is part of the Museum’s senior leadership team and seeks to foster encounters that invite visitors to think and feel differently about the world. Siegel has an international reputation as a leader who has helped shape the field. Prior to joining the Museum in 2023, she served as Curator of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she worked for 25 years. Her scholarly contributions include André Kertész: Postcards from Paris (2021), the first exhibition dedicated to the photographer’s carte postale prints; The Photographer’s Curator: Hugh Edwards at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1959–1970 (2017); Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage (2009), a landmark project showcasing the whimsical inventions of aristocratic women; and the book Galleries of Friendship and Fame: A History of Nineteenth-Century American Photograph Albums (Yale University Press, 2010), an academic study that has become a touchstone for scholarship on family albums. Siegel received her bachelor of arts in the history of art from Yale University and her PhD in art history from the University of Chicago.

Laetitia Zecchini is a senior researcher at the CNRS and director of the UChicago-CNRS Humanities International Research Lab. Her work focuses on modern and contemporary Indian literature and postcolonial modernisms and print cultures. In 2023, Laetitia restarted the IRNPPC (The International Research Network on Postcolonial Print cultures), expanding collaborations between eight academic institutions: CNRS (France), the University of Chicago, Newcastle University, University of the Witwatersrand, NYU and NYU Abu Dhabi, Jadavpur University and the Center for Studies in Social Sciences (Kolkata). This network addresses the interaction of print and other media associated with visuality in the field of postcolonial print cultures, focusing on practices of exhibition-making and publishing.

Nicolas Revire is a specialist in Southeast Asian Buddhism and started his research fellowship at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023, after lecturing at the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Thammasat University, Thailand. As a senior research fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago, he brings expertise from two decades of teaching and research in Bangkok. The speaker has published extensively on the subject and is currently the managing editor of the Journal of the Siam Society. With a research focus on Buddhist iconography and Dvāravatī with special focus on Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia, Nicolas Revire has translated numerous scholarly publications from Thai and English into French. Passionate about 19th century photography, he published multiple articles related to the question of orientalism and the notion of realism in visual arts. Born in France, Revire holds a doctoral degree from Paris, specializing in Hindu-Buddhist art of early Southeast Asia, particularly pre-modern Thailand, Myanmar, and Cambodia.

Marc Maillot curated the special exhibition Staging the East, orientalist photography in Chicago collections. His interest for early photography stems from his PhD, as he explored the photographic funds of The University of Pennsylvania, The Garstang Museum of Archaeology or the Louvre Museum focused on archaeological excavations from the 1910’s to 30’s in the Middle Nile Valley. His goal was to reconstruct cultural traits and salient architectural patterns on urban sites from archival documents and photographic prints compared to recent excavations. This investigation was complemented by his work with local craftsmen in Sudan from 2014 to 2022, whose knowledge and skills are threatened by the current conflict.

The panelists will reflect on the exhibition and share their experience in a conversation moderated by Marc Maillot, diving into photographic collections in Chicago Museums.

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