Rupert Nuttle
Rupert Nuttle is a PhD candidate in the art history department at the University of Toronto. He studies photographs and other artefacts of visual culture from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His archival research is focused on locating historical instances where the medium of photography has been deployed in the interests, and at the intersections, of corporate-capitalist, colonial and imperialist social structures. Rupert holds a bachelor’s degree in fine art from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and a master’s degree in journalism from Carleton University. He worked as a freelance writer and editor before starting his doctorate at U of T.
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Research Area:
- 19th-century visual culture
- History and theory of photography
- Vexations, errata, and nonhuman agency in early photography
- Chronophotography and the moving image
- Photography, surveillance, and docile bodies
- Colonialism, settler colonialism, and decolonization
- History of science
- New materialisms
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"Corporate Photo Baroque: History Dreaming in the Goodrich Company Archive" takes up the project of critically retelling the early history of the B. F. Goodrich Corporation, a defunct American rubber company, through the lens of its understudied photographic records.
Across chapters that cover the neo-colonialism of rubber procurement, labour and commodification, factory buildings as mnemonic signs, and the public theatrics that bound private profits to a nationalistic polity, "Corporate Photo Baroque" deploys a materialist approach in the photographic archive to mount a structural critique of the birth of American corporate-imperialist aesthetics.