James Michael Levinsohn

PhD Candidate
james.levinsohn@mail.utoronto.ca

Campus

  • Downtown Toronto (St. George)

Fields of Study

  • Aesthetics
  • Art Historiography
  • European
  • Modern/Contemporary
  • North American
  • Photography
  • Queer theory

Areas of Interest

  • History, theory, and criticism of photography
  • Photography as contemporary art (post-1960)
  • Documentary photography
  • Realism after modernism
  • German modern/contemporary art
  • Theories of space, embodiment, sensoriality, and subjectivity
  • Psychoanalysis and its legacy
  • Postmodernism and postmodernity
  • Urbanism and urban space
  • Vernacular photography
  • Gender/sexuality, esp. sexual minority cultures
  • Post-1945 Europe 

Working Dissertation

Title

Realism Beyond Redemption: Wolfgang Tillmans and Photography after Postmodernism

Supervisors

Louis Kaplan

Description

"Realism Beyond Redemption: Wolfgang Tillmans and Photography after Postmodernism" historically situates Wolfgang Tillmans' reimagining of the paradigm of photographic realism in the 1990's, arguing for its status as a crucial rejection of the premises of critical postmodernism. I examine it in both the context of its precedents in German twentieth-century photography (especially the interwar Neue Sachlichkeit and Neues Sehen movements and their installation strategies) and of the supposed emergence of a new post-national liberal consensus in a unifying Europe post-1989, then positioned as an "end of history", whose utopian promise Tillmans' work both incarnates and complicates, especially from the perspective of a present that seems to have proven that promise's implausibility. Ultimately, I conclude Tillmans' reinvention of photographic realism depended on another reinvention: of the photographic subject as ungoverned by the definitionally unfulfillable psychoanalytic notion of desire, a reconception only possible in the putatively post-historical moment of the 1990's.

Biography

James Michael Levinsohn is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on figurative realism's persistent reinvention in photography and other media over the course of the twentieth century in Europe and North America, especially insofar as its deployment has reflected new historical conditions of sexuality, subjectivity, and space (geopolitical, urban, and otherwise).

He holds a BA in Art History with Honours from the University of Chicago (2012) and an MA in Art History from Rutgers University (2017). He has held curatorial positions at the Roman Vishniac Archive of the International Center of Photography (ICP), Museum of Modern Art, and the Princeton University Art Museum and has taught a variety of undergraduate courses at Rutgers and the University of Toronto.

 

Selected Publications

  • Review of Art's Realism in the Post-Truth Era, eds. Marianne Boetzkes and Maryse Ouellet (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Co-written with Rupert Nuttle. RACAR: Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review 51 (forthcoming 2025). 
  • "'Unreal, Purely Formal Relations': Realism in Christian Schad's Drawings of Queer Nightspots for Ein Führer durch das ‘lasterhafte’ Berlin (1931)". Ikonotheka 2024 (32): 101–121. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31338/2657-6015ik.32.6.
  • Catalogue entries for "Untitled (urban panorama)" and "Untitled (Ice Houses)" by Catherine Opie. In The Public Image: Social Documentary Photography from the Collection of the Zimmerli Art Museum, edited by Donna Gustafson and Andres Mario Zervigon. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Dept. of Art History and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 2016, pp. 30–32. https://issuu.com/zimmerli/docs/ebook.zim_thepublicimage_b4.

Honours, Awards and Grants

  • Mary H. Beatty Fellowship, 2021-2022 and 2025-2026
  • University of Toronto-France International Doctoral Cluster Fellow, 2024
  • Stephen Vickers Memorial Award, 2025
  • Leonore V. Kinghorn Scholarship, 2025
  • W. Bernard Herman Fellowship, University of Toronto, 2021–22
  • SGS Research and Travel Conference Grants, 2022 and 2024

Education

MA, Rutgers University, Art History, 2017
BA, Art History with Honours, University of Chicago, 2012

Presentations

Chair and Introduction, "Beyond Paranoid and Reparative: New Methods in Photo-History" Session. 116th College Art Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL USA. 18 February 2026.
"'All Things Being Equal': Economies of Photographic Value in Wolfgang Tillmans' Burg (1998)". German Studies Association (GSA) 49th Annual Conference, Arlington, VA USA. "100 Years of Neue Sachlichkeit" Seminar. 22-25 September 2025.
"'Photography Without the Prick of Desire': Wolfgang Tillmans’ i didn’t inhale (1997) and the Post-Psychoanalytic Subject". 113th College Art Association Annual Conference, New York, NY, USA. "Ungovernable Bodies" Session. 13 February 2025.
“Sophie Calle’s Des histoires vraies: Rethinking the Photographic Body Beyond Presence”. 36th World CIHA Congress: Matter/Materiality, Lyon, France. 27 June 2024.
"What Queer Obscures: Photography in John Jack Baylin's Bum Bank." Association for Art History (AAH) 50th Annual Conference, Dept. of History of Art, University of Bristol, UK. "Queer Photography Now" Session. 3 April 2024.

Administrative Service

Co-Chair, Wollesen Memorial Symposium Committee, University of Toronto Dept. of Art History, 2019-20
Wollesen Memorial Symposium Committee Member and Respondent, 2021-23
Social Coordinator, Graduate Union of Students of Art History, 2022-23
Managing Editor, Rutgers Art Review Volume 33/34 (2018)
Co-Chair, Distinguished Speaker Series and Student/Faculty Symposium Committees, Rutgers University Dept. of Art History, 2015-17

Cohort

  • 2019-2020