From May 15-June 27, 2015, I had a visiting research fellowship at the Humanities Research Centre at The Australian National University, Canberra. It was such an honor to meet Will Christie, Desmond Manderson, Alastair Maclachlan and especially Martyn Jolly, a scholar of phenomenal research on photography and magic lantern and Read more…
I write about the FBI’s use of state-of-the-art facial recognition technology in its Next Generation Identification System, the world’s biggest biometric database. The new system has come under fire from privacy rights advocates who fear that federal databases will eventually be cross-referenced against other data, connecting faces to medical, financial, Read more…
The Gothic cathedral and the Victorian railway terminus both served as primary focal points of artistic and engineering activity. Photography’s history in the first century after its invention in 1839 offers a record of the railway station’s importance as a new source of photographic collaboration, and a window through which Read more…
In 2014, I was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of York (History of Art Department), and conducted research on the role of photography and visual culture of the Tichborne Claimant legal case in the late 19th century. My family joined me and we had an amazing year in beautiful Read more…
It was a huge pleasure to be an external faculty scholar affiliated to the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK for 3 years, 2014-17. The Centre, whose inaugural director was Prof. Elizabeth Edwards, has grown into a dynamic graduate program led by scholars Kelley Wilder, Read more…
“In a time when the world and its phenomena have been photographed many times over, what can we learn by revisiting the early days of photography, when strange, dramatic, and novel images served as both evidence and entertainment?” The article may be accessed through Aperture’s Archive here.
Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006 (paperback, 2013). In the late nineteenth century, new applications of photography sparked a complex debate about scientific practices and the value of the photographic images in the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge, from medicine and Read more…
Tucker, “Eye on the Street: Photography in Urban Public Spaces,” Radical History Review 114: Walkers, Voyeurs and the Politics of Urban Space, eds. Daniel Walkowitz & Robyn Autry (Fall 2021): 7-18. [Free online access through RHR]. Abstract: “Some of the most powerful historical images of streets and the people traversing Read more…
The question of whether life could be detected on other bodies in the universe is among the oldest and most enduring, and one of the first questions to which the telescope was applied when it was invented around 1608. In this op-ed, I write about the great thinkers over the Read more…
