Nina Lager Vestberg

Nina Lager Vestberg was educated in the UK, where she studied photography and multimedia at the University of Westminster (BA Hons), and history of art at Birkbeck College, London (MA and PhD). She teaches and researches visual culture, with a particular focus on photography.

Co-founder of the Ecology, Environment, Culture Network (EECN), which launches in Trondheim on Thursday 24 May 2012. This research network is funded by the Research Council of Norway through its SAMKUL-programme.

Current projects

1) Ethical and Environmental Aspects of New Media Technologies  – an interdisciplinary project which will examine the environmental and ecological aspects of contemporary media culture. This project has received funding from the Norwegian Media Authority's fund for applied media research and is conducted in cooperation with IKM colleague Jon Raundalen.

2) "The Memory of Photography" (working title) – a book about the impact of digitisation on photographic archives and documents. Preliminary research for this project was supported by a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the J. Paul Getty Foundation in the academic year 2007-08, and findings from the early stages of this project have already been published in article form (see below).

3) Photography and the Production of Space – a project in collaboration with Anna Dahlgren of Nordiska museet / Stockholm University and Dag Petersson of The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art School of Architecture. The project explores the role of photography in constructing and producing space and spatiality, and is funded by the Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

 

Other research interests

Nina is engaged in questions of academic culture and disciplinarity. She is a founder member of Visual Culture in Europe - an international research network examining the development of visual culture as a field of inquiry across the arts and humanities in Europe. The network was launched at a conference in London in early 2010 and held its second conference in Barcelona during 2011. A third conference is planned for autumn 2012 and will take place in Trondheim.

Another main area of Nina's expertise is the visual culture of modern and contemporary France. She is particularly interested in the relationship between photography and cultural memory in the postwar period, a subject investigated in her 2006 doctoral thesis, entitled Souvenirs of the Street: The Representation of Paris in French Humanist Photography, c.1947-1962.

 

Areas of supervision

All aspects of photographic culture (history, theory, aesthetics, production, reception, dissemination, etc.); visuality, materiality and sensory experience; gender aspects of visual culture; urban visual culture; visual culture as an academic discipline.

 

Teaching interests

Nina teaches visual culture studies at MA level and the history and theory of photography at BA level. She is also committed to fostering academic writing and research skills through her teaching and supervision of students on the BA Dissertation course and the MA Introduction course.

 

Service

Programme Leader in Film and Visual Media Studies (2010).

  

Selected publications

"Index/Finger: Medium and Materiality in the Archives", in The Archive as Project - the Poetics and Politics of the (Photo)Archive, ed. Krzysztof Pijarski, Warsaw (Archeologia fotografii) 2011, 160-176.

"Robert Doisneau and the making of a universal cliché", History of Photography, 35:2 (2011), 157-165.

"Flytande fotografier. Originalitet och upphovsrätt i det digitala arkivet", chapter in I bildarkivet. Om fotografier och digitaliseringens effekter, eds. Anna Dahlgren and Pelle Snickars, Stockholm (Kungl. biblioteket) 2009, 33-58.

"From the filing cabinet to the internet: digitising photographic libraries", chapter in Fotografie als Instrument und Medium der Kunstgeschichte, ed. Costanza Caraffa, Berlin (Deutscher Kunstverlag) 2009, 129-144.

"Archival value: on photography, materiality and indexicality", Photographies, 1:1 (2008), 49-65.

"Photography as cultural memory: imag(in)ing France in the 1950s", Journal of Romance Studies, 5:2 (2005), 75-90.

 

Recent conferences and seminars

2011

Image=Gesture

University of Bergen

Paper: "Gesturing towards Art"

 

 

Media Acts

NTNU, Trondheim

Paper: "Towards a New Media Ecology" (with Jon Raundalen)

 

 

International Society for Cultural History Annual Conference

University of Oslo

Paper: "Medium, Materiality and the Miscellaneous: Some Thoughts on the Ordering of Photographic Archives"

 

The Archive as Project
Archaeology of Photography Foundation, University of Warsaw
Presentation: "Places, Pleasures, Possessions: the Material World of Archives"

Visualizing Europe: the Geopolitical and Inercultural Boundaries of Visual Culture
The Second Visual Culture in Europe Network Conference
University of Barcelona
Presentation: "The Visual Culture in Europe Questionnaire" (with Øyvind Vågnes, University of Bergen)

2010

Association of Art Historians Annual Conference
University of Glasgow
Paper: "Processing Waste: Disposing of Photography in Contemporary Art"

Visual Culture Studies in Europe
University of Westminster, London
Presentation: "Visual Culture in a Nordic Context"

The Ends of Photography
The National Library, Oslo
Presentation: 'Photography terminates where?'

2008
Stars and Stardom: the Liv Ullmann Anniversary Symposium
NTNU, Trondheim
Paper: 'Image rights (and wrongs): Celebrity culture and the circulation of star photographs'.

13th conference of the Norwegian Media Research Association
Lillehammer University College
Paper: 'Between archive and agency: the work of photography in the age of its digital replaceability'

Location: Association of Art Historians 34th Annual Conference
Tate Britain, London
Paper: ‘Lee Miller at the V&A: photography and technostalgia in the museum'.

Fotografi i arkiv (‘Photography in archives')
Seminar, Nordiska Museet, Stockholm
Presentation: ‘Fotografier i flyt: originalitet og opphavsrett i det digitale arkivet' (‘Photographs in flux: originality and copyright in the digital archive').

Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association Annual Conference
Cardiff University
Paper: ‘Relocating authenticity: photographs and copyright in the post-print era'.

2007
Locating Photography
2nd DCAPS conference, University of Durham
Paper: ‘Frenching photography: Doisneau and the making of a universal cliché'.

2006
Photography: Theory, Practice and Debate
Interdisciplinary seminar series,
Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London.
Paper: ‘Memory, materiality and mediology: re-searching the photographic archive'.

NORDIK 2006
8th triannual conference of Nordic art historians, Bergen, Norway.
Paper: ‘Touching pictures: on medium and materiality in visual culture'.

Nordic Network for the History and Aesthetics of Photography
4th annual conference, Helsinki, Finland.
Paper: ‘Material difference: seeing sense(s) in Stephen Poliakoff's Shooting the Past (1999)'.

Photography and the City International Conference
Dublin, Ireland.
Paper: ‘Dreaming Paris: photography and experience in the post-war city'.

Links:

• Nina Lager Vestberg i FRIDA
• Visual Culture Studies in Europe