Wardman Art Center 562.907.5172 kalbers@whittier.edu
Contemporary art & visual culture; the visual experience of social media; visual activism; gender representation & visibility; racial equity in museums & cultural representation; public monuments and public space; public writing & scholarship; photographic studies; family & personal photography
Kate Palmer Albers (she/hers) teaches classes at Whittier College on the history and theory of photography, visual culture, new media, and contemporary art. Her most recent book, The Night Albums: Visibility and the Ephemeral Photograph (UC Press, 2021), focuses on the role of ephemerality throughout the history of photography. The concept of ephemerality encompasses artists’ projects that engage with popular modes of contemporary media technology within a deeply networked culture (GPS, Twitter, virtual reality, GIFs, data storage, the community-based and democratic promises of Wikipedia, etc.) and extends back through to the earliest days of the medium.
Her writing has addressed photography and digital abundance, multi-gigapixel photography, and contemporary artists’ archival projects. Her online writing project, Circulation/Exchange: Moving Images in Contemporary Art, is devoted to contemporary art practices that engage with intersections of physical and immaterial photographic images, and was supported by an Arts Writers Grant in 2015 from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation.
She has ongoing interests in the roles of narrative, biography, and archive in relation to visual art and personal photographs; the intersection of photography, geolocational technology, and landscape representations; and the impacts of emerging digital technologies on art, individuals, and society.
Professor Albers’ current projects include writing a fictional version of The Night Albums; a series of essays on “difficult” images that move through different mediums; and a research project on transgender representations in photography.
