Lien, SigridChercheuse invitée (septembre-octobre)

Biographie

Sigrid Lien is professor in art history at the University of Bergen, Norway, where her research primarily has been focused on the history and theory of photography, but also on visual arts (modern and contemporary), visual culture and museology. Her most recent research activities include: Silent images, Strong Lives: Early woman photographers in Norway, The HERA- project Photographs, Colonial Legacy and Museums in Contemporary European Culture (PhotoClec) headed by Elizabeth Edwards, http://photoclec.dmu.ac.uk/, and Photography in Culture, funded by the Norwegian Research Council, http://solstorm.infomedia.uib.no/fotografiet/. Lien is currently heading the national project, Negotiating History: Photography in Samí Culture. She is also a member of the editorial advisory board of Photography & Culture.

Bibliographie

Sigrid Lien has published extensively on photography as situated in a wide range of cultural contexts. Among her most important publications are the first comprehensive Norwegian History of Photography (with Peter Larsen, 2007); a study on the photographic culture related to the Norwegian US-emigration, (Pictures of Longing, 2009 – soon to be published in English on Bloomsbury Academic); and the anthology Uncertain Images on the works of photographs in museums (co-edited with Elizabeth Edwards) in print, (2014). Recent articles: ‘Buying an instrument does not necessarily make you a musician’ Studio photography and the digital revolution, in Mette Sandbye and Jonas Larsen (ed.), Digital Snaps. The New Face of Photography (2013) and  ‘“Last seen alone on the prairie”: migration, photography, and the invisibility of women’, in: Tanya Sheenan (ed.) Photography, History, Difference, in print (2014).

Projet de recherche

During her stay at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art Lien will conduct in depth research on the photographic material that Roland Bonaparte brought back from his expedition to the Sámi areas in the north of Norway in 1884 – a series of collotypes now kept at the BnF collections on the Richelieu site.  She will look at this material in relation to the larger cultural and political context, included the relation to Bonaparte’s other expeditions, his writings, his membership in the Société de Géographie and to the ways in which the visual and textual material circulated in the French society and elsewhere - in publications and exhibitions. Furthermore the research to be conducted in the BnF collections will include searching for other visual and textual material related to Sámi history and culture – as it appears that French scholars and travellers for hundreds of years have shown a remarkable interest in the life of the indigenous people in the North of Europe.