Kate Palmer Albers is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Arizona, where she teaches history and theory of photography, museum studies, and contemporary art at the graduate and undergraduate level. Previously, she worked in the photography departments at the Fogg Art Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and taught at Massachusetts College of Art and Boston University, where she earned her PhD in Art History.

Her current research outside of this writing project focuses on the role of ephemerality throughout the history of photography and proposes that the range of ways and reasons photographs disappear offers a counterpoint to the predominant theoretical modes of understanding the medium.

Albers has an ongoing interest, as well, in the intersection of photography, geolocational technology, and landscape representations. In this area, she organized the exhibition Locating Landscape: New Strategies, New Technologies at the Sam Lee Gallery in Los Angeles (2009) and participated in the NEH Summer Institute Mapping and Art in the Americas at the Newberry Library in Chicago (2010).

Books:

• Uncertain Histories: Accumulation, Inaccessibility, and Doubt in Contemporary Photography (University of California Press, 2015).
• Before-and-After Photography: Histories and Contexts, co-edited with Jordan Bear, forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press (2016).

Related Articles and Chapters:

• “Accessing the Landscape: Photography, Technology and Place Today” in Hans Hedberg, Gunilla Knape, Tyrone Martinsson, and Louise Wolthers, eds., Broken: Environmental Photography (Gothenburg, Sweden: Photography at Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg / Hasselblad Foundation and Art and Theory, 2014), 15-33. Projects include Nate Larson & Marni Shindelman, Bruce Myren, and the Degree Confluence Project.
• “Unseen Images: Gigapixel Photography and its Viewers,” Photographies special issue on “Surveillance and Place” (published online April 7, 2014; print edition followed)
• “Abundant Images and the Collective Sublime,” Exposure 46:2 (Fall 2013), 4-14. Artists include Penelope Umbrico, Gerhard Richter, Erik Kessels, Noah Kalina, Jamie Livingston, Nick Nixon, and Mark Klett & Byron Wolfe.
• “It’s Not an Archive”: Christian Boltanksi’s Les Archives de C.B. 1965-1988” Visual Resources 27:3 (August 2011), 249-266.
• “Cartographic Postings: GPS, Photography, and Landscape” Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism (March/April 2010). Artists include Andrew Freeman and Frank Gohlke.

Full CV