Kate Palmer Albers is an Associate Professor of Art History at Whittier College in Los Angeles, where she teaches courses on visual culture, new media, contemporary art, and history and theory of photography.

Her current research 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, offering a counterpoint to the predominant theoretical modes of understanding the medium.

Albers has an ongoing interests, as well, in the intersection of photography, geolocational technology, and landscape representations; the roles of narrative, biography, and archive in relation to visual art; and emerging digital technologies and digital humanities approaches in art historical research and student learning.

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, (Bloomsbury, 2017).

Related Articles and Chapters:

• “Restricted Imagery, the Ephemeral Gesture, and ‘Live’ Photography”, chapter in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Visual Culture (forthcoming, Wiley-Blackwell), eds. Joan Saab, Catherine Zuromskis and Aubrey Anable. Addresses the work of Cassils and astronaut.io.
• “Hiding in Plain Sight: Mistakes, Mishaps, and Possibility in Algorithmic Vision”, Fotografija special issue: New Tools in Photography: from Google to the Algorithm (forthcoming). Edited by Paul Paper. Artists include Jenny Odell, Aaron Hegert, Zachary Norman, Thomas Albdorf, and Indré Šerpytytė.
• “Schematic Traces: Systems of Making”, chapter in Constructed: The Contemporary History of the Constructed Image in Photography Since 1990, eds. Marni Shindelman and Anne Massoni (Routledge, 2018). Addresses the work of Ed Ruscha, James Bridle, Mishka Henner, Taryn Simon & Aaron Swartz, Dina Kelberman, Hasan Elahi, Miranda July & Paul Ford, and The Hereafter Institute.
• “Default Delete: Photographic Archives in a Digital Age”, chapter in Photography & Failure, Kris Belden-Adams, ed. (Bloomsbury, 2016)
• “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 (updated September 2018)