In 2025, I had the opportunity to serve as a visiting researcher at Platform ARCHIVO Photography and Visual Culture Research Platform, directed by Ana Catarina Pinho. The year was dedicated to the theme “the archive as model and source”.
As part of this year-long programmatic project, Gaëlle Morel and I published a shortened English version of our article on the slide libraries formerly used for teaching art history in Canada. “SUSAN DOBSON: Slide⏐Lecture. A Model and a (Res)source for Archival Critique in Contemporary Photography” can now be read here:
“In 2011, Canadian photographer Susan Dobson learned that the slide library used for art history courses at the University of Guelph, where she had been teaching photography since 2002, was about to be thrown away. Established in the late 1960s, slide libraries were widely used by instructors in the 1980s, when Dobson herself was a student at the School of Image Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU). Later, as a visual arts professor, she made use of this teaching resource, made available to faculty members to support their lectures. The creation of these image collections was entrusted to staff responsible for reproducing images from existing publications. At TMU, this visual resource grew significantly between 1978 and the early 2000s, with the inventory expanding from 26,000 to nearly 180,000 slides. By the 1990s, these collections began to appear obsolete with the rise of digital image projection, which became the preferred method in academic teaching. Confronted with the imminent disappearance of these objects, Dobson experienced a strong emotional reaction. She stored part of the endangered slide library in her office and, between 2016 and 2021, embarked on a broader photographic project focused on the slide libraries of the universities of Guelph, York, Concordia, and Toronto. The series explores the slide carousels, cabinets, and storage drawers that were once housed in university libraries and research centres. It was exhibited in 2021 at The Image Centre, curated by Gaëlle Morel in collaboration with Valérie Matteau…”
Thanks to Ana Catarina Pinho, Laura Singeot and the editorial board.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Audrey Leblanc (13 février 2026). “A Model and a (Res)source for Archival Critique in Contemporary Photography”, PhotoFile Essay on ARCHIVO, 2026. Le Clin de l'oeil. Consulté le 20 mai 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/1646g