The Frick Collection and the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University jointly sponsor the annual Symposium on the History of Art for graduate students in the northeastern United States. Speakers are nominated by their doctoral programs to present original research in any field of art history. The Symposium was held on April 3-4, 2025.
Ayesha Matthan, PhD candidate in Cornell’s History of Art, presented on “Photography, Gender, and Urban Dystopia in Twentieth-Century Bombay.”
Her presentation looks at how the entanglements of modernity and globalizing processes have rendered women as a voyeuristic spectacle in late 20th-century photography in Bombay (now Mumbai). Photography, along with advertising and cinema, produced an urban imaginary of cosmopolitanism and capital through the figure of these women that Andreas Huyssen has termed “cultural engineering” (Huyssen 2008). It both obscures and reveals urban dystopia and labor in the deindustrializing city. She argues that the nostalgic and enchanting trope of women as subjects in photography attempts to fill and overshadow “voids” (Huyssen 1997) of urban decline for a new vision of Bombay, that was simultaneously engulfed by regionalist, right-wing politics.
https://ifa.nyu.edu/events/frick.htm
