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Prof Patrizia Di Bello

Positions held:
  • Professor of History and Theory of Photography, School of Historical Studies
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  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    I have a background in practical photography, but after working for a number of years (I started as a teenager assisting photographer Maria Mulas in Milan) and studying for a BA in Photography, Film and Television at the London College of Printing (now LCC), I realised I was more interested in thinking and researching existing photographs than making new ones, so I studied for an MA in History of Art at Birkbeck. Writing my first essay made me realise that this was a much more joyous and rewarding way to explore my fascination with photography and the different ways and modes in which people interact with it, physically and intellectually.

    My PhD, with Professor Lynda Nead, examined nineteenth-century women's albums, in particular those combining photography with other media and using forms of photo-collage. It has been published as Women's Albums and Photography in Victorian England: Ladies, Mothers and Flirts (Ashgate, 2007). This work also features in Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, the catalogue of the exhibition organised by the Art Institute of Chicago (Yale University Press, 2009). 

    I have been appointed full-time at Birkbeck in 2003, and I am currently Head of the Department of History of Art, where I teach the history and theory of photography with undergraduate and postgraduate students ('with' because for me, teaching, learning and research work best as a collective and collaborative activity), and (when I am not Head of Department) I convene the MA in History of Photography, one of the few in the country. I co-direct, with Steve Edwards, the History and Theory of Photography Research Centre at Birkbeck, where I look after the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive.

    I am editor-in-chief of the quarterly History of Photography, and on the editorial board of the journals Art History and Photographies; I sit on the Research Advisory Panel of the National Portrait Gallery, London, and serve as a trustee of Mayday Rooms, London.

    My latest monograph is Sculptural Photographs: From the Calotype to Digital Technologies (Bloomsbury, 2018), which explores how sculpture has been not only a beautiful and convenient subject matter for photographs, or commercial and cultural opportunities for photographers in the market for art reproductions, but also an exemplar for thinking about photography as a medium based on mechanical means of production. Rooted in an understanding of the practical, social and aesthetic implications of photographic as well as sculptural technologies, my study demonstrates that photographs of sculpture are particularly useful in revealing how photography’s changing materialities shape the meaning of images as they are made, circulated, looked at, written about and handled at different historical moments.

    Curren research interests include the photographic culture of the magazines of second-wave feminism, and women and workers in nineteenth-century photography.

    Administrative responsibilities

    • Head of Department, History of Art

    Professional activities

    Editor-in-chief of the quarterly History of Photography

    Member of the editorial board of the journals Art History and Photographies

    Member of the National Portrait Gallery, London, Research Advisory Panel


    Trustee of the London-based charities Feminist Library and Mayday Rooms.

  • Research

    Research

    Research Centres and Institutes

  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Supervision

    Supervisions within Birkbeck:
    10

    Areas of research supervision:
    Projects related topically or methodologically to my research interests, including albums, photographically illustrated publications, photography and sculpture / sculpture as photography.
    Photography and its representations.
    Aspects of visual culture since the nineteenth, with particular reference to issues of gender and femininity.
    Art and mechanical reproduction.
    Photography, art and politics in the late twentieth century, including second-wave feminism.
    I have supervised PhD students working on a range of subjects including: Photographic Materiality in 20th Century Exhibitions; Amateurs and Colour Photography in Britain 1906 to 1932; The Institutions of Women's Photography in the UK, 1979-2003; Picturing Place in the Post-Photographic Era - Google Street View at the Alhambra; The April Photo Society and the challenge of independent photography in post-1976 China; and John Thomson in the Pearl River Delta, 1868-1870 - Redefining the photographic encounter, a Bloomsbury Scholarship with Professor Shane McCausland (SOAS).

    Current doctoral researchers

    • EDUARDO ARMENTIA
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
    • FRANCESCA ISSATT
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor, onwards
      Title of thesis:
      Women Photographing Architecture: The Royal Photographic Society, knowledge sharing networks and changing gender roles (1920-1939)
      Description:

      Drawing upon the Royal Photographic Society collection this thesis studies women photographers who took architectural images between 1920 and 1939. It examines the role of camera clubs, exhibitions, and journals in shaping attitudes towards women working in architectural photography. It seeks to locate women architectural photographers in the context of shifting ideals of femininity and the ‘new woman’. The reception of their work at the RPS and in the wider photographic community will be studied.

      It investigates the language and categories used to describe architectural photography, including that of ‘record’ and ‘pictorial’, and how amateur photographers, specifically women, navigated these terms.The project will take a broad approach to definitions of architectural photography in order to showcase a diverse engagement with architecture by amateur photographers – this will cover images of the built environment, industrial images, interiors and exteriors, as well as tourist or travel photographs.

      Histories of architectural photography are dominated by accounts of men, whether as art photographers, owners of commercial firms, or photographers commissioned by architects. This project studies women who took architectural photographs before the recognised professionalisation of women in the field. By charting the work of such women, and their place in professional and amateur networks at the time, the research offers a new outlook on how women are framed in the history of architectural photography.

      In addition to the RPS collection The Historic England and Royal Institute of British Architects photo archives will also be consulted for examples of professional women architectural photographers working at the time. The research will reveal as yet unknown women photographers, and make use of fairly well-known photographers, to be used as case studies through which to tell a broader history of women and architectural photography.

    Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

    • LIZ JOHNSTON DREW
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Constructing Visibility: British Social Documentary Photography and Eco-Criticality during the Fossil Economy circa 1970-2020
      Awarded:
      2024
    • JANINE FREESTON
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Colour Photography in Britain 1906-1931: Exhibition, Technology, Commerce and Culture - the Dynamics that Shaped its Emergence
      Awarded:
      2022
    • CAROLINE MOLLOY
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Photography, Memory, Belonging: a study of transcultural identity mediated through studio photography
      Awarded:
      2021
    • GERRIE VAN NOORD
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor,
      Title of thesis:
      The Fringes: Publications on Art: Curatorial Intersections of Practices
      Awarded:
      2021
    • LAURIE TAYLOR
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Photographic Materiality in the Exhibition: Forming the Content
      Awarded:
      2019
    • MARTIN MULLOY
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Resisting Amnesia: April 1976 and the challenge to state control of China’s visual world
      Awarded:
      2019

    Teaching

    Teaching modules

    • MA Dissertation (AHVM019D7)
    • Debates in Art History (AHVM091S4)
    • Museum and Heritage Work Placement (ARVC054S7)
    • Art and Photography Since 1970 (ARVC143S7)
    • Frameworks: Histories and Theories of Art, Architecture, Photography (ARVC247S7)
    • Research Exercise (ARVC282S7)
  • Publications

    Publications

    Article

    Book

    Book Section

    Conference Item

    Editorial

  • Business and community

    Business and community

    Outreach

    George Vasey in conversation with Patrizia Di Bello on Jo Spence

    Heni Talk on 'Jo Spence: Cultural Sniper' during the exhibition I organised with a group of students in Birkbeck's Peltz Gallery Cultural Sniping in Spring 2018.

    Lecture at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art on 'Photography and the Modern Self', part of their series on Photography and its Histories.