Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Douglas Nickel is the Andrea V. Rosenthal Professor of Modern Art in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and a specialist in the history of photography. Prior to arriving at Brown, he served as a curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and as Director of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. His book, Francis Frith in Egypt and Palestine (Princeton University Press, 2004), turns to cultural studies and art history in order to understand the political and theological implications of photographic picturemaking in the Holy Lands in the mid 19th century. Other published work extends this interest in photographic belief in more rhetorical, psychological, and phenomenological directions that can begin to account for the experience of the viewer in conceptual and historical terms. His project for the Cogut Institute, titled Photography, Art, and the Human Imagination, entails theorizing just what makes our individual responses to and experiences of the photograph so distinctive and difficult to articulate.