Associate Professor Donna Brett
Discipline of Art History
Member of the Vere Gordon Childe Centre (VGCC)
I am an Associate Professor in Art History and Chair of Discipline (2021-), specialising in the history of the photographic medium as it is employed within systems of power, media, and public spectacle. I came to the University of Sydney in 2014 after a career in the arts and art museum sector and this experience informs my research and teaching. I have published widely on photography including Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945 (Routledge 2016), edited volumes with Natalya Lusty of Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images (Routledge, 2019), which won the Best Anthology Category in the Association of Australian and New Zealand AWAPA 2020, and with Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Aesthetics in Transition: Visual Culture in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany (Bloomsbury, 2024).
I am an award-winning teacher and I love to teach students about art in the classroom and in the wild - in galleries, museums, artist spaces, and in our innovative fieldwork unit that takes place in Berlin. Working in the arts sector brings specialist knowledge to our prestigious postgraduate degree in art curating where students learn about curatorial methodologies through a collaborative approach that sees students learning in leading art institutions and art spaces.
Read about the Berlin Fieldwork unit and students' life changing experiencesHere and Here.
Units:
- ARHT1002 Shock of the Now: Art Since 1900
- ARHT3662 On Photography and the Wretched Screen
- ARHT3681 Art and the City: Berlin Fieldwork
- ARHT6932 Ways of Curating: Exhibitions and Display
I supervise honours, MPhil and PhD candidates in the areas of the history and theory of photography, modern and contemporary art, and curatorial studies.
Completed HDR Supervisions
- 2024 Yvette Hamilton, Photography at the Event Horizon: The Appearance and Disappearance of a Medium
- 2019 Fiona Davies, Cast a cold eye on life, on death: the Remake: Medicalised Death in ICU.
- 2019 Danica Knesevic, Holding space: The negotiation of self and other in performative art practice through the lens of caregiving
- 2017 Sally Brand, To Exceed the Boundaries of Language: Text in the Visual Art Practice of Contemporary Artists Gordon Bennett, Shane Cotton and Tony Albert (MPhil)
A Tyranny of Intimacy: Stasi Surveilliance & its Photographic Afterlife.
In its heyday from the 1960s to 1980s, the Ministry of State Security for the German Democratic Republic, commonly known as the Stasi, executed a mass-surveillance machine that recorded the everyday activities of its citizens and foreign interests. In producing one of the world’s largest archives of surveillance records the Stasi’s photographic practice and its instrumental mechanisms remain a significant testament to the intrusive observations of life in the GDR. Through key studies from its archive of two million photographs,A Tyranny of Intimacyprovides new insights into Stasi surveillance practice, its photographic impetus, subjects, aesthetics, and materiality. The project examines largely unpublished photographic records of surveillance operations and its mechanisms, including sustained analysis of previously unrecovered surveillance activities, and key examples of escape attempts from the GDR. In doing so, itunveils the inherent silences of the archive.
In foregrounding the archive’s material and residual effects, the project expands our understanding of Stasi surveillance practices through close analysis of photographic methods and mechanisms such as material and chemical damage, the destruction of files, and archival traces. This is complemented by key examples of the archive’s afterlife in the work of contemporary German photographers whose reframing of the archive offers a reparative approach to the Stasi’s unsettling visual legacy. Against the grain of seeing the archive as historically contained, the project instead offers a timely critique of its relevance to our surveillance-saturated world.
Accidents, Anarchism, Calamity: Picturing British Disaster 1864-1939. The mutual development of modernity with the photographic medium in turn-of-the-century Britain intersected with events of anarchy, natural and industrial disasters, urban tragedies, and a global pandemic. From the Clerkenwell explosion and mining disasters to World War I Zeppelin raids, the Spanish influenza and the Crystal Palace fire, the media recorded such events for the public in news articles increasingly accompanied by visual media such as drawings, engravings and later - photographs. This research project considers the ways in which the visual record was used to inform the public of such events, and the changing aesthetics of such images driven by technological advancements, public desire, and media practice. Enhancing the sense of spectacle driven by media and political propaganda, a burgeoning visual culture brought catastrophe and disaster into the homes of millions via the production of stereo views, postcards, and the illustrated news.
Modernist Photobooks, Propaganda and the Everyday. Supported as a Sloan Fellow in Photography at Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Trinity College) 2023-2024, this project will study part of the substantial collection of over 2000 photobooks generously donated in 2020 by Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey. The project will study photobooks in the collection by select photographers/artists whose work engages with modernist aesthetics and modes of representation to image the everyday. This ranges from surrealist aesthetics of the extraordinary in everyday life to representations of work, machines, industry, science, nature, and advertising, indicating the plethora of photographic output and diversity of practice in the modernist period. The second intersecting area of inquiry is to study the photobook’s capacity for reproduction and vast dissemination, utilising modernist aesthetics with political messaging or propaganda. This double-faceted research inquiry offers a unique means to study the interconnections between Modernism, photography and the public sphere.
BOARD/COMMITTEE MEMBERSHIP (selection).
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Research Leader of the Photographic Cultures Research Group, 2014-
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Editorial Committee Member, Visual Culture and German Contexts Series, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018-
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Australian & New Zealand Journal of Art, Editorial Committee and Reviews Editor, 2013–2018
- AICA Australia, International Art Critics Association, 2009–2018
- Art Association of Australia & New Zealand, 2003-2013
Membership:
- Art Association of Australia and New Zealand.
- Association of International Art Critics, AICA Australia.
- Association of Art Historians, UK.
- College Art Association, USA.
- German Studies Association, USA
- 2023-24 Sloan Fellowship in Photography, Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford (Trinity).
- Awarded Best Anthology forPhotography and Ontology: Unsettling Imagesco-edited with Natalya Lusty (Routledge 2019), in the Association of Australian and New Zealand AWAPA (Art Writing and Publishing Awards) 2020.
- Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Imagesco-edited with Natalya Lusty (Routledge 2019), nominated for the Krazna Krauss Photography and Moving Image Book Awards, 2019.
- FASS Teaching Excellence Award, 2018.
| Project title | Research student |
|---|---|
| Out of the Closet and Into the Archive: Queer Photographers in 1970s-1980s Sydney | Aiden MAGRO |
| Silence in Australian and Nordic art | Nina STROMQVIST |
| Unsettling: Contemporary post-colonial art and the promise of decolonisation | India URWIN |
Selected publications
(TBC, 2019)
(2018)
(2016)
(Routledge, 2016)
(2015)
(2014)
(2014)
Publications
Selected Grants
2017
- The surveillance methods of the Ministry for State Security (Stasi), Brett D, Australian Academy of the Humanities/Ernst & Rosemarie Keller Award
- Photographing Home: Surveillance and Containment in Divided Germany , Brett D, School of Literature, Art and Media/SLAM Research Support Scheme
2016
- Witnessing the Archive: Photography and the Berlin Wall, Brett D, School of Letters, Art and Media/Art History and Theory Quality Article Submission Incentive Scheme
Grants and Scholarships (selection)
- 2023-24 Sloan Fellowship in Photography, Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford (Trinity)
- 2017, Ernst and Rosemarie Keller Award, The Australian Academy of the Humanities
- 2013, Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, Career Development Scholarship
- 2012, Australia Council for the Arts, Presentation and Promotion Grant. Together<>Apart, AAANZ Conference
- 2023, 2019 SACE Mobility Fund
- 2020, PG Unit Development Grant
- 2019, 2018, 2017 SLAM Research Support Scheme
- 2017, Educational Innovation Grant, Objects and Problems: Transforming Learning in Art History with Prof. Mark Ledbury and Dr. Stephen Whiteman
Symposium/Conference Papers (International recent selection)
- Invited Speaker: ‘Modernist Photobooks, Propaganda and the Everyday,’ Weston Library, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, 27 February 2024.
- 'A Tyranny of Intimacy: Photography & Stasi Surveillance,' German Studies Association Conference, Montreal, Canada, October 2023.
- Public Lecture: 'A Tyranny of Intimacy: Photography & Stasi Surveillance,'Barber Lecture Theatre, Birmingham University, Dept of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies, England, 14 June, 2023 LINK
- Keynote address: 'Moholy-Nagy: Photography, Light, Space, and Time,' Times of Metaphor: A Symposium on the Temporal, Metaphorical, and the Still and Moving Image, Royal College of Art, London UK, 8 July, 2022. https://timesofmetaphor.wixsite.com/symposium.
- Session Chair: Photographic History without Photographs, Photographic History Research Conference, De Montfort University, Leicester, 13-14 June 2022
- 'Catastrophe & Calamity: Picturing British Disaster,' Disaster Discourse: Representations of Catastrophe, English Department, University of Bucharest, 2-4 June 2022. https://engleza.lls.unibuc.ro/conferinte/
- ‘Operation Overlord: Civilian Photography and Artistic Mediation’, Photographic Digital Heritage: Institutions, Communities and the Political, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, Oct 2021.
- ‘The Doubled Self: Shadow Play, Photography, Surrealism’German Studies Association, Indianapolis, Oct 2021.
Australasia
- ‘Anarchy and Calamity: Picturing British Disaster’, Impact: AAANZ Conference, University of Sydney, December 2021
- Research Seminar: At Home in the World, Donna West Brett, Kathleen Davidson, Mark de Vitis, and Mary Roberts 5 November 2020.
- ‘Roland Barthes and Lost Images’, Light Matters Symposium, UTS, Sydney, Aug 2019.
- ‘Moholy-Nagy’, Modernism Roundtable, UTS, Sydney July 2019.
- ‘Moholy-Nagy’s Utopian Photographic Vision,’ session Art and Revolution in Europe between 1918 and 1925, AAANZ, RMIT Melbourne, 5-8 December 2018.
- ‘Inadequate Images: Destruction and Redaction in the Stasi Archive,’ What is a document? A workshop on documentation, records and evidence, University Technology, Sydney 8-9 November 2018.
In the media
- Brett, D. The sensuous, yet unsettling: remembering the groundbreaking Australian photography Rosemary Laing,The Conversation, May 29, 2024.
- Brett, D. How the poetically-charged art of Tacita Dean gives its audience a moment for stillness and time, inThe Conversation, 11 Dec, 2023.>3,300 readers.https://theconversation.com/how-the-poetically-charged-art-of-tacita-dean-gives-its-audience-a-moment-for-stillness-and-time-219485
- Brett, D. Policing the Berlin Wall: the ghostly photos taken by the Stasi’s hidden cameras, inThe Conversation, 6 November 2019.>50,000 readers.https://theconversation.com/policing-the-berlin-wall-the-ghostly-photos-taken-by-the-stasis-hidden-cameras-126264
- Brett, D. Derrière le mur de Berlin: les clichés fantômes pris par les appareils photo cachés de la Stasi, inThe Conversation, French Edition, 8 November, 2019.>70,000 readers.https://theconversation.com/derriere-le-mur-de-berlin-les-cliches-fantomes-pris-par-les-appareils-photo-caches-de-la-stasi-126560
- Brett D. 30 år efter Berlinmurens fald: Forsker fortæller om de spøgelsesagtige Stasi-fotos, inVidenskab, Denmark, 22 November 2019. https://videnskab.dk/kultur-samfund/30-aar-efter-berlinmurens-fald-forsker-fortaeller-om-de-spoegelsesagtige-stasi-fotos
