About this event
For over a decade, Nathaniel Brunt has explored the many ways communities affected by war and mass violence use photography to document their lives, histories, and struggles. His interdisciplinary work moves across photojournalism, archival practice and historical research, both making photographs and preserving and activating existing photographic archives and family collections.
In this lecture, Brunt traces the evolution of this photographic work through a discussion of his long-term projects with Yezidi communities in northern Iraq and the diaspora, and in the Kashmir Valley. Together these projects reveal the many roles photography can play in the aftermath of atrocity and conflict, as record and evidence, as tools of memorialsation and healing, and as a way communities engage with their difficult pasts and seek to shape their futures.
Speakers
Nathaniel Brunt is an interdisciplinary scholar, documentary photographer, and educator. His documentary and academic work critically examines modern armed conflict and the ways it is, and has been, represented photographically. Brunt completed his PhD in the joint Communication and Culture program at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University, with research supported by SSHRC and the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation.
Brunt's photographic work has been widely published and exhibited internationally. He is currently working on long-term projects in Northern Iraq and the Kashmir Valley and holds appointments as a KULA Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Victoria Libraries and a Hannah Arendt Fellow at TIB (Technische Informationsbibliothek – Leibniz-Informationszentrum Technik und Naturwissenschaften und Universitätsbibliothek) in Hannover, Germany. While diverse in format, his work is united by a commitment to producing projects that personalize the often-abstract nature of modern war.
Richard Ovenden OBE is Bodley’s Librarian and the Helen Hamlyn Director of the University of Oxford Libraries, and is responsible for their strategic oversight. He holds these posts alongside his role as Head of Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM), University of Oxford. He has published widely on the history of collecting, the history of photography and on professional concerns of the library, archive, and information world.
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