Description

Catherine E. Clark is Assistant Professor of French Studies in the Global Studies and Languages Section at MIT. She is a cultural historian who specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France and visual culture.

Her current book project, Paris and the Cliché of History, explores the intersection of the history of Paris and the history of photography. It tells the story of the various uses of photos as documents of the capital’s past from the establishment of Paris’s municipal historical institutions (the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris) to the amateur photo contest “C’était Paris en 1970,” which created an archive of 100,000 pictures of the city. The project combines the history of collecting photographs with a consideration of the theoretical assumptions that underpinned their use, alongside prints and paintings, in illustrated books, historical exhibitions, and commemorations. Her article about photographs of the Liberation of Paris is forthcoming in the American Historical Review. Clark is also currently writing about films shot in and around Paris during the 1970s.