Photography’s Interdisciplinary Publics: A Tribute to Professor Andrea Noble

Abstract

Professor Andrea Noble was responsible for a substantial amount of the energy and enthusiasm behind the workshop from which the book —Photography and Its Publics—originates. Indeed, sensitivity to the flow and circulation of images emerged as a defining theme of Andrea’s engagement with photography. Andrea’s sensitivity to the importance of interdisciplinarity was further enhanced by her awareness of the presumed hierarchies that nevertheless persist both between academic disciplines and between the locations where academic knowledge is produced. She used her expertise in Latin American visual culture to challenge the emerging orthodoxies in the field of visual culture studies, dominated for her by Anglo-American and Euro-centric assumptions about the nature of cultural forms and cultural production in a globalized epoch. Andrea’s concern was with the ramifications of the Cold War in a Latin American context, and how photographs were caught up in the proxy wars, revolutionary struggles and counter-revolutionary repression that marked the region in the post-war period.