Michelle Henning

• Chair in Photography and Media, University of Liverpool

I joined Liverpool University as Chair in Photography in Media in the Communications and Media Department, in September 2019. Previously, I was Professor in Photography and Cultural History at the University of West London, and before that I taught media and cultural studies at Brighton University and the University of the West of England in Bristol. I have also worked as an art director, artist and designer. I completed a BA in Fine Art and Art History at Goldsmiths, University of London, an MA in Social History of Art at the University of Leeds and a PhD by published works at Brighton University.

Since 1994, I have published research on photography, digital media, exhibitions and museums in edited collections and journals, authoring three books: Museums Media and Cultural Theory (Maidenhead: Open University Press 2006), Photography: The Unfettered Image (London: Routledge 2018) and the edited collection Museum Media (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2015, forthcoming in paperback). I have just completed a fourth book, an environmental history of photography, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025. My writing has appeared in the journals Media Theory, Digital Culture and Society, History of Photography, Visual Culture in Britain, photographies, New Formations, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Radical Philosophy. My research has been funded by the AHRC and the British Academy, and I sit on the editorial board of photographies journal. My design work includes the record covers of the PJ Harvey albums Let England Shake (2011), The Hope Six Demolition Project (2016) and I Inside the Old Year Dying (2023).

My research and teaching in the history and theory of photography stems from my interest in the place of photography in contemporary society. In particular, and throughout my career, I have been interested in the newness of digital photography, and the ways in which the history of chemical photography is reimagined in order to produce a particular understanding of contemporary practices. So part of my work involves a media archaeology of photography, focussing on developments in the first half of the twentieth century. Other writing and research addresses contemporary developments, situating photography within a larger media ecology that includes emoji and other icons, text and video. In particular, my work challenges the idea of photography as a medium that 'fixed' a fleeting reality, and the focus on the photographic print as the epitome of pre-digital practice. This is a core theme of my book Photography: the Unfettered Image (2018). In 2018 -19 I was awarded an AHRC leadership fellowship to produce and disseminate research on the Ilford Limited photographic company, in a project that focuses on the 1920s and '30s, but situates the history of photographic technologies within a larger history of sensory experience and everyday life. From this funded project came a series of workshops for artists and members of the public at The Photographer's Gallery, London, entitled The Stuff of Photography (July 2019), and a conference called Light Sensitive Material (November 2019), as well as a number of publications. Simultaneously, I wrote several essays on the role of the mass image in an economy centred on attention and data, and on changing concepts of photographic realism. In 2023 I was awarded research leave to write a new book on photography and atmosphere, which is broadly speaking an environmental history of photography, looking at its place in the larger chemical industries of the interwar period and in relation to ideas about breathable and emotional atmospheres.

• –present Chair in Photography and Media, University of Liverpool

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