Elspeth H Brown
Biographic Data
| ID | 515489 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elspeth H Brown |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elspeth H |
| FAMILY NAME | Brown |
| SIGNATURE | BROWN E H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5977-7186 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 35 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Photography, Fashion, and Queer Worldmaking at the Pussy Palace
This article examines the queer and feminist politics of photography and fashion at the Pussy Palace, a series of trans-inclusive queer women’s bathhouse events held in Toronto from 1998 to 2014. Drawing on oral histories, archival materials, and visual culture analysis, we argue that photography and fashion functioned as critical technologies of queer and trans worldmaking. These practices enabled patrons to assert erotic autonomy, resist gender…
Sensing the Palace
This article explores how oral historians might more fully engage the sensory and affective dimensions of queer memory by centering the body as an archival site within the interview encounter. Drawing on the Pussy Palace Oral History Project -a public history initiative documenting Toronto's trans-inclusive lesbian bathhouse events and the 2000 police raid that followed-we introduce somatic elicitation , a contemplative interview technique design…
Toward an Ethos of Trans Care in Trans Oral History
This article examines trans oral history within the current context of both increased trans visibility and neoliberal storytelling. We ask whether trans oral history projects simply exemplify a trans visibility that intensifies surveillance and neoliberal representational politics, endangering the most marginalized of trans people, or, rather, offer a different kind of political intervention, the careful gathering of trans narratives as a form of…
Work! A Queer History of Modeling
From the haute couture runways of Paris and New York and editorial photo shoots for glossy fashion magazines to reality television, models have been a ubiquitous staple of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American consumer culture. In 'Work!' Elspeth H. Brown traces the history of modeling from the advent of photographic modeling in the early twentieth century to the rise of the supermodel in the 1980s. Brown outlines how the modeling industry…
The Cultural Politics of Aspiration
This article describes the relationship between family photography, oral history, and feeling. The authors explore questions about affect and family photography in relationship to black, queer relationality and to Asian, diasporic subjectivities. They argue that the affective modality of family photography for marginalized subjects is that of 'mixed feelings', which they analyze through a focus on 'aspiration' as central to the visual and affecti…
The Family Camera Network
Despite increasing interest in visual studies, diaspora studies, and oral history, critics have not fully accounted for the complexity of family photography. The Family Camera is a collaborative research project that collects domestic images and oral histories about them as a means of tracing new histories of migration. This article describes our work in collecting both family photographs and oral histories about them, with a specific focus on re…
Queering Glamour in Interwar Fashion Photography
Obviously, glamour is queer. But has this always been true? This article offers queer histories of capitalism and interwar glamour through an analysis of George Platt Lynes's photographic work. Lynes, an American photographer for Condé Nast publications, was one of numerous queer photographers, including Baron de Meyer, Cecil Beaton, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Horst P. Horst, who defined a queer aesthetics of fashion photography in New York, Par…
Trans/Feminist Oral History
This piece discusses current trans oral history projects that bring together feminist methodologies, transgender studies, and queer archives. I offer a map of some of these oral history projects, and their archive partners, while offering some reflections concerning how prior work in transgender ethnography and poststructuralist history are helping to shape contemporary approaches to trans oral history. Projects discussed include the LGBTQ Oral H…
Queering the Trans✲ Family Album
Historian Elspeth H. Brown and photographer Sara Davidmann explore the relationship between the family photograph album, trans☼ history, and queer archives. Describing their queer archival work, they address topics including ethics; intertwined histories of racism, colonialism, and normativity in photography; and the violent erasures of sexual and gender minorities within the conventional family photography album. "Family" photographs, so central…
Feeling Photography
Queering Photography
Introductory chapter for this Special Journal Issue of Photography and Culture. Davidmann also co-edited this volume with Elspeth Brown, Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto, and with Bruno Ceschel, writer, curator, and publisher
Plane Queer
The Commodification of Aesthetic Feeling
Black Models and the Invention of the US “Negro Market,” 1945–1960
Long before white marketers began paying attention to the US “ethnic” market in the mid-late 1960s, African American marketing professionals invented blacks as a market in order to become visible as a consumer demographic. This essay examines the history and politics of an emergent black modeling industry as an integral part of the creation of a US “Negro market” in the post-war years. How did black professionals and publishers seek to render bla…
De Meyer at Vogue
This article analyzes the work of Baron Adolph de Meyer, a pictorialist whose work revolutionized fashion photography at Vogue between 1913 and 1922. After a brief discussion of de Meyer's life and work in Europe before emigrating to New York City in 1914, the essay draws on recent scholarship on “public feelings” to investigate the queer context of de Meyer's photographic work for US Vogue in the years surrounding the First World War. The essay …
Welfare Capitalism and Documentary Photography
This article examines the use of photography in promoting welfare capitalist initiatives at the National Cash Register Company (N.C.R.) of Dayton Ohio in the early twentieth century. The article argues that the company's founder, John H. Patterson, became interested in both industrial betterment schemes and their photographic documentation as a result of industrial sabotage. In response to working‐class antipathy to the cash register itself, whic…
Cultures of Commerce
Racialising the Virile Body
Technology, Culture, and the Body in Modern America
The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American. By Carolyn Thomas de la Peña. New York: New York University Press, 2003. 329 pages. $35.00 (cloth). Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars. By Joel Dinerstein. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 415 pages. $80.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). The relationship between technology and culture is one of the most venerable a…
Seeing America
Journal Article Seeing America: Women Photographers between the Wars. By Melissa A. McEuen. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. xii, 360 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8131-2132-9.) Get access Elspeth Brown Elspeth Brown University of Toronto, Mississauga, Canada Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 87, Issue 4, March 2001, Page 1547, https://doi.org/10.2307/2674852 Published…
Everyone in Faces
Review| April 01 2000 Everyone in Faces Ghost In the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, October 24, 1999-January 16, 2000Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000, by Robert A. Sobieszek, Cambridge and Los Angeles: MIT Press and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 1999, 336 pp./$39.95 (sb) Elspeth H. Brown Elspeth H. Brown Elspeth H. Brown is a Ph.D. candi…
Rationalizing Consumption
The reasons why photographic illustration was generally avoided by American print advertisers before 1913, even though halftone technology had made such illustration economically advantageous, have not been adequately explored. This article explains that art directors initially avoided the medium because of its slavish dependence on material reality. Photography offered too much detail; it seemed incapable of the abstraction or idealization neces…
Records of the Dawn of Photography
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 153 always successful. Interestingly, authors from more practical perspec tives, including the writers of essays on systems engineering and on the practitioner’s view ofPh.D. work in operations research, stressed that the real world had to be brought into the classroom if future business managers were to appreciate the utility of OR. The final section ofsix essays considers how research derived from operations…
Records of the Dawn of Photography
The Cultural Politics of Aspiration
This article describes the relationship between family photography, oral history, and feeling. The authors explore questions about affect and family photography in relationship to black, queer relationality and to Asian, diasporic subjectivities. They argue that the affective modality of family photography for marginalized subjects is that of 'mixed feelings', which they analyze through a focus on 'aspiration' as central to the visual and affecti…
The Family Camera Network
Despite increasing interest in visual studies, diaspora studies, and oral history, critics have not fully accounted for the complexity of family photography. The Family Camera is a collaborative research project that collects domestic images and oral histories about them as a means of tracing new histories of migration. This article describes our work in collecting both family photographs and oral histories about them, with a specific focus on re…
Trans/Feminist Oral History
This piece discusses current trans oral history projects that bring together feminist methodologies, transgender studies, and queer archives. I offer a map of some of these oral history projects, and their archive partners, while offering some reflections concerning how prior work in transgender ethnography and poststructuralist history are helping to shape contemporary approaches to trans oral history. Projects discussed include the LGBTQ Oral H…
Racialising the Virile Body
Queering Glamour in Interwar Fashion Photography
Obviously, glamour is queer. But has this always been true? This article offers queer histories of capitalism and interwar glamour through an analysis of George Platt Lynes's photographic work. Lynes, an American photographer for Condé Nast publications, was one of numerous queer photographers, including Baron de Meyer, Cecil Beaton, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Horst P. Horst, who defined a queer aesthetics of fashion photography in New York, Par…
Queering the Trans✲ Family Album
Historian Elspeth H. Brown and photographer Sara Davidmann explore the relationship between the family photograph album, trans☼ history, and queer archives. Describing their queer archival work, they address topics including ethics; intertwined histories of racism, colonialism, and normativity in photography; and the violent erasures of sexual and gender minorities within the conventional family photography album. "Family" photographs, so central…
Cultures of Commerce
Toward an Ethos of Trans Care in Trans Oral History
This article examines trans oral history within the current context of both increased trans visibility and neoliberal storytelling. We ask whether trans oral history projects simply exemplify a trans visibility that intensifies surveillance and neoliberal representational politics, endangering the most marginalized of trans people, or, rather, offer a different kind of political intervention, the careful gathering of trans narratives as a form of…
Technology, Culture, and the Body in Modern America
The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American. By Carolyn Thomas de la Peña. New York: New York University Press, 2003. 329 pages. $35.00 (cloth). Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars. By Joel Dinerstein. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 415 pages. $80.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). The relationship between technology and culture is one of the most venerable a…
Seeing America
Journal Article Seeing America: Women Photographers between the Wars. By Melissa A. McEuen. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. xii, 360 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8131-2132-9.) Get access Elspeth Brown Elspeth Brown University of Toronto, Mississauga, Canada Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 87, Issue 4, March 2001, Page 1547, https://doi.org/10.2307/2674852 Published…
Rationalizing Consumption
The reasons why photographic illustration was generally avoided by American print advertisers before 1913, even though halftone technology had made such illustration economically advantageous, have not been adequately explored. This article explains that art directors initially avoided the medium because of its slavish dependence on material reality. Photography offered too much detail; it seemed incapable of the abstraction or idealization neces…
Records of the Dawn of Photography
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 153 always successful. Interestingly, authors from more practical perspec tives, including the writers of essays on systems engineering and on the practitioner’s view ofPh.D. work in operations research, stressed that the real world had to be brought into the classroom if future business managers were to appreciate the utility of OR. The final section ofsix essays considers how research derived from operations…
Records of the Dawn of Photography
Everyone in Faces
Review| April 01 2000 Everyone in Faces Ghost In the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, October 24, 1999-January 16, 2000Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000, by Robert A. Sobieszek, Cambridge and Los Angeles: MIT Press and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 1999, 336 pp./$39.95 (sb) Elspeth H. Brown Elspeth H. Brown Elspeth H. Brown is a Ph.D. candi…
Rationalizing Consumption
The reasons why photographic illustration was generally avoided by American print advertisers before 1913, even though halftone technology had made such illustration economically advantageous, have not been adequately explored. This article explains that art directors initially avoided the medium because of its slavish dependence on material reality. Photography offered too much detail; it seemed incapable of the abstraction or idealization neces…
Seeing America
Journal Article Seeing America: Women Photographers between the Wars. By Melissa A. McEuen. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. xii, 360 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8131-2132-9.) Get access Elspeth Brown Elspeth Brown University of Toronto, Mississauga, Canada Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 87, Issue 4, March 2001, Page 1547, https://doi.org/10.2307/2674852 Published…
Technology, Culture, and the Body in Modern America
The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American. By Carolyn Thomas de la Peña. New York: New York University Press, 2003. 329 pages. $35.00 (cloth). Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars. By Joel Dinerstein. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 415 pages. $80.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). The relationship between technology and culture is one of the most venerable a…
Racialising the Virile Body
Cultures of Commerce
Welfare Capitalism and Documentary Photography
This article examines the use of photography in promoting welfare capitalist initiatives at the National Cash Register Company (N.C.R.) of Dayton Ohio in the early twentieth century. The article argues that the company's founder, John H. Patterson, became interested in both industrial betterment schemes and their photographic documentation as a result of industrial sabotage. In response to working‐class antipathy to the cash register itself, whic…
De Meyer at Vogue
This article analyzes the work of Baron Adolph de Meyer, a pictorialist whose work revolutionized fashion photography at Vogue between 1913 and 1922. After a brief discussion of de Meyer's life and work in Europe before emigrating to New York City in 1914, the essay draws on recent scholarship on “public feelings” to investigate the queer context of de Meyer's photographic work for US Vogue in the years surrounding the First World War. The essay …
Black Models and the Invention of the US “Negro Market,” 1945–1960
Long before white marketers began paying attention to the US “ethnic” market in the mid-late 1960s, African American marketing professionals invented blacks as a market in order to become visible as a consumer demographic. This essay examines the history and politics of an emergent black modeling industry as an integral part of the creation of a US “Negro market” in the post-war years. How did black professionals and publishers seek to render bla…
Feeling Photography
Queering Photography
Introductory chapter for this Special Journal Issue of Photography and Culture. Davidmann also co-edited this volume with Elspeth Brown, Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto, and with Bruno Ceschel, writer, curator, and publisher
Plane Queer
The Commodification of Aesthetic Feeling
Trans/Feminist Oral History
This piece discusses current trans oral history projects that bring together feminist methodologies, transgender studies, and queer archives. I offer a map of some of these oral history projects, and their archive partners, while offering some reflections concerning how prior work in transgender ethnography and poststructuralist history are helping to shape contemporary approaches to trans oral history. Projects discussed include the LGBTQ Oral H…
Queering the Trans✲ Family Album
Historian Elspeth H. Brown and photographer Sara Davidmann explore the relationship between the family photograph album, trans☼ history, and queer archives. Describing their queer archival work, they address topics including ethics; intertwined histories of racism, colonialism, and normativity in photography; and the violent erasures of sexual and gender minorities within the conventional family photography album. "Family" photographs, so central…
The Family Camera Network
Despite increasing interest in visual studies, diaspora studies, and oral history, critics have not fully accounted for the complexity of family photography. The Family Camera is a collaborative research project that collects domestic images and oral histories about them as a means of tracing new histories of migration. This article describes our work in collecting both family photographs and oral histories about them, with a specific focus on re…
Queering Glamour in Interwar Fashion Photography
Obviously, glamour is queer. But has this always been true? This article offers queer histories of capitalism and interwar glamour through an analysis of George Platt Lynes's photographic work. Lynes, an American photographer for Condé Nast publications, was one of numerous queer photographers, including Baron de Meyer, Cecil Beaton, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Horst P. Horst, who defined a queer aesthetics of fashion photography in New York, Par…
The Cultural Politics of Aspiration
This article describes the relationship between family photography, oral history, and feeling. The authors explore questions about affect and family photography in relationship to black, queer relationality and to Asian, diasporic subjectivities. They argue that the affective modality of family photography for marginalized subjects is that of 'mixed feelings', which they analyze through a focus on 'aspiration' as central to the visual and affecti…
Work! A Queer History of Modeling
From the haute couture runways of Paris and New York and editorial photo shoots for glossy fashion magazines to reality television, models have been a ubiquitous staple of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American consumer culture. In 'Work!' Elspeth H. Brown traces the history of modeling from the advent of photographic modeling in the early twentieth century to the rise of the supermodel in the 1980s. Brown outlines how the modeling industry…
Toward an Ethos of Trans Care in Trans Oral History
This article examines trans oral history within the current context of both increased trans visibility and neoliberal storytelling. We ask whether trans oral history projects simply exemplify a trans visibility that intensifies surveillance and neoliberal representational politics, endangering the most marginalized of trans people, or, rather, offer a different kind of political intervention, the careful gathering of trans narratives as a form of…
Photography, Fashion, and Queer Worldmaking at the Pussy Palace
This article examines the queer and feminist politics of photography and fashion at the Pussy Palace, a series of trans-inclusive queer women’s bathhouse events held in Toronto from 1998 to 2014. Drawing on oral histories, archival materials, and visual culture analysis, we argue that photography and fashion functioned as critical technologies of queer and trans worldmaking. These practices enabled patrons to assert erotic autonomy, resist gender…
Sensing the Palace
This article explores how oral historians might more fully engage the sensory and affective dimensions of queer memory by centering the body as an archival site within the interview encounter. Drawing on the Pussy Palace Oral History Project -a public history initiative documenting Toronto's trans-inclusive lesbian bathhouse events and the 2000 police raid that followed-we introduce somatic elicitation , a contemplative interview technique design…
Sociology (12 works) · Art (11 works) · History (10 works) · Art history (9 works) · Visual arts (9 works) · Photography and Visual Culture (8 works) · Queer (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Photography (7 works) · Fashion and Cultural Textiles (5 works)