Joel Snyder, among the first scholars in the United States hired to teach the history of photography, died on June 5. He was 86.
Snyder, a professor emeritus in the Department of Art History, joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1969 and, for over five decades, helped establish a field of study at a moment when photography was still peripheral to art history.
Snyder’s research ranged across the history and theory of photography, keeping focus on the 19th-century rise of commercial photography in the United States and Europe. His scholarship illuminated the ways photography developed in dialogue with painting and sculpture.
A professional photographer whose work is held in the Art Institute of Chicago, Snyder, SB’61, urged all scholars of the medium to understand how a work was made in order to interpret it.
Colleagues and students remember Snyder not simply for what he studied but for his attention to the ill-defined relationship between idea and practice, the camera and the eye behind it.
“He was our department’s uncompromising intellectual compass,” recalled Christine Mehring, Mary L. Block Professor of Art History and former department chair. “His combination of connoisseurial and technical expertise in photographic media with an understanding of their hermeneutic potentials were pathbreaking for our discipline.”
Photography as an intellectual problem
Synder helped transform the study of photography by refusing to accept it as distinct from the pantheon of the arts.
“Perhaps his most radical provocation was that photography, despite its technological underpinnings, does not produce pictures that we ought to regard as categorically distinct from other kinds of pictures,” said mentee Carl Fuldner, PhD’18, assistant instructional professor in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities.
Snyder contested assumptions that photographs were neutral records of the world. In the landmark essay “Territorial Photographs,” Snyder examines 19th-century landscape photography to show how images presented the American West as tamable land open to settler conquest. His analysis of the photographer Timothy O’Sullivan reveals how photographs participated in projects of territorial mapping, scientific knowledge and nationalist expansion.
As Prof. W.J.T. Mitchell writes in a remembrance in Critical Inquiry, where Snyder was an editor and contributor for about forty years, this habit of looking again and looking harder was fundamental to Snyder’s intellectual character.
“It is as if Joel’s basic instinct in front of an interesting visual image—whether painting, photography, sculpture, shadow, reflection, or view from the window—was to say: ‘wake up!’”
Theory together with practice
Snyder’s scholarship combined deep knowledge of art history with firsthand experience as a photographer and maker.
As a professional photographer, Synder operated a Chicago studio, produced original documentary work, and collaborated with institutions including the Smithsonian. He also participated in projects ranging from historical photographic reconstructions to film photography—most famously on the sets of Star Wars and the film adaptation of A River Runs Through It (1992), where Snyder took pictures of Robert Redford and Brad Pitt used in the film to mark the passing of time.
In 1965, Snyder co-founded Chicago Albumen Works with Doug and Dorothy Munson. The organization became one of the nation’s foremost studios for the restoration and reproduction of historical photographs.
Snyder’s technical expertise earned international recognition. Working from original negatives by Eugène Atget, he produced albumen prints for a Museum of Modern Art portfolio that curator John Szarkowski praised for representing Atget’s work “with great sensitivity and fidelity.”
Snyder was connected to the Smart Museum of Art from its earliest days, serving as the unofficial photographer of its opening and becoming a collaborator, curator, advisor, lender and donor over subsequent decades. His exhibitions—including the groundbreaking 1976 exhibition The Documentary Photograph as a Work of Art: American Photographs, 1860-1876 and the 2006 exhibition One/Many: Western American Survey Photographs by Bell and O’Sullivan—helped make photography a central area of inquiry in the museum.
Within the Department of Art History, Snyder served multiple terms as chair and played a pivotal role in shaping the department’s direction. His influence lives on through the Joel Snyder Research Fund, which supports faculty and graduate student research, and through the Joel Snyder Materials Collection, established in his honor by the Department of Art History in its Visual Resources Center.
The collection reflects a Snyderian principle: that art should be handled, examined and understood materially as well as intellectually.
Teaching people how to see
Again and again, former students describe Snyder’s greatest gift as teaching them to examine photographic art more carefully.
For Sarah Miller, PhD‘09, independent scholar and current ACLS Fellow, Snyder’s advising style overturned assumptions of prevalent topics and methodologies that had gone unquestioned.
“What unites Snyder’s advisees,” Miller reflected, “is a penchant for starting new projects by asking the question nobody had previously thought to ask or by revisiting what others considered utterly settled knowledge.”
Rather than presume photographs are static objects, Snyder counseled students to work from the ground up to re-open avenues of inquiry.
“I feel Joel lodged permanently in my brain,” as Miller put it, and other mentees echoed.
According to Mitchell, Snyder pushed students and colleagues “into zones of alertness, second looks, double takes, puzzlement, curiosity, irritation, and discovery.”
Mitchell, the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of English & Art History and Snyder’s close friend for more than fifty years, reflected on a question Snyder posed that became emblematic of his pedagogy: “Why would you want to say that?”
Britt Salvesen, PhD‘98, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and the Prints & Drawings Department, recalled Snyder as a mentor who took endless pleasure in following his students down research paths.
“Never heavy-handed or dogmatic, Joel had strong beliefs that he carried lightly,” she said.
The 2018 “Joelfest” (part-symposium, part-celebration of Snyder’s retirement) drew art critics from across the country to take stock of his momentous career. His students, colleagues and friends continue to carry forward the habits of mind he cultivated: looking closely, questioning assumptions and refusing easy answers.
Snyder was preceded in death by his first wife, Jean Maclean Snyder, the mother of his two sons. He is survived by his wife and long-time partner, Katherine Fischer Taylor, Associate Professor of Art History emerita, and his sons, Jacob Samuel Snyder and his wife Kaoutar and son Dashiell, and Noah Scot Snyder, his wife Julie and son Joshua. A memorial is being planned.
—Adapted from a story originally published by the Division of the Arts & Humanities.
