The Center for the Humanities will continue its Book Talk series and is pleased to present Heather Diack- Associate Professor of Art History, and a discussion of her book Documents of Doubt: The Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art.

Why do we continue to look to photographs for evidence despite our awareness of photography’s potential for duplicity? Documents of Doubt critically reassesses the truth claims surrounding photographs by looking at how conceptual artists creatively undermined them. Studying the unique relationship between photography and conceptual art practices in the United States during the social and political instability of the late 1960s, Heather Diack offers vital new perspectives on our “post-truth” world and the importance of suspending easy conclusions in contemporary art. 

Considering the work of four leading conceptual artists of the 1960s and ’70s, Diack looks at photographs as documents of doubt, pushing the form beyond commonly assumed limits. Through in-depth and thorough reevaluations of early work by noted artists Mel Bochner, Bruce Nauman, Douglas Huebler, and John Baldessari, Diack advances the powerful thesis that photography provided a means of moving away from the object and toward performative effects, playing a crucial role in the development of conceptual art as a medium of doubt and contingency. Discussing how unexpected and contradictory meanings can exist in the guise of ordinary pictures, Documents of Doubt offers evocative and original ideas on truth’s connection to photography in the United States during the late 1960s and how conceptual art from that period anticipated our current era of “alternative facts” in contemporary politics and culture.

Heather A. Diack is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and the History of Photography at the University of Miami, where she specializes in conceptual art, critical theory, and visual culture. She is the author of Documents of Doubt: The Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), which won an Andrew Wyeth Foundation for American art publishing grant. She is also co-author with Erina Duganne and Terri Weissman of Global Photography: A Critical History (Routledge, 2020) and co-editor of photographies (Fall 2017 no. 10.3) Not Just Pictures: Reassessing Critical Models for 1980s Photography. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals including, Visual Studies, History of Photography, Public, RACAR, and Artforum, as well as in several edited volumes, such as Photography Performing Humor (Leuven University Press, 2019), L'art de Douglas Huebler (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2018), Photography and Doubt (Routledge, 2017), and The Public Life of Photographs (MIT Press and Ryerson Image Center, 2016).

Diack holds degrees from the University of Toronto and McGill University, and was a Helena Rubenstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Diack’s research has been supported by numerous awards and fellowships, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, DAAD/Goethe Institute, Berlin, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, the National Endowment for the Humanities, USA, the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ, and the Henry Moore Institute for the Study of Sculpture, UK. In 2016 Diack was the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin.