Jordan Bear
Associate Professor
Graduate Department of Art
University of Toronto
Canada
Biography
Jordan Bear’s scholarship has focused on the historical intersection of visual representation, knowledge and belief. His first book, Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject, tells the story of how photographic trickery in the 1850s and 1860s participated in the fashioning of the modern subject. By locating specific mechanisms of photographic deception employed by the leading midcentury photographers within this capacious culture of discernment, Disillusioned integrates some of the most striking—and puzzling—images of the Victorian period into a new and expansive interpretive framework. A second project is underway, with the support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, on the display of history painting and conceptions of visual evidence in London during the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century. More generally, he maintains an ongoing interest in the visual representation of knowledge in the natural and human sciences, as well as in visual communication in the illustrated press.
Research Interest
19th-century European art; History and theory of photography
