BIO
Kim Sichel

Kim Sichel is Associate Professor of the History of Art & Architecture and of American and New England Studies at Boston University. She writes on American and European documentary and artistic photography, with an emphasis on the years between World War I and World War II.

PROJECT
Germaine Krull in Africa.
2006

In 2006, I received a Peter Palmquist Fellowship for a project entitled “Germaine Krull in Africa.” As an extension of the chapter I wrote on Krull in Africa for my 1999 MIT Press book Germaine Krull: Photographer of Modernity, I returned to the African materials that Krull made during World War II. I had begun this expansion in an earlier article, “Germaine Krull and L’Amitié noire:  World War II and French Colonialist Film,” published in Eleanor Hight and Gary Sampson, eds, Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place (London: Routledge, 2002, paperback edition, 2004), 257-280.

My Palmquist Fellowship resulted in various lectures and publications, including a paper on “European Stereotypes in African Colonial Era Photography,” at the Conference on Cosmopolitan Identities and Alternative Histories: Africans in Front and Behind the Camera, African Studies Center, Boston University/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, November 2008. A scholarly article on the new research was published in 2014: “Germaine Krull: Fotografien im Auftrag der Freien Französischen Steitkräfte 1942-1944 [Germaine Krull’s Photographs for the Free French Forces, 1942 to 1944],” Fotogeschichte 134 (2014), 45-54.