Participant Info

First Name
Carol
Last Name
Quirke
Country
United States
State
NY
Affiliation
SUNY Old Westbury
Website URL
https://www.oldwestbury.edu/people/carol-quirke
Keywords
photography, visual culture, feminism, New Deal, labor movement, agricultural labor, unions, social movements, working class history, mass culture, mass media
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

My scholarship addresses how photography is a political force in American life.  Currently I am working on New York City photojournalist Bettye Lane, and her archive of images of the women’s movement and feminism from the late 1960s through the 21st century.  I have worked in the New Deal era, examining the political stakes of documentary photography, news photography, and the new picture magazines like Life magazine.  I focus on how social movements represent themselves, but also how what today we call “the mainstream media” represents social movements, and the interactions between such representations.  Am particularly interested in labor unions, agricultural labor, racism, and the modern women’s movement.

Recent Publications

Dorothea Lange, Documentary Photography, and Twentieth-Century America: Reinventing Self and Nation (Taylor and Francis/Routledge) part of “Lives of American Women Series,” editor, Carol Berkin.  (Routledge, 2019.)

 Eyes on Labor: News Photography and America’s Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

“Industry without Industry: Seeing Labor in the Fashion and Garment Industries in Postwar New York City,” in Teaching Labor History in Art and Design: Capitalism and the Creative Industries, edited by Kynghee Pyun and Vincent Quan, (Routledge, 2024): 147-171.

“The ‘Body of Labor,’ in U.S. Postwar Documentary Photography,” in Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies, edited by Michele Fazio, Christie Launius and Tim Strangleman, (Routledge, 2021): 325-342.

“Imagining Racial Equality: Local 65s Union Photographers, Postwar Civil Rights, and the Power of the Real, 1940-1955,” Radical History Review,  Special issue on “Photography and the Histories of Working Peoples and Laboring Lives.”

“Ditched, Stalled and Stranded: Dorothea Lange and the Great Depression,” History Now: The Journal of the Gilder Lehrman Institute No. 45 (Summer 2016) available at http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/great-depression/essays/ditched-stalled-and-stranded-dorothea-lange

“Reframing Chicago’s Memorial Day Massacre, May 30, 1937,” American Quarterly, 60 no. 1, (March 2008): 129-157.

“The Sweat of Their Face: Exhibition Review, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution,” Labor Online, (June 2018), available at https://www.lawcha.org/2018/06/15/the-sweat-of-their-face-exhibition-review-national-portrait-gallery-smithsonian-institution-through-september-3-2018/.

Media Coverage
History News Network (2012)
Country Focus
U.S.
Expertise by Geography
United States
Expertise by Chronology
20th century
Expertise by Topic
Art & Architectural History, Capitalism, Gender, Labor, Women