Daniel Palmer (art Historian)

Daniel Palmer (born 1971) is an Australian historian, critic, academic and theorist of art. Palmer has explored image, identity, and social interaction. He has held teaching and research roles at the University of Melbourne, Monash University, and RMIT University, where he was Associate Dean of Research and Innovation in the School of Art from 2018 to 2023 and then a professor.

Palmer's research on photomedia focuses on the evolution of photography in the digital age, participatory media, and the collaborative turn in contemporary art. He has published books on photomedia and has advocated for the integration of new media into art history.

Early life and education

Daniel Stephen Vaughan Palmer was born in Perth in 1971 and grew up in Darlington in the foothills of Perth, going to Darlington Primary and Eastern Hills Senior High schools. His father Michael Palmer worked as a radio announcer at the ABC in the 1970s and 1980s.

Palmer briefly studied photography at Edith Cowan University in 1993 as part of a Graduate Diploma in Media Studies. While undertaking a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Western Australia Palmer exhibited a series of portraits of passers-by as part of Perth's Artrage fringe arts festival in 1993. A review by arts writer Jay Gargett of this exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts detailed how Palmer photographed strangers, with their consent, on Barrack Street over an 18-month period. Shot with a 35mm camera and standard lens without any post-production manipulation, the unglamorous realism and scientific sharpness impressed Gargett: “The portraits are unusual in many respects. All of the shots were taken outside – yet there's a real studio feel about them, they're deliberately formal.” The review commends Palmer's ability to portray ordinary people with dignity and directness without aestheticising or romanticising subjects, many of whom were initially bewildered by his request to photograph them. Palmer has continued his photography of others, including his portrait of scholar Ian North, in 2014, and on whose work as a photographer Palmer wrote in 2005.

In 1996, Palmer completed Honours in English and History at University of WA, with a thesis supervised by novelist Gail Jones on memory, photography and Proust, for which he won the Katherine Moss Prize for Best Honours Thesis. In December 1996, he held a second solo exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, called ''Analogical Spectres''. Before departing for Melbourne in 1997, his study of graffiti in a Fremantle prison was published, illustrated with his photographs.

Palmer undertook doctoral studies at the University of Melbourne on the topic of participatory media, which he completed in 2003. Palmer's interest in education began in 1993 when he was a teacher of English as a Second Language (ESL) in Spain, and he says he has a commitment to "inclusivity and clarity".

While researching for his PhD, Palmer wrote for ''Eyeline,'' over 1998–99, reviews of exhibitions at Melbourne independent and artist-run galleries.

Career

Palmer volunteered at Melbourne's not-for-profit Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), producing a number of catalogue essays and curating an exhibition ''Click,'' which was held from May to October 2001 at five Victorian regional art galleries: Bendigo Art Gallery, Geelong Art Gallery, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Mildura Arts Centre Gallery, and Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery. That year he and Kate Rhodes curated ''Between Place and Non-Place'' at the Victorian College of the Arts Gallery.

In 2002 he was recruited for the editorial team of the avant-garde ''Big'' magazine's issue featuring 20 contributing Australian photographers including Bill Henson, Anne Zahalka and Brook Andrew.

On the occasion of the National Galley of Australia touring shows ''Refocus: Current Directions in Photography'' and ''The Good, the Great & the Gifted'', art critic Susan McCulloch consulted with Palmer about the rising popularity of photography exhibitions which he credited to "the influence of pop culture, the ability of photography to tell a story, the size to which photographs can now be enlarged (comparable to big paintings) and its possibilities in terms of expressiveness and presenting a highly personal view."

As a consequence of a 'photography boom' when a Tracey Moffatt print had broken Australian contemporary photography records, he and CCP director Naomi Cass promoted the medium as a canny art purchase. In 2005 he edited ''Photogenic,'' a series of essays based on lectures he had organised over 2000–2004 for the Centre for Contemporary Photography, and was its 'Curator of Projects' (1997–2004). His initiatives added digital art to the scope of exhibitions there, but when Kodak Australia closed its Coburg plant he readily attested to the importance of film photography.

Teaching

In 2003, Palmer was appointed part time as lecturer at the University of Melbourne to initiate the institution's first subject focused on the history of photography, a position that was externally funded by Joyce Evans. During this same period, he pioneered a subject on new media art for Melbourne's Master of Art Curatorship degree, and published on internet user interfaces and online identity.

At the end of 2004, Palmer left his position at the CCP and became a lecturer in Art Theory at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University (MADA) in Caulfield. He continued as a contributor to the CCP's board, exhibition selection committee and as organiser of the Joyce Evans lecture series. In 2016, Ray Edgar quoted him on how photography had changed during the thirty years since the founding of the Centre, from a marginal position in the art world and into one equivalent with painting: "It's having the time and space to question what impact changing technology and the plethora of images has on us and what impact we have on it, that makes CCP an important space."

During his time at Monash, Palmer served as Honours Coordinator of Art History and Theory and in 2009 he was promoted to Senior Lecturer, and continued his outreach into the art public, in one case presenting in the Monash University Museum of Art a discussion of "recent trends, curatorial initiatives and artworks using museum collections as their subject or materials." Palmer's 2014 'explainer' on postmodernism was published in ''The Conversation''.

As Acting Director of the Art History and Theory Program in 2015, he established a Bachelor of Art History and Curating degree, which as Associate Professor he co-coordinated from 2016 onwards. Over 2014–2017 he was Associate Dean, Graduate Research, MADA, Monash University. He was consulted in the Australia Council's 2006 New Media Arts Scoping Study Context Interview and Focus Group. In 2012, he was a participant in one of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Stone Summer Theory Institute seminar series convened by art historian James Elkins and devoted to discussing the education of artists.

Palmer joined RMIT University in 2018, serving six years as a senior academic leader until 2023, as Associate Dean of Research and Innovation in the School of Art at RMIT.

Research

Palmer has written on perspectives on photography, video and contemporary art. Mike Leggett acknowledges that since 2004 Palmer has recognised that those artists working in video, like Leggett himself, were using it not to make entertainment as in the institutions of cinema and television, but to renew language in a relational manner:

Reviewing Darren Toft's 2005 ''Interzone: Media Arts in Australia,'' Palmer takes issue with its 'hermetic' Australian focus, and in Berlin, at 'Re:Place' the second international conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology, 2007, he surveyed the still marginal position of multimedia art in Australia, despite the role that video art played in its development there, and the gradual institutionalisation of media art in the New Media Arts Fund (1998) and Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne (2002). Brunt notes in Palmer's paper his emphasis on this:

continuing divide between media art and contemporary art. Particularly vivid is his description of the status of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). Palmer argues: "ACMI ..cast in concrete a split between media art and contemporary art; it was located right next door to the newly relocated and renovated National Gallery of Victoria, which found itself relieved of the pressure to properly represent and collect artists working with video"

Since as early as 2005 Palmer paid attention to the effects that mobile phone technology has had on photography, the way its intimacy, portability, ubiquity, and immediacy produced multimedia content that made it a “participatory” medium. Hjorth and others cite a conference paper of that year in which Palmer argued that the dominant “modes of address” of mobile media are as a tool that complicates the distinction between creating and viewing images. Instead of transforming the boundaries between public and private visual spheres, mobile photography seems to intensify the privatization of experience, so that “the Nokia moment is far more intimate than the Kodak moment...”Daniel Palmer, “Mobile Exchanges,” Paper presented at the Vital Signs conference, ACMI, Melbourne, 8 September 2005. In a 2013 observation quoted by Henning, he adds that the technology encourages repetition and the making of sequences.

Palmer writes after 2012 in '' Photographies'' and elsewhere on a 'collaborative turn' in photography reflecting that in other arts, with the rise of digital networked technologies facilitating new forms of photographic cooperation, such as the immediacy of photo-sharing, citizen journalism, participatory sensing projects and community engagement, citing the work of Stephen Willats and Simon Terrill. Oliver, quotes him on photo-sharing such as Flickr as "an ever-accumulating archive of personal visual experience, memory and emotion," while Berry notes his suggestion that a continuously evolving visual feed allows individuals to enhance their personal photo archives with snippets from mainstream media, supporting the process of remembering and commemorating past events. These practices of which Palmer writes, as noted by McDonald, Nwafor, and Ruygt, foreground the collective labour behind photographic acts and challenge the ideology of the solitary author. Palmer argues "that although histories of photography invariably privilege individual figures, contemporary developments should be understood in terms of important precursors such as community photography in the 1970s,” in reference to the Half Moon Photography Workshop, the 1988 Australian documentary project ''After 200 Years,'' and Photovoice.

Of Palmer's ''Photography and Collaboration: From conceptual art to crowdsourcing'' published in 2017, Cerbarano notes it as foreshadowing the publication ''Collaboration – A Potential History of Photography'' in raising of "awareness of photography as a means of relationship" and the power dynamics behind it "rather than as mere representation", and instrumental in this is the convergence of the camera with the network, via the mobile phone, while Hjorth cites Palmer's perception of "co-presence" in camera phones' provision of an "overlay between media, visual culture, and geography."

For '' Photography & Culture'', one of his contributions covers collaboration in the form of "image-based dialogue" via exchange of photographs. Reviewer Lewis Bush finds Palmer's book on the subject ''Photography and Collaboration,'' "as sanguine about the real possibilities of collaborative practices as it is realistic about the limitations ... simply delivering cameras into the hands of subjects is not enough to redress the power balances that ... operate at every stage of the photographic process." On the indexation of images through tagging and other means Cooley points to Palmer's intimation in his writing on the iPhone, "that the representational, or iconic, register of the image—despite the promise of indexicality—is almost beside the point. This is because information trumps representation: a picture appended with metadata becomes less about what it represents than the information it carries."

His texts appear also in ''History of Photography'', ''Philosophy of Photography'', ''Angelaki,'' ''Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture'', and the ''Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art,'' for which he has been an editor.

Critic

Palmer has authored over sixty catalogue essays and fifty art reviews since 1997 in art magazines including ''Photofile,'' ''Frieze,'' ''Art Monthly Australia'', ''Artlink'', ''Art World,'' ''Broadsheet'', '' Eyeline'', and ''Art & Australia''. Peter Hill in an article promoting creativity and imagination in art texts uses the example of the way Palmer "stretches his language to 'fit' with Brassington's disturbing images" exhibited in the 2004 Biennale of Sydney. Likewise, Gina McColl notes his setting aside reservations about the politics and pretensions around Bill Henson's 2005 NGV retrospective to describe it as "a guilty pleasure". Of Anne Zahalka's ''Hall of Mirrors,'' portraits of artists, ''Age'' reviewer agrees with Palmer's comment in his catalogue essay that "'these are portraits of how the artists wish to be seen, ideal ego-projections'."

David Rosetzky typifies Palmer's capacity for identifying major players out of his interest in the interplay between the media of still photography and video and the independent artist-run galleries. Also for ''Art & Australia'', he interviewed James Turrell about his work ''Within, Without'' installed that year at the National Gallery of Australia and, seeing the work through a growing interest in the moving image, remarked that "in essence, the work brings the sky down to us as a kind of floating dynamic picture."

Book publications

Palmer's earliest books were published by the Centre for Contemporary Photography in 2005. ''Twelve Australian Photo Artists'' co-authored with Blair French, followed and provided accounts of twelve exemplary photographers working in Australia from the early 1980s onward, praised by Andrew Stephens in ''The Age'': "in photography ..few boundaries have been left intact in the past few decades. Which is why this selection of ‘‘photo artists’’ is impressive ..It's hard to say quite what unites all this work, but there is certainly something. Perhaps it is a tendency to muse on unsettling emotions, as expressed through the body. It all packs a genuine punch." Kirker in ''Artlink'' journal praised how for each artist the authors' "distillation of an individual's practice, written with an assured grasp of methodology, key works, biographical and theoretical drivers and place within the cultural (and sometimes political) landscape, means that one can confidently dispense with much prior literature on them."

In 2012, after co-convening a 2011 Melbourne symposium 'Digital Light: Technique, Technology, Creation', he, Sean Cubitt and Les Walkling wrote a paper contending that prevailing theories overlooked key aspects of analogue-digital transitions, and called for medium-specific analysis and a balanced study of nuances in transitional forms, which Cubitt elucidates elsewhere in the translation of an Ansel Adams landscape through "digital scanning and photolithography, from the sunlight of that day in 1960 to the page as it appears today," and that Taffel considers in relation to their automation. A 2015 book ''Digital Light'' that Palmer co-edited with Sean Cubitt and Nathaniel Tkacz, explores the paradoxical concept of "digital light" from multidisciplinary perspectives. This collection brought together commentators on image computation from diverse fields; cinematographer and artist Terry Flaxton, New Media artist Jon Ippolito, video artist Stephen Jones, Canadian academic specialist in computer art Carolyn L. Kane, Melbourne University Professor of Media and Communications Scott McQuire, art historian Christiane Paul, writer and researcher in cyberculture Darren Tofts, co-founder of Pixar, Alvy Ray Smith, and feminist philosopher Cathryn Vasseleu. In Palmer's chapter 'Lights, Camera, Algorithm: Digital Photography's Algorithmic Conditions' he suggests that the sheer volume and fluidity of digital images demand new forms of curation—meta-photography—that rely on computational power to contextualise and authenticate images, as algorithms were coming to condition both the existence and utility of photographs at speeds beyond human capacity.

As co-editor with Anne Marsh and Melissa Miles, also in 2015, he collaborated on ''The Culture of Photography in Public Space.'' Reviewer Tara Milbrandt notes his "speculative consideration of Google Street View" in Chapter 11, and "the seeming contradiction between ‘current suspicions of street photographers’ and the popularity of such ‘consumer-oriented online surveillance’". His contribution with Jessica Whyte, "‘No Credible Photographic Interest’: Photography Restrictions and Surveillance in a Time of Terror,” draws attention to the moral anxiety surrounding "stranger danger" and illustrates this with an example from Australia's state-sponsored TV campaign encouraging the public to be suspicious of individuals taking photos of things deemed to lack "credible" photographic value. while Yoshiaki Kai places that in the context of a growing phenomenon of suspicion of street photographers.

In an Australian Research Council funded research project, Palmer with Martyn Jolly assembled incrementally online a chronology of exhibitions of photography in Australia. The outcome was ''Installation View''. Palmer's 2021 essay for ''The Conversation'' provides an overview. The book was widely reviewed, including by critics Catherine De Lorenzo (Adjunct A/Professor, MADA, Monash University) and Geoffrey Batchen who acknowledge its value (though criticise the design idiosyncrasies of COVID-era publication) but bemoan a missed opportunity for a survey of the history of curatorship itself. Collectively, the selected exhibitions discussed in ''Installation View'' reflect broader view of social and political evolution in Australia. The survey that the co-researchers conducted enabled Palmer's more granular chronology applied in his chapter in the Museum of Australian Photography publication ''The Basement'' devoted to the contexts of foundational and influential teaching of photography for artistic purpose at Melbourne's Prahran College.

Reviewing the 2023 volume ''Dystopian and Utopian impulses in art making'' co-edited by Palmer with Grace McQuilten, Drudgeon finds it engaging with Haraway and Segarra's, ''El món que necessiteman'' (2019) from an Asia-Pacific perspective to consider an "intimate relationship between art and crises" to consider how artistic practices "highlight the dystopian dimension of both our daily lives and a not-so-distant future".

In their 2024 article in ''AI and Society'', Herrie, Maleve, Philipsen, and Staunæs, consider the role of user proficiency in the context of AI-driven photorealistic image generation which Palmer and Sluis discuss in ''Media Theory.'' They observe that disparities among users continue to emerge based on expertise—especially a solid grasp of photographic principles. While generative AI broadens access to image creation, it does not eliminate differences in ability; rather, it shifts them. Effective use of prompts still demands specialized knowledge and strong text-based communication skills. This suggests that the interplay between automation, user engagement, and technical practices remains fluid and evolving.

Recognition

Palmer is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and conference convenor for The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand. He is an associate of the journal ''Art & Australia'' and served as on the editorial board of the ''Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art.''

In 2005, Palmer was granted a State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship to research Australian fashion photography from 1900–1930. He is an Affiliate of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S) and has been the recipient of Australian Research Council grant 'Dictionary of Australian Artists Online', and Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Projects; ‘Genealogies of Digital Light’ (2008–11) with Sean Cubitt and Les Walkling; ‘Curating Photography in the Age of Photosharing‘ (2015–2018) with Martyn Jolly; and ‘Digital Photography: Mediation, Memory and Visual Communication’ (2020–22) with Scott McQuire, Nikos Papastergiadis, Sean Cubitt and Celia Lury; and an ARC Linkage Project ‘Photography as a Crime’ (2009–2012) with Anne Marsh, Melissa Miles, Mark Davison and the Centre for Contemporary Photography.

Personal life

Palmer's partner is State Library of Victoria curator Kate Rhodes with whom he also writes, and they have two children.

Publications

Books

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Selected chapters

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Selected articles

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* Palmer, Daniel: "Contemplative Immersion: Benjamin, Adorno & Media Art Criticism," in: TRANSFORMATIONS, Issue No. 15, November 2007
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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Palmer, Daniel
Living people
1971 births
University of Western Australia alumni
Art historians
Monash University alumni
RMIT University people
Australian academics
Australian art critics
Art writers
Historians of photography
Academics from Perth, Western Australia
21st-century historians
Australian art educators
Australian writers
Video
Date of birth missing (living people)