Kim Timby (born 1970 in California, United States) is a
photography historian based in Paris who teaches at the
Ăcole du Louvre
The Ăcole du Louvre () is a selective institution of higher education and prestigious ''grande Ă©cole'' located in the Aile de Flore of the Louvre Palace in Paris, France. It is dedicated to the study of archaeology, art history, anthropology ...
and works as a curator for a private collection specialising in international nineteenth-century photography. From her research and teaching, Timby writes on the cultural history of photography as a technology.
Education
Timby's research draws on her learning, and combines her interests, in
anthropology
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, society, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behav ...
, history and photography. Her early experience of the medium was through her maternal grandmother, who had a darkroom and was active in her local photo club and showed her how to print in the darkroom. Her first camera was a high school graduation gift.
Timby was educated at the private
Connecticut College
Connecticut College (Conn) is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in New London, Connecticut. Originally chartered as Thames College, it was founded in 1911 as the state's only women's colle ...
,
New London, where as an Anthropology undergraduate she undertook a minor subject studio arts, studying photography and making photographs in the vintage processes of
cyanotype
The cyanotype (from , and , ) is a slow-reacting, photographic printing formulation sensitive to a limited near-ultraviolet and blue light spectrum, the range 300 nm to 400 nm known as UVA radiation. It produces a monochrome, blu ...
and
gum printing
Gum printing is a way of making photographic reproductions without the use of silver halides. The process uses salts of dichromate in common with a number of other related processes such as sun printing.
Gum prints tend to be multi-layered im ...
. From there she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in
Social Anthropology
Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In t ...
in 1992 before completing an M.A. in that discipline in 1996 at the
Ăcole des Hautes Ătudes en Sciences Sociales
The School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (, EHESS) is a graduate ''grande école'' and '' grand établissement'' in Paris focused on academic research in the social sciences. The school awards Master and PhD degrees alone and conj ...
,
France
France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...
, and from 2002 to 2006 undertook her PhD at the same
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...
institution.
Career
Timby's Master's thesis was "La photographie et l'ethnologie de la France. Modes d'emploi et apports de l'image" (âPhotography and the ethnology of France. Uses and contributions of the imageâ) dealing with the usefulness of photography to museums of French
ethnography
Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. It explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research that involves examining ...
and how photography was employed by anthropologists in their
field work
Field research, field studies, or fieldwork is the empirical research, collection of raw data outside a laboratory, library, or workplace setting. The approaches and methods used in field research vary across branches of science, disciplines. ...
and publications in studying French culture or as object of study in its own right. This research shifted her interest from traditional anthropology toward history, taking her into the
history of photography
The history of photography began with the discovery of two critical principles: The first is camera obscura image projection; the second is the discovery that some substances are visibly altered by exposure to light. There are no artifacts or de ...
, where her anthropology guides her consideration of its cultural impact.
Timby's research subsequent to her master's degree and her interest in photographic technologies and their social utility and impact stem also from her work as a
curator
A curator (from , meaning 'to take care') is a manager or overseer. When working with cultural organizations, a curator is typically a "collections curator" or an "exhibitions curator", and has multifaceted tasks dependent on the particular ins ...
. From 1996 to 2001 she was employed in that role at the
Musée Carnavalet
The Musée Carnavalet () in Paris is dedicated to the History of Paris, history of the city. The museum occupies two neighboring mansions: the HÎtel Carnavalet and the former HÎtel Le Peletier de Saint Fargeau. On the advice of Baron Haussmann, ...
, the museum of the history of Paris, a city so closely associated with the progress of photography from its invention.
There she prepared exhibitions including "Paris in 3D: from Stereoscopy to Virtual Reality, 1850-2000â, an exercise in configuring rigorous academic archival research for general consumption.
Timby had first become interested in
stereography
Stereoscopy, also called stereoscopics or stereo imaging, is a technique for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image by means of stereopsis for binocular vision. The word ''stereoscopy'' derives . Any stereoscopic image is ...
when working with the photography historian
Peter Palmquist for a month in the early 1990s as an undergraduate in the US. His study of original photographs and primary source materials to uncover overlooked aspects of the history of photography chimed with her background in anthropology and as an historian. Palmquist took her to an antique shop in
Arcata
Arcata (; ; ) is a city adjacent to the Arcata Bay (northern) portion of Humboldt Bay in Humboldt County, California, United States. At the 2020 census, Arcata's population was 18,857. Arcata was first founded in 1850 as Union, was officially ...
(California) where he lived, and there she bought her first stereo view.
Timby was able to find temporary work that engaged her interest in photography and anthropology at the
MusĂ©e de lâHomme photography department and MusĂ©e Carnavalet specialising in the history of Paris. In 1996 she began co-curating a 3D exhibition at the Carnavalet museum, and the resultant display opened in Paris in October 2000 and closed January 2001. The exhibition and catalogue in English and in French ( âParis en 3D: de la stĂ©rĂ©oscopie Ă la rĂ©alitĂ© virtuelle, 1850-2000â) in hardbound editions, appealed to a diverse audience who, using the different stereo viewers enclosed in the book, could enjoy hundreds of images, stereo pairs,
anaglyphs,
lenticular
Lenticular is an adjective often relating to Lens (optics), lenses. It may refer to:
*A term used with two meanings in botany: see
*Lenticular cloud, a lens-shaped cloud
*Lenticular galaxy, a lens-shaped galaxy
*Lenticular (geology), adjective de ...
images and
holograms
Holography is a technique that allows a wavefront to be recorded and later reconstructed. It is best known as a method of generating three-dimensional images, and has a wide range of other uses, including data storage, microscopy, and interfe ...
, of Parisian life from the early nineteenth century to the present. Timby contributed text that one reviewer called an âhistorical roadmap of the techniques leading to the development of 3D photography from stereocards, anaglyphs, and holograms to 3D computer imagery and
virtual reality
Virtual reality (VR) is a Simulation, simulated experience that employs 3D near-eye displays and pose tracking to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video gam ...
â. The book and exhibition were of âlandmarkâ historical value, in the opinion of another reviewer, with many of its pictures showing antique equipment and portraits of pioneers of stereoscopy and integrated biographical information and excerpts of treatises of prominent persons in stereoscopy. In the opinion of David Haberstich, the exhibition was âdefinitiveâ in dealing with perception, art, and technology.
In 2001, with a training and research grant from the Ministry of Culture and Communication (photographic patrimony) for access to patents, and by the Carnavalet museum as part of her work on the exhibition "Paris in 3D: de stereoscopy to virtual reality, 1850-2000 ", Timby published a 23-page academic paper on research into commercial, advertising, entertainment, and even medical and religious, applications of the lenticular image invention in France, and its technical development.
Investigation into 3D and colour photography
When researching 3D imaging Timby found that
colour
Color (or colour in Commonwealth English; see spelling differences) is the visual perception based on the electromagnetic spectrum. Though color is not an inherent property of matter, color perception is related to an object's light absorp ...
was a major consideration, a thread that developed during her PhD on lenticular photography, begun after "Paris in 3D" closed and she had left Carnavalet. Her first published work on colour was the 2005 article "Colour Photography and Stereoscopy: Parallel Histories," from which she developed the idea that colour, like 3D, was a constructed illusion; an ambition in common to the two technologies was the reproduction of an aspect of
human perception
Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous syste ...
through its
deconstruction
In philosophy, deconstruction is a loosely-defined set of approaches to understand the relationship between text and meaning. The concept of deconstruction was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who described it as a turn away from ...
and reconstruction.â
Also in 2005, before the completion in 2006 of her PhD at the Paris Ăcole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Timby was appointed Director of Collections at the MusĂ©e
Nicéphore Niépce
Joseph NicĂ©phore NiĂ©pce (; 7 March 1765 â 5 July 1833) was a French inventor and one of the earliest History of photography, pioneers of photography. NiĂ©pce developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world's oldest surviving ...
in
Chalon-sur-SaĂŽne
Chalon-sur-SaÎne (, literally ''Chalon on SaÎne'') is a city in the SaÎne-et-Loire Departments of France, department in the Regions of France, region of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté in eastern France.
It is a Subprefectures in France, sub-prefectu ...
, France which houses the archive of devices and objects once belonging to the inventor of photography as well as nearly three million images from all photographic processes.
There, her work included curating "Sous un beau ciel bleu: un siĂšcle de couleurs et de photographie" (June 17âOctober 1, 2006), augmenting the second strand of her research interests, colour photography, into the technological,
aesthetic
Aesthetics (also spelled esthetics) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and taste, which in a broad sense incorporates the philosophy of art.Slater, B. H.Aesthetics ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,'' , acces ...
, and social history in which she has since pursued investigations alongside stereoscopy. Timby's other projects at the Musée Nicéphore Niépce included designing and implementing new permanent exhibition spaces structured around a rotating series of mini-exhibits, thus continuing her informed engagement with a broad audience.
Timby elaborates a cultural history of photography by examining human engagement with, and transformation of, its particular techniques and technologies, as she does with the
photo-booth, precursor to the â
selfie-stickâ, in her paper âPhotographies dâamitiĂ©. De lâusage collectif du photomaton,â (âPhotographs of friendships: the collective use of the photo boothâ). For the same purpose, she tracks the mid-century development of colour printing technologies for magazine photographs as a response to audiencesâ and advertisersâ desire, and the adaptation of photographers, amateur and professional, to its availability and special demands.
Researching animated photography
In a move to alma mater Ăcole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 2009, and until 2012, Timby co-coordinated investigation in "La CrĂ©ation Photographique", a research program in the history of photography funded by the
Agence Nationale de la Recherche.
During this period she published a chapter 'Le cinĂ©ma dans une seule photo' : le portrait animĂ© des annĂ©es 1910â, a contribution to a collection of essays on the crossover between cinema and the still image, also reproduced as âCinema in a Single Photo: The Animated Screen Portrait of the 1910sâ in an English edition. Her text first raises the way that lenticular
animation
Animation is a filmmaking technique whereby still images are manipulated to create moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Animati ...
, in novelty portraits and advertising, satisfied an expectation of progress toward ever more perceptual
naturalism in photographic technologies, and this was expanded in the second chapter of her book ''3D and Animated Lenticular Photography: Between Utopia and Entertainment'', published in 2015.
Response to the book was positive and recognised the value of Timby's contribution to the literature on lenticular imagery which in comparison to the history and analysis of other 3D technologies had received little attention.
Teaching
Alongside the research affiliation with the EHESS where she was also in charge of a postgraduate seminar, Timby was a professor at the
Paris College of Art
Paris College of Art, is an international college of art and design with U.S degree-granting authority and accreditation from the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD) located in Paris, France.
History
In 1981, the school was ...
from January 2010 to the end of 2012, and is currently, since 2005, professor responsible for the
Ăcole du Louvre
The Ăcole du Louvre () is a selective institution of higher education and prestigious ''grande Ă©cole'' located in the Aile de Flore of the Louvre Palace in Paris, France. It is dedicated to the study of archaeology, art history, anthropology ...
's intensive 3-year History of Photography survey course.
Bibliography
Books
*''3D and Animated Lenticular Photography: Between Utopia and Entertainment'' (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015 )
Chapters in books
*
* ''Face Ă la couleur : une histoire en creux du noir et blanc'', in
* âThe Colors of Black-and-White Photography,â in ''The Colors of Photography'' (forthcoming, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019).
* âPhotography, Cinema, and Perceptual Realism in the Nineteenth Century,â in Simone Natale and Nicoletta Leonardi, eds., ''Photography and Other Media in the Nineteenth Century: Towards an Integrated History'' (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2018), 176â190.
* âFaire âplus beau que natureâ : la construction culturelle des illusions stĂ©rĂ©oscopiques en photographie,â in Miguel Almiron, Esther Jacopin and Giusy Pisano, eds., ''StĂ©rĂ©oscopie et Illusion. ArchĂ©ologie et pratiques contemporaines: photographie, cinĂ©ma, arts numĂ©riques'' (Villeneuve-dâAscq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2018), 141â155.
*âLook at those Lollipops! Integrating Color into News Pictures,â in Vanessa Schwartz and Jason Hill, eds., ''Getting the Picture. The History and Visual Culture of the News'' (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 236â43.
* âPhotographies dâamitiĂ©. De lâusage collectif du photomaton,â coauthored with Nora Mathys, in
Clément Chéroux
Clément Chéroux (born 1970) is a French photography historian and curator. He is Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He has also held senior curatorial positions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at the ...
and Sam Stourdze, eds., ''DerriĂšre le rideau. LâesthĂ©tique du photomaton'' (Arles: PhotosynthĂšses, 2012), 273â281.
* âCinema in a Single Photo: the Animated Screen Portrait of the 1910s,â in Olivier Lugon and Laurent Guido, eds., ''Between Still and Moving Images: Photography and Cinema in the 20th Century'' (New Barnet, UK: John Libbey Publishing, 2012), 97â111.
* âLe cinĂ©ma dans une seule photo: le portrait animĂ© des annĂ©es 1910,â in Olivier Lugon and Laurent Guido, eds., ''Fixe/AnimĂ©. Croisements de la photographie et du cinĂ©ma au XXe siĂšcle'' (Lausanne: Ăditions LâĂge dâHomme, 2010), 117â31.
*Paris in 3D, from Stereoscopy to Virtual Reality, 1850â2000. French edition: Paris en 3D, de la stĂ©rĂ©oscopie Ă la rĂ©alitĂ© virtuelle, 1850â2000 (London/Paris: Booth-Clibborn/Paris-MusĂ©es, 2000). Co-editor with Françoise Reynaud and Catherine Tambrun.
*âThe Inventors of 3D Photography in France. Patents 1852â1922.â In F. Reynaud, C. Tambrun et K. Timby (eds.), Paris in 3D (2000), 158â64.
Articles
* âThe Invention of the Myth of Total Photography,â ''International Journal on Stereo & Immersive Media'', vol. 2, no. 1, January 201
* âSpectaculaire, rĂ©flĂ©chie : la photographie en couleurs au prisme de la presse française, 1945â1960,â ''Focales'', no. 1, June 201
* âGlass Transparencies: Marketing Photographyâs Luminosity and Precision,â ''PhotoResearcher'', no. 25, Photography in the Marketplace (Spring 2016), 7â24.
* âColour Photography and Stereoscopy: Parallel Histories,â ''History of Photography,'' vol. 29, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 183â96.
* âImages en relief et images changeantes. La photographie Ă rĂ©seau lignĂ©,â ''Ătudes photographiques'', no. 9 (May 2001): 124â47.
Book reviews
* "Lâhistoire de la photographie prend des couleurs''," Perspective. La revue de l'INHA,'' Apr 2009
* "Color Rush // Color: American Photography Transformed // Twentieth-Century Color Photographs: Identification and Care," Review of three recent books on the history of color photography, ''History of Photography'' 39:1 (February 2015)
* "Kevin Moore, Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980" (Hatje Cantz, 2010) ''History of Photography'' 35:2, 2011
* "Technologies of Photography: review of Sean F. Johnston, Holographic Visions, and Pamela Roberts, A Century of Colour Photography," ''History of Photography'' 33:4, 2009
* "On the Materiality of Images: review of Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, eds.", ''History of Photography'' 30:3, 2006
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Timby, Kim
1970 births
Living people
American women art historians
French women art historians
Historians of photography
American women anthropologists
Social historians
Stereoscopic photography
American art historians
American curators
American women curators
21st-century American women