A conversation with the editorial team behind the journal Trans Asia Photography.
The current editorial team of Trans Asia Photography will reflect on the past, present and future of this important publication, and its role in mediating the unstable concepts of ‘Asia’ and ‘photography’.
Trans Asia Photography is an international refereed open access journal based at the University of Toronto. It provides a venue for the interdisciplinary exploration of photography and Asia. The journal examines all aspects of photographic history, theory and practice by centering images in or of Asia, conceived here as a territory, network, and cultural imaginary.
People
Thy Phu
Thy Phu is a Distinguished Professor of Race, Diaspora and Visual Justice at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture and Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam. She has also co-edited Feeling Photography, Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada, and the forthcoming, Cold War Camera. Currently, she serves as co-editor of the open-access peer-reviewed journal, Trans Asia Photography.
Yi Gu
Yi Gu is an associate professor of Chinese modern and contemporary art and visual culture at University of Toronto. Her research interests include cold war visual culture and post-socialist art, comparative media studies, Chinese photography history and contemporary photography in Asia, politics of aesthetics, and visual methodologies across disciplines. She is the author of Chinese Ways of Seeing and Open-Air Painting (Harvard University Press Asia Center, 2020). Her articles have appeared in The Art Bulletin, Ars Orientalis, and Representations. She is a convening member of the research project “Recalibrating Postwar Chinese Art: Digital Humanities and Alternative Archives.”
Deepali Dewan
Deepali Dewan is the Dan Mishra Curator of South Asian Art & Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. She is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto. Her main research interest focuses on the history of photography in India and the South Asian diaspora with a view toward understanding how photography has shaped contemporary ways of viewing and being in the world. She is the author of Raja Deen Dayal: Artist-Photographer in 19th-Century India (2013, co-authored with Deborah Hutton), Embellished Reality: Indian Painted Photographs (2012), and the editor of Bollywood Cinema Showcards: Indian Film Art from the 1950s to the 1980s (2011). All three were accompanied by exhibitions. Her essays have also been published in Photography and Culture, Trans Asian Photography Review, and Marg.
