Kim Sichel

Research Areas: History of photography; modern art; American art; archives; documentary photography; photographic books

Professor Kim Sichel teaches photographic history and European/American modernism, with a particular interest in photographic books, photojournalism, and documentary photography. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in modern art and the history of photography. She advises a large number of graduate students studying photography and modern art, as well as advising dissertations in the American and New England Studies Program.

Her most recent book is Making Strange: The Modernist Photobook in France (Yale University Press, 2020). Her book Germaine Krull: Photographer of Modernity (1999), was published in English by MIT Press and in German by Schirmer/Mosel Verlag. Her catalogue Black Boston: Documentary Photography and the African American Experience (1994) was an early examination of African American photographers in Boston.

Her books and catalogues also include TO FLY: Contemporary Aerial Photography (2007), Germaine Krull/Monte Carlo (2006), Street Portraits 1946-1976: The Photographs of Jules Aarons (2003); Brassai: Paris le jour, Paris la nuit (1988); From Icon to Irony: German and American Industrial Photography (1995); and Mapping the West: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photographs from the Boston Public Library (1992). She has also written essays about Lee Friedlander, André Kertész, Germaine Krull, the New Topographics, interwar European photography, and European women photographing in Africa.

Professor Sichel has served as Chair of the Department of History of Art & Architecture, as Director of the American and New England Studies Program, and as Director of the Boston University Art Gallery. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and the Boston University Center for the Humanities

Selected Publications:
“Lee Friedlander, The American Monument, and Eakins Press,” Exposure 47.1 (Spring 2014)

“Deadpan Geometries: Mapping, Aerial Photography, and the American Landscape,” Reframing the New Topographics (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

TO FLY: Contemporary Aerial Photography (BU Art Gallery, Distributed by University of Washington Press, 2007)

Editor, Jules Aarons: Street Portraits 1947-1976 (Charles River Publishing, 2003)

Germaine Krull: Photographer of Modernity (MIT Press, 1999)

For a detailed academic bio and CV, please see Professor Sichel’s Department Profile.