Dr. Kris Belden-Adams

About Dr. Kris Belden-Adams

Kris Belden-Adams is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Mississippi and specializes in the history of photography. She is the author of the books Photography, Temporality, Modernity: Time Warped (2019), and Photography, Eugenics, ‘Aristogenics’: Picturing Privilege (2020).

Alphonse Bertillon, Mugshot and Record of Francis ...

by Dr. Kris Belden-Adams

Niépce's heliograph is the earliest surviving camera-made photograph.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window ...
by Dr. Kris Belden-Adams

$John Whipple, William Bond, and George Bond, The Moon, No. 37, 1851. Daguerreotype made through Great Refractor Equatorial Mount Telescope, Harvard College Observatory. Case size 4 ½ x 3 ¼ in. Public Domain/Creative Commons.$

Achieving clear daguerreotypes from the unprecedented process of photographing through a telescope was anything but easy.

John Whipple, William Bond, and George Bond, ...
by Dr. Kris Belden-Adams

Baldus’s Cloister of St. Trophîme, Arles aspired to use photography to make an imagined reality visible, tangible, and therefore achievable.

Édouard Baldus, Cloister of St. Trophîme, Arles
by Dr. Kris Belden-Adams

Galton, who founded the Eugenics movement made composite portraits to validate his stereotypes.

Francis Galton, eugenics, and photography
by Dr. Kris Belden-Adams

A drop of milk landing into a bowl makes an elegant crown shape, thanks to Edgerton’s stroboscope.

Harold Edgerton, Milk-Drop Coronet Splash
by Dr. Kris Belden-Adams

The title of the photograph suggests that this image of lines and dots in wavy bands represents a walking soldier. But how?

Marey, Joinville Soldier Walking
by Dr. Kris Belden-Adams

Daguerre’s The Artist’s Studio shows off his new medium’s promise—photography—as an art form.

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, The Artist’s Studio / Still ...
by Dr. Kris Belden-Adams

When the first eleven images of Sallie Gardner are seen in rapid succession at a speed of at least 24 frames per second, they allow us to re-experience her run.

Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion
by Dr. Kris Belden-Adams

Though this photograph could be seen as a searing social commentary, its maker preferred to view it as fine art.

Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage
by Dr. Kris Belden-Adams