Emily Doucet
- Lecturer in the ARC: Photography and Visual Formats in Lebanon in the 19th Century
Emily Doucet is a writer, editor and historian of photography and visual culture, based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. After obtaining a PhD in art history from the University of Toronto (2020), she held postdoctoral research positions in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University (2022-2023), at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen, Germany (2021), and at The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University (2021). She was a CCA-WRI fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 2024. Her first book, Inventing Nadar: A History of Photographic Firsts, will be published by Duke University Press in 2026. Her research has been funded by the Association for Art History, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen, the Northrop Frye Centre, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and The Image Centre.
[The original text is in English; this version is translated from the French.]
Lecture title: Letters by the Reel: Microfilm and the Empire’s Mail
Date: Tuesday 11 March 2025 at 4.00 pm (Beirut time)
Format: Online
Venue: Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, Beirut (ALBA)
Language: English
Audience: Students in the atelier “Photography and Visual Formats in Lebanon in the 19th Century”, led by Carine Chelhot Lemyre, PhD.
Based on recent research in the British Airways archives at Heathrow Airport and in the Kodak Historical Collection at the British Library, this lecture examines the history of the airgraph postal system, a photographic format in which documents or letters written on pre-printed forms were microfilmed in order to save cargo space on aircraft flying transnational mail routes. Patented by Eastman Kodak, Imperial Airways and Pan Am Airways, the system was first used on a large scale by Britain during the Second World War. By bringing this little-known format back to life, I will explore how the material mobility of photography was harnessed as a motif to represent the state of British communication networks across the Empire during the war.
[The original text is in English; this version is translated from the French.]