Ellen Macfarlane

Ellen Macfarlane specializes in art of the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, including the history of photography and Black American art. Her current research and courses examine visual culture of the past two centuries, from popular media images to well-known paintings and photographs in the history of art, and moves within the fields of environmental studies, critical race studies, and visual studies.

Her first book, Politics Unseen: Group f.64 Photography and the Problem of Purity (2025, University of California Press) reframes the pure photographs of the California art photography society Group f.64 by foregrounding members’ and their prints’ alliances across commercial, political, and artistic domains, ultimately altering perceptions of what constituted a political photograph in 1930’s America.

She is currently at work on a second book titled Perishable Arrangements: Food Photography and the Still Life. The project examines how, like the medium of photography itself, the genre of still life has long been entangled with questions of consumption, time, fragility, and death. Questioning how these associations resonate in twentieth-century American images of food, including those in cookbooks and popular magazines, the book considers issues of ecological crisis, ethnicity, war, and religious ritual in relation to this centuries-old art historical tradition. A related essay on photography on Ebony magazine’s Date With a Dish food column (1948-1962) is underway.

In addition to research articles related to her first book (American Art, fall 2016 and Fundación MAPFRE, Brooklyn Museum, October 2024), Prof. Macfarlane has also published essays on the artist William Edmondson (Vanderbilt University Press, 2021) and 1930s farmworker news photography (Southern California Quarterly, summer 2018). A new article on Imogen Cunninham’s On Mount Rainier series (1915) and the visual culture of dispossession is in review.

Prof. Macfarlane’s research has been supported by the USC Visual Studies Research Institute, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the ACLS/Luce Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Center for Creative Photography, the Terra Foundation, and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.

Before coming to DU, Prof. Macfarlane taught at The University of Southern California, California State University, Northridge, and Princeton University. She received her PhD and MA in art history from Princeton University, an additional MA in art history from Rutgers University, and BA in art history from the University of Southern California.