Art historian, writer, and curator
Dr. Heather Diack is Associate Professor of History of Art, Photography and Visual Culture, at The School of Image Arts, Toronto Metropolitan University. Previously, she was Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and the History of Photography at the University of Miami, where she specialized in conceptual art, critical theory, and visual culture (2012-2023). Diack holds a PhD from the University of Toronto, a BA from McGill University, Montréal and is an alumna the Whitney Independent Study Program, Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the author of Documents of Doubt: The Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) which was awarded an inaugural Photography Network Book Prize (2021) and a Wyeth Foundation for American art /College Art Association publication grant (2018), co-author with Erina Duganne and Terri Weissman of Global Photography: A Critical History (London: Routledge, 2020), and co-editor of photographies (Fall 2017 no. 10.3) Not Just Pictures: Reassessing Critical Models for 1980s Photography. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals including, Visual Studies, History of Photography, Public, and RACAR, as well as in several edited volumes, such as Photography Performing Humor (Leuven University Press, 2019), L'art de Douglas Huebler (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2018), Photography and Doubt (Routledge, 2017), and The Public Life of Photographs (MIT Press and Ryerson Image Center, 2016). Diack writes criticism for Artforum.com and caa.reviews, among other publications, and was the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin in 2016. Her current book project, titled Imagined Meetings on the Horizon: Migratory Passages in Contemporary Art, interrogates the role of art and visual representation in relation to the humanitarian crisis of forced migration during the past two decades.
Books
Documents of Doubt: The Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2020).
Why do we continue to look to photographs for evidence despite our awareness of photography’s potential for duplicity? Documents of Doubt critically reassesses the truth claims surrounding photographs by looking at how conceptual artists creatively undermined them. Studying the unique relationship between photography and conceptual art practices in the United States during the social and political instability of the late 1960s, this book offers vital new perspectives on our “post-truth” world and the importance of suspending easy conclusions in contemporary art.