Elisa deCourcy

Elisa deCourcy is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow based at the Australian National University. She is a specialist in early photography and is currently completing a substantial project on the first fifteen years of photographic practice in the Australian colonies. Her scholarship is informed by deep archival research, practice-led investigation, and rethinking digital design for photographically centred heritage collections. Her work has been covered by The Guardian, The Smithsonian Magazine, and The Conversation. Her latest book, Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle: The global career of showman daguerreotypist J.W. Newland, co-authored with Martyn Jolly, was published with Routledge in February 2021. She has been the recipient of several grants and prizes both from within Australia and abroad.

The Business of Photography | Chau Chak Wing Museum

ABR Arts • 11 March 2021

Few exhibitions about photography are premised on something other than the resulting image. The Business of Photography: The 19th century studio in NSW at Sydney University’s new Chau Chak Wing Museum makes an intriguing step back from the cased daguerreotypes, carte de visite, and collectable stereo cards of the nineteenth century. It invites visitors into the places of these images’ latency ... (read more)