Anna Näslund is a visiting scholar in the Department of History of Art. She is professor of Art History at Stockholm University, Sweden. 2019-2023 she was PI of the research projects The Politics of Metadata and Sharing the Visual Heritage (http://metadataculture.se, funded by the Swedish Research Council) which focused on the challenges and opportunities in the digitization and online publication of cultural heritage institutions image collections.
Anna Näslund specializes in various aspects of photography and visual culture, mediatization and digitization of the production, circulation and consumption of pictures, art historiography, archives and museum practices.
She is the author of Travelling Images. Looking Across the Borderlands of Art, Media and Visual Culture (Manchester University Press, 2018) and have acted as editor and author of the most recent standard work on the Swedish history of photography: Fotografihistorier. Fotografi och bildbruk i Sverige från 1839 till idag (Natur & Kultur, 2022).
She is currently developing a new project in collaboration with Professor Nina Lager Vestberg (NTNU) with the working title ‘Pictorial Commodities’. This project seeks to trace the genealogy of contemporary “AI-generated” image hype back through 200 years of promoting technologies for the production, reproduction, and circulation of pictures on a mass scale. Its overall aim is to understand the historical role of pictures, not simply as commodities, but as agents of commerce: Pictures that do the work of selling. By identifying iconographic and discursive patterns in pictures of pictorial mass reproduction (metapictures), and by comparing and combining picture theories expressed in advertising copy and trade journalism (vernacular picture theories) with canonical picture theories, the project will establish a new analytical vocabulary, rooted in historical material practices, that will clarify and expand understandings of how and why pictures do so much of the work of selling in modern and contemporary societies.
Select publications
Critical Digital Art History eds. Amanda Wasielewski and Anna Näslund [Intellect, nov 2024] https://intellectdiscover.com/content/books/9781789389760
Näslund, Anna. ”Image Metadata. From Information Management to Interpretative Practice”, Museum Management and Curatorship, 39 (4) 2024: 398-418. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09647775.2022.2073562
Näslund Dahlgren, Anna. ”From Icon to Effect. The Travelling Image of Marilyn”, in Challenging the Iconic Turn. Positionen – Methoden – Perspektiven eds. Dominic Delarue and Christoph Wagner (De Gruyter, 2023): 28-43. https://www.degruyter.com/document/isbn/9783110757750/html?lang=en
Fotografihistorier. Fotografi och bildbruk i Sverige från 1839 till idag ed. Anna Näslund Dahlgren (Natur & Kultur, 2022) https://www.nok.se/titlar/a7/fotografihistorier/9530fc9a-c08f-42fe-adb8-dd467f7e0441
Näslund Dahlgren, Anna and Amanda Wasielewski, ”Cultures of Digitization: Quantifying and Contextualizing Museum Practice in Digital Art History” Visual Resources, 36 (4) 2020: 339-359 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01973762.2021.1928864
Fashioned in the North. Nordic Histories, Agents, and Images of Fashion Photography, ed. Anna Dahlgren (Nordic Academic Press, 2020). https://nordicacademicpress.se/product/fashioned-in-the-north/
Dahlgren, Anna. Travelling Images. Looking Across the Borderlands of Art, Media and Visual Culture, (Manchester University Press, 2018). https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526126641/
