Professional Experience

The Ryerson Image Centre (RIC) offers several fellowships for research related to photography. Applications to be announced.

The Nadir Mohamed Postdoctoral Fellowship
$10,000 (for candidates holding a PhD)

The Doina Popescu Fellowship 
$5,000 (for candidates holding or working toward a PhD)

The Howard Tanenbaum Fellowship 
$2,000 (for candidates holding or working toward a Master’s)

The Elaine Ling Fellowship 
$2,000 (for candidates holding or working toward a Master’s)

Research fellows have the opportunity to study select areas of the RIC’s photography collections first-hand. These include the acclaimed Black Star Collection of photo-reportage, with over a quarter-million prints spanning the 20th century; a historic and fine art photography collection; and several archives devoted to the life and work of diverse photographers, including Werner Wolff, Wendy Snyder MacNeil, Jo Spence, and Berenice Abbott.

We also offer access to the Ryerson University Library Archives/Special Collections, which includes additional important resources related to photography, including the archive of Kodak Canada.

Film and video “counter-archives” disrupt conventional national narratives to write difference into public accounts. Resistant and community-based, these archives counter the hegemony of traditional archival institutions that have normally neglected or marginalized women, Indigenous Peoples, the LGBT2Q+ community, and immigrant communities. But film preservation for counter-archives requires a “counter-pedagogy,” where training is paired with student-centred research and professional development. Student archival internships are a significant part of Archives | Counter-Archives, a national-scale multi-year project across Canada.

The Master’s in Film Preservation and Collections Management at Ryerson University is a special hub of activity in this component of the project, which overall aims to enhance access for Canada’s citizens and Indigenous peoples and other communities to their own audiovisual cultural heritage. Master’s thesis projects are linked to archival partners’ case studies, which are practice-based artistic remediations tied to specific problems around audiovisual preservation and driven by community interests. Student interns are key for achieving community-based goals while building credentials for the future generation of film presentation professionals in Canada. Students are thus central to the project’s work advocating for the needs of community collections, shaped by Indigenous and other protocols around cultural property, sovereignty, and repatriation.

Archives | Counter-Archives offers paid opportunities to two or more film preservation MA students to join the project, if their thesis work overlaps with the research and mandate.

The Paris Workshop for Photography proposes an interdisciplinary, international, and inter-institutional two-week summer program for students working in the history, preservation, conservation, and care of photographic and film collections.

The Paris Workshop for Photography is a unique extra-curricular opportunity to acquaint students with major French institutions and collections including but not limited to:

• the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
• the Centre Pompidou
• the Collections du Centre National du Cinéma
• the Maison Européenne de la Photographie
• the Musée d’Orsay
• the Société Française de Photographie

Students will get the chance to look at collections unavailable to the general public with their curators giving behind-the-scenes access. They will be able to network with French professionals working in archives and museums and to discover Paris as a place of culture where photography and film have a long history and a vibrant contemporary life.

The Paris Workshop for Photography engages students in an international collaboration between photography and film communities in Toronto and Paris.

NOTE: The Paris Workshop for Photography is an extra-curricular option for students, organized by faculty in the F+PPCM program, but it is not for course credit. Students are responsible for any costs associated with the workshop (ie: travel, accommodation, etc).