Dr. Alise Tifentale is an art and photography historian, writer, editor, curator, and educator based in New York City. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the City University of New York in 2020.
Currently, Alise Tifentale is finalizing the book Photo Club Culture: Global Image Circulation, Competition, and Collaboration in the 1950s and 1960s (forthcoming).
Tifentale is the founder, director, and curator of Art Days Forever, the archive and estate of photographer Zenta Dzividzinska (1944-2011) and painter Juris Tifentals (1943-2001).
She also teaches the history of art, photography, and visual culture at CUNY Kingsborough, CUNY Queensborough, and SUNY Old Westbury.
Alise Tifentale is the author of The Photograph as Art in Latvia, 1960-1969 (2011), Photographer Alnis Stakle (2009), and the co-author or editor of several other books about photography. Tifentale is also the author of three fiction books published in Latvian and German.
Tifentale co-curated the Pavilion of Latvia at the 55th Venice Art Biennale (2013; with Anne Barlow and Courtenay Finn). Before that, she was the founder and editor-in-chief of the photography magazine Foto Kvartals (2005–2010) and also the founder, director, and curator of the first photography gallery in Latvia, FK Gallery (2010).
Her fields of expertise are interdisciplinary and include the sociology of culture, art history, visual culture, photography history and theory, social media studies, and transnational cultural networks. Her secondary field of expertise covers selected topics in Soviet, post-Soviet, and Eastern European art history. Since 1998 she has written extensively about contemporary art and the history of art and photography in Latvia and the Baltic region.
Tifentale’s scholarly articles have appeared in journals such as Art History & Theory, ARTMargins, CAA.Reviews, Communication Today, Foto Kvartals, MoMA Post, Networking Knowledge, PhotoResearcher, Russian Art & Culture, Scriptus Manet, Social Sciences, Studija, and others.
She has contributed chapters to volumes such as Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Culture (2018), Exploring the Selfie: Historical, Analytical, and Theoretical Approaches to Digital Self-Photography (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), The History of European Photography 1970–2000 (Central European House of Photography, 2016), and Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation, and Design (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
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I’m beyond excited to welcome everyone to the session I’m organizing and chairing, "Camera-derie: Collaborative, Communal, and Collective Practices in Photography," at the CAA 113th Annual Conference in NYC. We’re scheduled for the first day of the conference, Wednesday, February 12, 2025, from 2:30 pm to 4 pm, at the New York Hilton Midtown.
This is a review of these two major photo exhibitions that I saw during my research visit to Riga, Latvia, at the end of 2024: “Gleizds, Paper, Scissors” at the Pauls Stradiņš Medicine History Museum and “Binde 100–10” at the Latvian National Museum of Art.
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