research focus
- history of film, film theory
- history of photography
- media archaeology
- art and science studies
CURRENT PROJECTS
The Origins of Automated Identity Recognition in Art, Science, and Spectacle, Habilitationsprojekt, Kunstuniversität Linz (2025-2028
History of Identity Documentation in European Nations, national management committee member for Slovenia (HIDDEN, COST, no. CA21120, 2022-2026)
The Photo of a Black Hole: Physics Meets Photography, co-author and team member, Slovenian National Research Agency (ARIS) no. J7-60101 (2025-2027).
Béla Balázs Reading Group (2019-)
COMPLETED PROJECTS
Sustainable Digital Preservation of New Media Art, research team member, Slovenian National Research Agency (ARIS) no. J7-3158 (2022-2025).
An Archaeology of Identity Photography, Principal Investigator, ERC Complementary Scheme, Slovenian National Research Agency (ARIS) no. N6-0244 (2022-2023).
Short CV
Eszter (M) Polonyi is a photo and film historian trained in the Anglo-American academic system using media archaeological methods. Her research focuses on types of images that are of interest to more than one discipline and that have multiplied our forms of belonging to, sheltering from, and sharing in the world. Her book-length manuscript and Habilitationsprojekt is about Identity Recognition and traces the history of techniques by which identity was derived from images of the human head and hands before the advent of digital recognition methods. Eszter is also working on a state-funded interdisciplinary research project involving the history of imaging the sky and the role played astral bodies in defining the human subject at the Physics department of the University of Ljubljana. Since migrating from New York, where she was working at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn (2017-2020), Eszter has worked at multiple institutions in the Adriatic, including as curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, Visiting Lecturer at the University of Udine, and Assistant Professor at the University of Nova Gorica. Her degrees are from Columbia University (PhD, MPhil and MA, History of Art), Courtauld Institute of Art (MA), and Wellesley College, MA, USA (BA, Art History) and has received funding from ARIS (Slovenian National Research Agency), the Mellon Foundation, DAAD, PepsiCo, SSRC DPDF, AHRC UK, the Hungarian Educational Ministry, and several other private and public arts and humanities foundations.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Essays in publication
“Image as Shelter: Tobias Putrih and Media (Art) History,” text of exhibition catalogue, Tobias Putrih with Ardalan Sadeghikivi: Order of Sweetness, Cukrarna Gallery. 19.6.-15.9.2024, ed. Alenka Gregorič, Ljubljana: Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana Press, 2025 (in press).
“A Short History of Identity Photography,” in Special Issue on Uses and Misuses of Identity Documents, Migration History (forthcoming).
co-authored with Veronika Hittmanová Rollová and Mackenzie Pierce, “A ‘Civilizing Mission’? Building, Designing and Educating” in The Cultural History of the Avant-Gardes of Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Julia Secklehner and Matthew Rampley, Brill Press (in press).
“Between Useful and Useless: Small Gauge and Amateur Film in Socialist Hungary” in Useful Cinema in State Socialism, edited by Lucie Česálková, Christian Ferencz-Flatz, and Ana Szel, Amsterdam University Press (in press).
Recent essays
“Mobility Media: an Archaeology of Identity Photography through Science, Art and Visual Culture,” in Yet it Moves! on Cinema, Media and Mobility, Eds. Simone Schneider, Andrea Mariani, Mimesis International, 2024.
“"An Opportunity to Grapple with the Picture Plane…": The Stereo-Illusion’s History of Frustration” chapter in Art and Artifice in Visual Culture: Eighteenth Century to the Present, Routledge Research in Art History Series, edited by Michael Yonan, Ovidiu Prejmerean, Sonia Coman, 2024.
“The Return of the Painter: Mechanicity and its Operator” in Dominik Mahnič: Steering the Brush, Ed. Jani Pirnat; Ljubljana: City Museum of Ljubljana, Match Gallery, 2024. Also in Slovenian.
“Franz Ferjan’s Color Stereography: Expanding Sensory Perception,” in An arsenal of memories or an intimate landscape? Franc Ferjan and stereo photography. Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana: 3. 11. 2022 - 22. 1. 2023, Ljubljana: Moderna galerija, 2022.
“Flicker: Thom Andersen Takes Muybridge to the Movies,” in Provenance and Early Cinema. Ed. Joanne Bernardi, Paolo Cherchi-Usai, Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021.
INTERVIEWS
Matevž Brecej , “A nearly forgotten photographer: Franc Ferjan,” (in Slovenian) Osmih dan, RTVSLO, Nov 17, 2022
Jaša Rajšek,”'There is a part of your face that belongs to the state:’ surveillance technologies increasingly focus on the human face.” (in Slovenian) RTVSLO, Dec 12, 2021
