Matthew Johnston
Professor of Art History
Matt Johnston studies the history of modern visual culture, in particular the nineteenth century and popular media such as photography and print. A focus of his work has been exploring how print publications in many discourses used landscape images to motivate the expansion and development of the United States. In an era before film, such publications relied on inventive, sometimes pre-cinematic orchestrations of viewing and reading in order to make their claims more convincing. Other scholarly interests include changing relationships between “high art” and popular media, the role of illustration in the development of such sciences as geology and ethnology, and the impact of photomechanical processes in the early twentieth century. Publications in progress include “‘The Printed Page Has Superseded the Market-Place’: Gilded Age Business Practices and the Rack Pictures of John Frederick Peto” and “‘Scarce a Dozen Steps Will Take Us Where We Need to Go’: Utilizing the Halftone in Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives.” Matt also serves on the board of trustees of the Maryhill Museum of Art, Goldendale, WA.