Dr. Thierry Gervais

Associate Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and Head of Research at the The Image Centre

Ph.D. the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) in 2007

Thierry Gervais is an associate professor at the School of Image Arts (Toronto Metropolitan University) and head of research at The Image Centre. He is a historian of photography who was the editor-in-chief of Études photographiques from 2007 to 2013 and is the author of numerous articles on photojournalism in peer-reviewed journals and scholarly publications. He was the curator of the exhibition Dispatch: War Photographs in Print, 1854–2008 (RIC, Fall 2014) and the co-curator of the exhibitions Views from Above (Centre Pompidou-Metz, Spring 2013), Léon Gimpel (1873–1948), The Audacious Work of a Photographer (Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Spring 2008), and L’événement: Les images comme acteurs de l’histoire (Jeu de Paume, Paris, Winter 2007). At the RIC, he organized the symposia “The ‘Public’ Life of Photographs” (2013), “Collecting and Curating Photographs: Between Private and Public Collections” (2014), “Photography Historians: A New Generation?” (2015), and “Photography: The Black Box of History” (2018). He is the series editor of the academic “RIC Books” series, published in partnership with MIT Press, and edited the first volume entitled The “Public” Life of Photographs (2016). His most recent book (with Gaëlle Morel) The Making of Visual News. A History of Photography in the Press was released by Bloomsbury in October 2017. His current research focuses on retouched press photographs.