Daniel Palmer (born 1971) is an Australian historian, critic, academic and theorist of art. Palmer has explored image, identity, and social interaction. He has held teaching and research roles at the University of Melbourne, Monash University, and RMIT University, where he was Associate Dean of Research and Innovation in the School of Art from 2018 to 2023 and then a professor.
Palmer's research on photomedia focuses on the evolution of photography in the digital age, participatory media, and the collaborative turn in contemporary art. He has published books on photomedia and has advocated for the integration of new media into art history.
Early life and education Daniel Stephen Vaughan Palmer was born in Perth in 1971 and grew up in Darlington in the foothills of Perth, going to Darlington Primary and Eastern Hills Senior High schools. His father Michael Palmer worked as a radio announcer at the ABC in the 1970s and 1980s.
Palmer briefly studied photography at Edith Cowan University in 1993 as part of a Graduate Diploma in Media Studies. While undertaking a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Western Australia Palmer exhibited a series of portraits of passers-by as part of Perth's Artrage fringe arts festival in 1993. A review by arts writer Jay Gargett of this exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts detailed how Palmer photographed strangers, with their consent, on Barrack Street over an 18-month period. Shot with a 35mm camera and standard lens without any post-production manipulation, the unglamorous realism and scientific sharpness impressed Gargett: “The portraits are unusual in many respects. All of the shots were taken outside – yet there's a real studio feel about them, they're deliberately formal.” The review commends Palmer's ability to portray ordinary people with dignity and directness without aestheticising or romanticising subjects, many of whom were initially bewildered by his request to photograph them. Palmer has continued his photography of others, including his portrait of scholar Ian North, in 2014, and on whose work as a photographer Palmer wrote in 2005.
In 1996, Palmer completed Honours in English and History at University of WA, with a thesis supervised by novelist Gail Jones on memory, photography and Proust, for which he won the Katherine Moss Prize for Best Honours Thesis. In December 1996, he held a second solo exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, called Analogical Spectres. Before departing for Melbourne in 1997, his study of graffiti in a Fremantle prison was published and illustrated with his photographs, and was the subject of his paper for Studies in Western Australian History.
Palmer undertook doctoral studies at the University of Melbourne on the topic of participatory media, which he completed in 2003. Palmer's interest in education began in 1993 when he was a teacher of English as a Second Language (ESL) in Spain, and he says he has a commitment to "inclusivity and clarity".
While researching for his PhD, Palmer wrote for Eyeline, over 1998–99, reviews of exhibitions at Melbourne independent and artist-run galleries.
Career Palmer volunteered at Melbourne's not-for-profit Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), producing a number of catalogue essays and curating an exhibition Click, which was held from May to October 2001 at five Victorian regional art galleries: Bendigo Art Gallery, Geelong Art Gallery, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Mildura Arts Centre Gallery, and Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery. That year he and Kate Rhodes curated Between Place and Non-Place at the Victorian College of the Arts Gallery.
In 2002 he was recruited for the editorial team of the avant-garde Big magazine's issue featuring 20 contributing Australian photographers including Bill Henson, Anne Zahalka and Brook Andrew.
On the occasion of the National Galley of Australia touring shows Refocus: Current Directions in Photography and The Good, the Great & the Gifted, art critic Susan McCulloch consulted with Palmer about the rising popularity of photography exhibitions which he credited to "the influence of pop culture, the ability of photography to tell a story, the size to which photographs can now be enlarged (comparable to big paintings) and its possibilities in terms of expressiveness and presenting a highly personal view."
As a consequence of a 'photography boom' when a Tracey Moffatt print had broken Australian contemporary photography records, he and CCP director Naomi Cass promoted the medium as a canny art purchase. In 2005 he edited Photogenic, a series of essays based on lectures he had organised over 2000–2004 for the Centre for Contemporary Photography, and was its 'Curator of Projects' (1997–2004). His initiatives added digital art to the scope of exhibitions there, but when Kodak Australia closed its Coburg plant he readily attested to the importance of film photography.
Teaching In 2003, Palmer was appointed part time as lecturer at the University of Melbourne to initiate the institution's first subject focused on the history of photography, a position that was externally funded by Joyce Evans. During this same period, he pioneered a subject on new media art for Melbourne's Master of Art Curatorship degree, and published on internet user interfaces and online identity.
At the end of 2004, Palmer left his position at the CCP and became a lecturer in Art Theory at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University (MADA) in Caulfield. He continued as a contributor to the CCP's board, exhibition selection committee and as organiser of the Joyce Evans lecture series. In 2016, Ray Edgar quoted him on how photography had changed during the thirty years since the founding of the centre, from a marginal position in the art world and into one equivalent with painting: "It's having the time and space to question what impact changing technology and the plethora of images has on us and what impact we have on it, that makes CCP an important space."
During his time at Monash, Palmer served as Honours Coordinator of Art History and Theory and in 2009 he was promoted to Senior Lecturer, and continued his outreach into the art public, in one case presenting in the Monash University Museum of Art a discussion of "recent trends, curatorial initiatives and artworks using museum collections as their subject or materials." Palmer's 2014 'explainer' on postmodernism was published in The Conversation.
As acting director of the Art History and Theory Program in 2015, Palmer established a Bachelor of Art History and Curating degree, which as Associate Professor he co-coordinated from 2016 onwards. Over 2014–2017 he was Associate Dean, Graduate Research, MADA, Monash University. He was consulted in the Australia Council's 2006 New Media Arts Scoping Study Context Interview and Focus Group. In 2012, he was a participant in one of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Stone Summer Theory Institute seminar series convened by art historian James Elkins and devoted to discussing the education of artists.
Palmer joined RMIT University in 2018, serving six years as a senior academic leader until 2023, as Associate Dean of Research and Innovation in the School of Art at RMIT.
Research Palmer has written on perspectives on photography, video and contemporary art.
Since as early as 2003 Palmer paid attention to the effects that mobile phone technology has had on photography, the way its intimacy, portability, ubiquity, and immediacy produced multimedia content that made it a “participatory” medium in which, as noted by Willms, images are designed for their circulation. Hjorth and others cite a conference paper of that year in which Palmer argued that the dominant “modes of address” of mobile media are as a tool that complicates the distinction between creating and viewing images. Instead of transforming the boundaries between public and private visual spheres, mobile photography seems to intensify the privatization of experience, so that “the Nokia moment is far more intimate than the Kodak moment...”Daniel Palmer, “Mobile Exchanges,” Paper presented at the Vital Signs conference, ACMI, Melbourne, 8 September 2005. In a 2013 observation quoted by Henning, he adds that the technology encourages repetition and the making of sequences, while Julia Willms uses his observations in 'The Rhetoric of the JPEG,' of mages' inbuilt design for their circulation, which the techno-utopian perspective welcomes as 'democratising' the Internet, to argue that conversely, that facilitates distribution of imagery of actual violence.
Mike Leggett acknowledges that since 2004 Palmer has recognised that those artists working in video, like Leggett himself, were using it not to make entertainment as in the institutions of cinema and television, but to renew language in a relational manner:
Reviewing Darren Toft's 2005 Interzone: Media Arts in Australia, Palmer takes issue with its 'hermetic' Australian focus, and in Berlin, at 'Re:Place' the second international conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology, 2007, he surveyed the still marginal position of multimedia art in Australia, despite the role that video art played in its development there, and the gradual institutionalisation of media art in the New Media Arts Fund (1998) and Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne (2002). Brunt notes in Palmer's paper his emphasis on this:continuing divide between media art and contemporary art. Particularly vivid is his description of the status of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). Palmer argues: "ACMI [...] cast in concrete a split between media art and contemporary art; it was located right next door to the newly relocated and renovated National Gallery of Victoria, which found itself relieved of the pressure to properly represent and collect artists working with video"Palmer writes after 2012 in Photographies and elsewhere on a 'collaborative turn' in photography reflecting that in other arts, with the rise of digital networked technologies facilitating new forms of photographic cooperation, such as the immediacy of photo-sharing, citizen journalism, participatory sensing projects and community engagement, citing the work of Stephen Willats and Simon Terrill. Oliver, quotes him on photo-sharing such as Flickr as "an ever-accumulating archive of personal visual experience, memory and emotion," while Berry notes his suggestion that a continuously evolving visual feed allows individuals to enhance their personal photo archives with snippets from mainstream media, supporting the process of remembering and commemorating past events. These practices of which Palmer writes, as noted by McDonald, Nwafor, and Ruygt, foreground the collective labour behind photographic acts and challenge the ideology of the solitary author. Palmer argues "that although histories of photography invariably privilege individual figures, contemporary developments should be understood in terms of important precursors such as community photography in the 1970s,” in reference to the Half Moon Photography Workshop, the 1988 Australian documentary project After 200 Years, and Photovoice.
Of Palmer's Photography and Collaboration: From conceptual art to crowdsourcing published in 2017, Cerbarano notes it as foreshadowing the publication Collaboration – A Potential History of Photography in raising of "awareness of photography as a means of relationship" and the power dynamics behind it "rather than as mere representation", and instrumental in this is the convergence of the camera with the network, via the mobile phone, while Hjorth cites Palmer's perception of "co-presence" in camera phones' provision of an "overlay between media, visual culture, and geography." Reference to Palmer's investigation of iPhone evolution is made in discussion to the value of mobile phone images in generating large-scale visual data sets.