Paolo Magagnoli

Dr. Paolo Magagnoli is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication and Arts within the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Queensland. He earned his MA and PhD in Art History from University College London in 2012, after which he relocated to Australia in 2015 to assume his position at UQ. An art historian specializing in the history of photography, artists’ cinema, and video, Magagnoli has published extensively on modern and contemporary art. His research explores contemporary artists’ engagement with images to produce histories and memories, the aesthetics and politics of documentary forms, the history of Australian photography, and the contributions of lens-based images and visual culture to social and environmental justice movements in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. He promotes an interdisciplinary perspective on image culture that spans art history, media studies, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies. Magagnoli is an affiliate of the Centre for Critical and Creative Writing and serves as convenor for the Art History major.

Magagnoli authored the monograph Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Documentary, published by Columbia University Press in 2015. His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in leading journals such as Oxford Art Journal, Third Text, Afterall, Philosophy of Photography, and Photography and Culture. Notable recent works include 'Symbolic violence: Pacific Islander labourers and photography' (History of Photography, 2025), 'Photography as labour and industry: reading photographic archives of indentured labour' (Labour History, 2025), the introduction to the special issue 'Photography and Racial Capitalism' (History of Photography, 2025), 'From national hero to national problem: the image of the worker in Pix Magazine (1938-1954)' (Journal of Australian Studies, 2023), and 'Blinded by quarry vision: Nicholas Mangan, Australia, and the history of extraction in the South Pacific' (Third Text, 2020). He has contributed chapters to edited volumes, including 'To put a human face on the question of labour: photographic portraiture and the Australian-Pacific indentured labour trade' (2024) and 'Museums in late populist democracies: the photographic archive and the working class' (2022). In 2016, he received a University of Queensland Early Career Researcher grant for the project 'Chinese contemporary art and the politics of ecology.' Magagnoli welcomes supervision of postgraduate students researching photography's intersections with fine art, film, and mass media.

Professional Email: p.magagnoli@uq.edu.au