Concept
Kim Timby (born 1970 in California, United States) is a photography historian based in Paris who teaches at the École du Louvre and works as a curator for a private collection specialising in international nineteenth-century photography. From her research and teaching, Timby writes on the cultural history of photography as a technology. Timby's research draws on her learning, and combines her interests, in anthropology, history and photography. Her early experience of the medium was through her maternal grandmother, who had a darkroom and was active in her local photo club and showed her how to print in the darkroom. Her first camera was a high school graduation gift. Timby was educated at the private Connecticut College, New London, where as an Anthropology undergraduate she undertook a minor subject studio arts, studying photography and making photographs in the vintage processes of cyanotype and gum printing. From there she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Social Anthropology in 1992 before completing an M.A. in that discipline in 1996 at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France, and from 2002 to 2006 undertook her PhD at the same Paris institution. Timby's Master's thesis was "La photographie et l'ethnologie de la France. Modes d'emploi et apports de l'image" (‘Photography and the ethnology of France. Uses and contributions of the image’) dealing with the usefulness of photography to museums of French ethnography and how photography was employed by anthropologists in their field work and publications in studying French culture or as object of study in its own right. This research shifted her interest from traditional anthropology toward history, taking her into the history of photography, where her anthropology guides her consideration of its cultural impact. Timby's research subsequent to her master's degree and her interest in photographic technologies and their social utility and impact stem also from her work as a curator.