Episodes
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Nina Lager Vestberg (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) discusses the digital condition of photography through a phase model of digitisation. What do we talk about when we talk about digitisation? People working with photographic images tend to understand this concept in different ways, depending on whether they work in museums, archives, the stock photo industry, media outlets, publishing, or education. Photography holds a significant place in all these fields of endeavour, the impact of digitisation has likewise been varied across these different areas. Inspired by the sociologist Roland Robertson’s (1992) attempt at ‘mapping the global condition’ through the development of a ‘minimal phase model of globalisation’, this paper charts the digital condition of photography through a similar phase model of digitisation, in which the ‘place’ of photography is plotted against a set of cultural, social, technological and economic coordinates.
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Shamoon Zamir (New York University Abu Dhabi) discusses the 'The Family of Man' exhibition and its related archives. Apart from early reviewers and commentators, everyone who has written on the famous The Family of Man Exhibition has done so without the benefit of having seen it at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955 in its original iteration. The reliance on the book of the exhibition has consequently substituted for the exhibition and greatly distorted our understanding of Edward Steichen’s curatorial design. Shown, according to one count, in more than 40 countries and seen by over 9 million people, The Family of Man was a defining event in the global history of photography. This paper attempts to explore the ways in which the Museum of Modern Art’s archives and the archives of the United States Information Agency help us revise this history and develop new perspectives on Steichen’s exhibition.
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Episodes manquant?
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Pascal Griener (University of Neuchatel) discusses photographic reproductions of the French crown jewels made for their auction in 1887. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the royal heirlooms were exhibited in the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre. Even after the Third Republic, they remained very popular with the wider public. However, for political reasons, some diamonds from the French crown jewels were auctioned in the Louvre itself in May 1887. This paper analyses the major attempts made to picture these exceptional pieces, and to sell their reproductions in portfolios. The information delivered through these photographs as a group was anything but neutral in this context. The paper aims to reconstruct the functioning of these images within the framework of art history of this time.
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Catherine E. Clark (MIT) discusses the life cycle of anonymous photographic archives. This paper examines the trope of ‘trash to treasure’ in the history of photo archives. This paper’s key example is the revaluation and profit generation of an archive of amateur prints and albums collected in the 1980s by a French production company based in Marseille. They were used primarily for a show ‘Souvenirs, souvenirs’ that ran on ARTE in the 1980s. This paper will use this show and its archive to think through the life cycle of similar anonymous photographic archives. It asks: is there anything particularly photographic about trash-treasure narratives? What role does quantity play in producing photographic value? And how do photographs form new, secondary, affective meanings?
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Estelle Blaschke (University of Lausanne) discusses the development and growth in use of microfilm during the 1920s and 1930s. The use of photography as a copying machine in libraries and museums started around 1870. While the potential and the advantages of photographic reproduction for copying purposes were already discussed since the early days of photography, the idea and the practice matured during the 1920s and 1930s with the introduction of microfilm. This paper examines the technological developments and the formation of networks of people, research units, associations and public institutions during the 1920s and 1930s that solidified the idea of microfilm as an information technology of the future. The paper will ask how the medium played into the continued expansion and democratization of knowledge.
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Kelley Wilder (De Montfort University) discusses photography as a scientific protocol This talk examines the idea that photography has entered into the protocols of archive practice, informing and perhaps deforming them beyond recognition. What might a photographic protocol be? And how could an image, a photographic image, act within the confines expected of protocols? The paper explores how photographic practices and the protocols of archiving have come together in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The paper also interrogates how far the idea of photographic protocols can lead to a better understanding of the place of photographs and photographic archives within disciplinary imperatives.
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Chitra Ramalingam (Yale University) discusses photographic collections within science laboratories Experimental practice in laboratories sometimes generates vast quantities of visual records. Such sites produce an imperative to analyse, store, and bring order to large collections of experimental images. Laboratory practice thus has a museological dimension rarely acknowledged in science studies, while laboratory image archives – when considered as collections rather than as individual images – have aesthetic and epistemic dimensions rarely explored in histories of art. This talk presents a few examples of modern physical laboratories, including the Kodak Research Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, that have functioned in part as photographic archives and explores the cultural forces under which their photo collections have variously been maintained together, dispersed, or destroyed.
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Luke Gartlan (University of St Andrews) discusses Victorian arctic photography in The Arctic Regions (1873) and an unpublished album. William Bradford's The Arctic Regions has often been cited as an exemplar of the Victorianera photobook. Published in 1873 by the renowned firm of Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, this imposing volume marked a new phase in private efforts to profit from the trans-Atlantic interest in Arctic subjects. Yet the systematic first-person narrative and captioned prints of this photobook belie the shifting contexts, applications, and private debates that had accrued to these photographs in the intervening years between the voyages and the publication. This paper aims to contrast selections from The Arctic Regions with an unpublished, privately compiled photographic album in the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.
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Christina Riggs (University of East Anglia) discusses the 'forgetfulness' of photo albums from excavations in colonial and interwar Egypt. Almost every archive associated with fieldwork from archaeology's 'golden age' includes photographic albums. The album was one way of ordering, and producing, the knowledge of the past that was archaeology’s ostensible goal. But like the process of photography itself, archival processes such as assembling an album also reflected - and shaped - knowledge of the present, and in particular, a knowledge of the places where archaeology did its work. This paper explores the quality of forgetfulness that albums enable, alongside the question of place, by considering the creation, form and content, and subsequent histories and uses of albums originating from excavations in colonial and interwar Egypt.
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Christopher Morton (University of Oxford) discusses the concept of the relational museum applied to an album from the Anthropological Society in London. This paper takes the notion of the ‘relational museum’ – the concept that museum objects to some degree conceal the mass of relations that lie behind them – and applies it to a nineteenth-century album compiled at meetings of the Anthropological Society in London. The album is something of a ‘scrapbook’, as such this album is a particularly important ‘relational’ object, enabling a rich and nuanced insight into the relationships between photography, anthropological knowledge, and scientific networks in nineteenth-century London. The paper gives an overview of the album’s relational networks and suggest ways in which it shifts our understanding of photography and anthropology in a crucial period in the discipline’s early history.
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Katarina Masterova (Institute of Art History, The Czech Academy of Sciences) discusses the objecthood of Josef Sudek's photographic archive. This paper examines the process of revaluing Josef Sudek’s (1896–1976) professional archive of almost 20,000 photographic reproductions of works of art housed in the photo library of the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Transferred from Sudek’s studio in 1978, this collection was, until recently, interpreted merely as an art historical tool to view the depicted artworks. The paper discusses the ways in which restoring the objecthood of the analogue photographs facilitates the process of reclaiming and re-identifying the archive’s lost functions and meanings. Thus this methodological shift reconstructs the archive as a multifunctional reservoir, which, through the process of transfer between various spaces, uncovers innovative analytical approaches and produces new layers of historical knowledge.
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Frederick N. Bohrer (Hood College) discusses Frederic Edwin Church's photographic collection. The 19th-century American painter Frederic Edwin Church’s photographic collection is an object lesson in archival curation. It does not fully illustrate or inform a viewer about place so much as it assembles (and excludes from vision) a controlled locale. Church’s collection embodies a variety of uses of photographic imagery in the context of a mobile subject, located within a larger network of cultural authorities and visual purveyors. It also presents a view of the porous boundaries between other visual media that photography inserted itself within, which works to problematize or fracture their claims to objectivity and invites new ways to theorize them.
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Opening remarks on the second day of the conference. Costanza Caraffa has been Head of the Photothek at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut since 2006. In 2009 she initiated the Photo Archives conference series dedicated to the interaction between photographic archives, photography and academic disciplines.
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Opening remarks on the first day of the conference. Geraldine A. Johnson is Associate Professor of History of Art at Oxford University and a Fellow of Christ Church, Oxford. She is the editor of Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension and co-editor of Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. Deborah Schultz is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at Regent’s University London. She completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford on Marcel Broodthaers: Strategy and Dialogue (published 2007).
