Elizabeth Edwards

Material beings: Objecthood and ethnographic photographs

This paper argues that the material and presentational forms of photographs are central to their meaning as images. Drawing on work from the anthropology of material culture, it explores the significance of the materiality of ethnographic photographs as socially salient objects. The argument suggests that, while the analytical focus has been on the semiotic and iconographical in the representation of race and culture, material forms of images are integral to this discourse.

Photographic Uncertainties: Between Evidence and Reassurance

This paper examines the mid-nineteenth century photographic collecting practices in the Colonial Office (CO) in London. Following methodologies laid down by Stoler and Joyce, the paper excavates the epistemic procedures through which photography and its role in colonial governance operated between the late 1860s and 1875. I focus my analysis on the production of, and response to, two CO despatches, which were circulated in November 1869 requesting photographs. But what was the work expected of these photographs, what were they meant “to do”? What was their relationship with anthropology and geography? The paper argues that in the praxis of central government, the role of photographic evidence was more uncertain and confused than instrumental interpretative models have assumed. I shall argue that in many cases photographs were not “evidence” in any dynamic sense in information provision, but rather functioned as tools of reassurance.

Visualising Traces of the Past in Latin America

Abstract The articles included in this special issue address the shifting relationship between traces of the past and photography in Latin America from the nineteenth century to the present day. Looking at different forms of materiality and trace in Latin America, from pre-Columbian remains to body art and industrial ruins, this issue also understands photographs as material objects that ‘act’ within particular visual economies. In this introduction, we offer some brief reflections on ruins and ruination in Latin America, and on the relationship between photography and the past.

Photography, History, Difference, Edited by Tanya Sheehan. Dartmouth University Press, Hanover NH, 2014. 286 pages with 37 black & white illustrations. Softcover

Photography, History, Difference is an ambitious volume that aims to expand, indeed demolish, the boundaries that typify global photographic histories. It does so through an exploration of the dynamic and complex entanglements of local, regional, national and global practices as they perform photographic desires. Where do universalities lie? Are there any beyond the existence of a technology? The essays are wide ranging, from early photographic adaptations in Persia (Mirjam Brusius) to Photography 2.0 and digital practices in gallery spaces (Areta Galani and Alexandra Moschovi). There are essays on Canada (Martha Langford) and on Norwegian settlers in the USA (Sigrid Lien) and an equally wide range of photographic practices from family photography, through popular journalism to contemporary arts practice, and the interpenetrations of forms and purposes. All contributors are keen to stress the transnational and to distance their studies from any sense of ‘national’ history of photography, a model that has tended to dominate to date. Thus, in different ways, they tackle the mutual interpenetration of global, national and local photographic systems, and of different photographic intentions from family photographs and identity cards to art works. At the core of the volume is a concern with the historiography of photographic history and analysis. What have been the institutional, disciplinary and political investments that have shaped the account to date? The mobility of ideas, practices and images is at the core of the volume and is fascinating. Nonetheless, the success of this volume lies in its individual essays rather than in its overall concept. Some essays tackle the theoretical and interpretative implications of this historiographical challenge and come up with forceful concepts to think around the impasse – for instance, Andrés Mario Zervigón’s development of the concepts of itinerancy and migrancy around Lalla Essaydi’s folded photographic and calligraphic art works, and Gil Pasternak’s energetic challenge to the reading of family photography as merely and passively submissive to assumed social norms. Other contributors offer more straightforward literature reviews linked to a case study. With less sense of the analytical bite of a theoreticallyinformed concept of photographic historiography that intersects with something akin to philosophy of history, these chapters tend to bed down to a certain sameness. Some of the essays are outstanding contributions to the debate. Justin Carville explores the fragmented and resistant notion of the national, and indeed nationalist, in antiquarian colonial imaginaire in Ireland. Harriet Riches, after an uncertain start over familiar territory of Kodak and gender, plots the shifting territory of ‘the feminine touch’ in photographic practice and photographic industry across gender and class – the parallels with needlework being especially engaging – and offers an expansive haptic history of photography and its gender dynamics. Karen Strassler writes on identity photographs in Indonesia in ways that demolish Foucaultian models of state gaze and control, demonstrating instead the appropriation and remediation of the identity photograph to confront the oppressive practices of the state. Pasternak offers something of a reverse process, discussing the political undercurrents of family photographs in politically contested environments within which these photographs are entangled with the conditional relations between family groups and the nation-state. All of these essays really start to push at the confining categories and assumptions of analysis that have beset the writing of photographic history. These dynamics run through the other essays in the book to pleasing and cohesive effect, if perhaps less analytical force. This historiographical thrust is most welcome, and I enjoyed its broadside of challenges. However there are two problems with the volume: namely its book-ends, literally and metaphorically. First, the introduction fails to set up and gather the volume conceptually such that these disparate essays might cohere – a position not helped by the rather unclear ordering of the essays themselves. The key categories of the title – difference, history, even photography itself – are not adequately positioned. The brief discussion treats them effectively as assumed categories that too often loop back into the commonplaces of art historical analysis without offering any suggestions for their reconceptualisation and displacement. Crucially, there is no address to the enormous literature on the nature and politics of difference across numerous disciplines, over class, gender, ethnicity, for instance, especially Reviews

40.00, ISBN 978-1-611-68647-0

This collection of essays explores the relationship between photography and architecture, or more precisely the built environment. It covers a wide range of topics, locations and styles, from nostalgia to politics, from Ireland to China, from urban modernity to the cult of the ruin. This range is most welcome, and there is much of interest throughout as unknown material is brought to the surface of the discussion. However, the result is slightly frustrating. The category ‘architectural photography’ is not defined or discussed; it is interpreted variously as photographs of buildings, urban spaces, inhabited landscapes and something of a catch-all rubric. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this but the lack of discussion means that the sense of analytical cohesion is not as strong as it could be.

Nineteenth-century photographs and architecture: Documenting history, charting progress and exploring the world

into windows and photographs out of windows seem more replete with meaning than mere photographs of windows; the Bayard is reduced to historical document). Yet if Niépce and Daguerre demonstrate an interest in process or a straightforward attempt to record ‘reality’, Batchen has responded to Mike Weaver’s suggestion that when Talbot referred to his ‘Philosophical Window’, he had taken the opportunity to explore the metaphorical potential of his subject matter. Not only was Latticed Window rendered twodimensional, something much more akin to the flatness of those pieces of lace or the botanical specimens, it was as if imprinted directly onto the photographic paper without mediation, thereby demonstrating – as if with a proto-Modernist flourish – the artifice of picture-making. The reflexivity of that gesture managed to transcend simply recording and to say something far greater about the practice of image-making itself. But why stop there? If Talbot’s Latticed Window yields to a metaphorical interpretation, what about something like his so-called Milliner’s Window (before January 1844), which looks like a shop window but was in fact staged out of doors in front of a black cloth, the hats carefully arranged on shelves, providing a comment on the aesthetics of contemporary display? Hellman acknowledges that the store window is a ‘photographic trope’ which ‘offer[s] a ready-made picture opportunity for the roving street reporter’, but that is as far as she is prepared to go. The same kind of abstraction found in the Latticed Window – a kind of black and white grid pattern – is present here with the elaborate bonnets punctuating the inky backdrop. Their very fashionability lodges them firmly in a here and now. In this photograph, the added poignancy comes from the acknowledgment of desire (so many bonnets from which to choose). If this is as seen through a pane of glass, then it is with none of the reflectiveness of Eugène Atget or Harry Callahan. The Arcadian pleasures that centred on a theatre of consumption and the creation of desire contributed to this sense of ‘look but don’t touch’ that the shop window awakened in the decades after Talbot produced these early works and was heightened by the development of the new technology of plate glass. The various modes of transparency that coincided with the development of photography – the panopticon, the diorama, the Great Exhibition – demonstrate the links between plate glass and the emergence of new visual technologies as the window clearly foregrounds looking in a significant way that goes beyond Batchen’s reflexivity. The fantasising gaze and the awakening of new, strange appetites that could never be fulfilled were both captured and suggested by the camera. As Rachel Bowlby has argued in Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (1985):

A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country: Vincent Soboleff in Alaska

Archaeology is, in many ways, a discipline and practice defined through its images. Photographs, and more recently digital imaging techniques, have been used to identify, penetrate, interpret and communicate the archaeological past. Both these books address those ways in which the past has been brought into visibility and thus comprehension through the practices of photography. They both also consider, from their very different approaches, how photography has brought this past into the public realm and is in part responsible for the massive and wide ranging interest in archaeology. Bohrer’s volume Photography and Archaeology, in the Reaktion Exposures series, tackles this huge and sprawling subject in four substantial thematic chapters that follow an introduction, and each of which addresses an aspect of content and process: ‘Science, or Truth’, ‘Travel, or Presence’, ‘Meaning, or the Archive’, and ‘Art, or Reframing’. Each chapter is full of interesting information, explanations, insights and ways of thinking about the relationship between the two practices. They tackle variously the negotiation of objectivity, the conditions of visibility and invisibility of the archaeologist, the structuring of information, and the ways through which artists have engaged critically with the practices and metaphors of archaeology. All the chapters are supported by an excellent and fascinating array of images, beautifully reproduced, and throughout Bohrer wears his theory and analysis lightly and elegantly, woven neatly through his many examples. However, despite its many merits, the book has some major limitations as an account of the entanglements and dependencies that mark archaeology’s relationship with photography. The themes of each chapter begin well enough, raising important questions, but then tend to bed down into a certain sameness. There is an overemphasis on the large ruins and iconic sites that have entered the romantic archaeological imagination, and on the nineteenth-century inscription of the Middle East, Egypt and Classical Mediterranean regions. Consequently, it is an account that too often accords with the canons of photographic history, with many photographs from familiar names such as Francis Frith, Maxime Du Camp, Gustave Le Gray and Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey filling the pages. While certainly these are important, the everyday and visually less impressive photographs of stratigraphy and sections, changes in soil colour, postholes and dull broken earthenware pots in situ, which have been the backbone of archaeological practice for some hundred years, are under-represented in both discussion and illustration. One appreciates that these would make a less attractive book, but a more extensive inclusion would have accentuated the differences between the inclusive images of views of sites andmighty ruins (Chapter 2), and the detailed work of archaeology itself (Chapter 1). There is very little discussion of material dating from after 1930, of the huge body of material generated through the everyday practices of excavation, or of the post-excavation interpretative practices of archaeology. The recognition of the significance of stratigraphy and other analytical methods for reading the past is given scant attention, beyond appeals to changing concepts of scientific evidence in archaeology, yet these changes had a massive impact on the kind of photography produced and the demands made of imaging technologies, such as more recent quasi-photographic imaging techniques used in modern archaeology. The reader is returned repeatedly to early work such as Excursions Daguerriennes (1842) and La Mission He liographique (1851). While such publications were undoubtedly formative of European archaeological imagination and practice, there is little, for instance, on the core latenineteenth-century and twentieth-century work in Central Europe. The great Archaeological Survey of India gets little more than a walk-on part, and sub-Saharan Africa is barely mentioned despite all the major and highly visualised archaeological work on human origins. The Americas fair a little better. There is a very useful, interesting and well-illustrated discussion of the imaging practices of an emergent meso-American archaeology, especially that of Desire Charney and, later, AlfredMaudslay. But yet again one feels that the discussion is dominated by the canon of the history of photography – a thought rather supported by North

Photography and Archaeology

The three photoCLEC PIs are the guest editors of this Theme issue, november 2012, of Photography and Culture, with nine articles from PhotoCLEC research.

Editorial. Photographic Legacies: Addressing the Colonial Past in Europe

This sumptuously produced volume examines the photographic albums of Sir John Marshall, Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India between 1902 and 1928, and commemorates the 150 anniversary of the Archaeological Survey. These photographs, their archival lives, and Sir John’s career and interpretation of antiquities policy in India, are used as a platform through which to discuss the development of antiquarian interest in Indian antiquities, and the emergence of scientific archaeology in India and its entanglement with colonial power. There are three essays of particular interest to historians of photography – those by Sudeshna Guha, Christopher Pinney and Tapita Guha-Thakurta. The photographic essays are accompanied by two others with non-photographic themes. The first concerns orientalism and archaeology in India, especially the relationship between imperial control, archaeological development and philological research which worked to constitute and institutionalise a western history of India and the non-west. The second non-photographic essay examines the broader interpretation of Buddhist monuments. But all have an impact on how we might understand the photographic albums. The photographs are approached as artefacts of a shifting archaeological practice, for the political and disciplinary milieu in which Marshall both practised archaeology and negotiated visual evidence of his department’s activities changed radically over the period of his directorship. Guha’s introduction outlines the benefits of this theoretical position, actively resisting the reduction of the photographs to the somewhat tired model of a ‘colonial gaze’. Certainly these were practices and values that were nurtured by colonialism and existed within an imperial structure, but the evaluation of ancient remains, responses to their preservation and the photographic recording of those processes was the site of constant contestation and negotiation. For at the same time there was a strong sense of the value of monuments as Indian national heirlooms, which defined the glories and longevity of Indian culture, and which eventually became absorbed into the growing Indian nationalist movement. Under Marshall’s charismatic and sometimes autocratic leadership, the Archaeological Survey of India moved from antiquarian and orientalist paradigms towards a scientific archaeology and the detailed understanding, aided and sustained by photography, of the material traces of the past. The photographs record the consolidation and conservation of a wide range of monuments. However, one site became both a major focus for Marshall’s work and is a recurring feature of the discussion in this book; namely, the great Stupa at Sanchi, one of the major Buddhist pilgrimage sites. The significance, indeed the iconic status of Sanchi and its conservation, demonstrates the contentious histories which characterised colonial archaeology and its value systems. Tapati Guha-Thakurta’s chapter, in particular, takes a ‘social biography’ approach to the monument itself and its representations in order to demonstrate the complex and various expressions of that monument as it moves from ruin to national monument, especially in relation to the growing Indian scholarly and institutional engagement with Sanchi, and indeed, as Sudeshna Guha also demonstrates, with other monuments and archaeological sites in India. Guha-Thakurta’s is a fascinating and satisfying chapter that neatly negotiates the complexities of the different claims on the monument, both in the treatment of it as an archaeological site and a site of resacralisation, and its ‘off-site’ career in museums, exhibitions, publications and as casts at the South Kensington Museum. Pinney also returns to Sanchi in order to consider the spatialities of the experience of the monument and the possibilities of its photographic translation. Pinney’s essay takes a different perspective though, exploring the possibility of a ‘Buddhist photography’ as a spatial articulation of Sanchi and its apprehension. He asks what would be an appropriate photography, in terms of the local pilgrims, to articulate the affective engagement of the visually complex and affective space of the Sanchi temple? As usual Pinney is in dazzling form, tying spaces to evolving religious concepts and to the spaces of experience. But at the same time one is left with a sense that photographs exist solely to demonstrate or perform a set of theoretical dispositions as Barthes, Mulvey, Bazin, Alpers and a host of others from the postmodern canon swirl through the pages. This endless scatter of references leaves one feeling a little breathless, and hoping for the more detailed and engaged pursuit of some of them in relation to the material. Pinney poses a number of intriguing and stimulating questions, but seldom offers any closure in terms of argument. The most substantial chapter is that by Sudeshna Guha on the shifting entanglement of photographic and archaeological practices in India and the emerging techniques and demands of a proto-modern archaeological discipline with its sense of objective scientific procedures. Guha’s Introduction and the chapter entitled ‘Photographs in Sir John Marshall’s Archaeology’ constitute useful and well crafted accounts of the epistemological frames through which photographs were shaped in the Archaeological Survey, and the constant mediation between disciplinary principles and practices in the making of the visual economy of knowledge on archaeological realities. It may lack Pinney’s pyrotechnics, but it creates a solid and theoretically informed base from which to consider the work of these photographs

The Marshall Albums: Photography and Archaeology

The astounding products of recent scientific imaging, ranging from the Hubble Telescope’s representations of prehistoric celestial explosions to the instantaneous visibility of emotional and intellectual states rendered by fMRI, have made it difficult for all but the most intractable of social constructivists not to wonder afresh at the possibilities of picturing the natural world with a new fidelity. Despite our sophistication as discerning viewers, our scepticism of the purity of scientific interests, and an entrenched antipathy towards claims of the epistemic validity of visual representations, we nevertheless harbour a desire to see that which escapes our field of vision and an optimism that surpassing that threshold is a matter to be solved technologically. These innovations, and the ambitions they serve, are implicit rebuttals to the deprecation of scientific authority that has been the premise of the most innovative and challenging work in the history of science in recent decades. That this contest is joined so decisively in the realm of the visual signals the idiom in which some very fundamental questions of knowledge and belief in modern culture are being articulated. Such a vital moment as ours requires some historical perspective, which Brought to Light furnishes by examining a very specific body of photographs within the context of the most vibrant, interdisciplinary debates in the history of science and art, for which the medium acts as an obvious point of intersection. As editor and curator Corey Keller asserts at the beginning of her insightful introductory essay, the decision to focus on photographs of phenomena invisible to the human eye in fact encompasses an expansive constellation of historical problems. At the centre of these, during the period of photography’s genesis, is the development of an increasingly corporeal location of visual experience, in which the link between seeing and knowing was modulated by the limitations and idiosyncrasies of human perception. The implied variability of the sensory apparatus of the image-maker in the process of representing natural phenomena proved to be enormously destabilizing to the objective security of scientific pictures, especially those executed in traditional graphical media. What the photograph enticingly appeared to offer was a way around the contamination of this mediation, of expelling human agency and its inevitable flaws from the process by turning to Nature to produce a purified representation of itself. The task of historicizing visual objectivity has been undertaken most impressively by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison in their landmark article in Representations, ‘The Image of Objectivity’ (1992), and in a more recent and comprehensive volume which augments it. The crux of these studies, which have helped to bring historical specificity to the status of the photograph, is the hypothesis that ‘nonintervention, not verisimilitude, lay at the heart of mechanical objectivity, and this is why mechanically produced images captured its message best.’ It was not photography’s resemblance to the referential world but, rather, the fact that it seemed to be generated without the agency of a human being that secured for the medium its privileged epistemic position. Yet, as several of the extraordinary objects in this exhibition demonstrate, nonintervention was often incommensurable with the didactic aims of scientific photography, for a ‘pure’ image might include either a surfeit of irrelevant data that distracted the viewer from the essential phenomenon of interest, or, conversely, a scarcity of legible information that needed to be amplified by non-photographic means. Nonintervention, then, is not a monolithic category that guarantees the photograph’s objectivity, but rather a contested realm that is calibrated to accomplish the instructive purposes for which many of these photographs were produced, balancing the need for legibility against the authority of neutrality. The photographs at issue constantly seem to reintroduce the human hand into the process by which the image is made legible and useful, even from the very earliest years of the medium. In their Cours de microscopie complementaire des e tudes medicales (1845), which they averred was an ‘atlas execute d’après nature au microscope-daguerreotype’, Alfred Donne and Jean Bernard Leon Foucault sought to instruct young physicians in the physiology of vital fluids through the ‘rigorous fidelity’ of the daguerreotype. Yet the uniqueness of that process meant that the volume contained no photographic images, but rather engravings based upon drawings of the daguerreotypes, in an uneasy reconciliation of the demands of reproduction and wide dissemination with the possible invasion of the impurities of the draftsman’s hand. A gelatin silver print of a telescopic ‘star map’ by Maximilian Franz Josef Cornelius Wolf and Johann Palisa (1903) renders a virtually indecipherable series of tiny dotsmeaningful only with the addition of a grid, transforming a photograph free from human interference into a hybrid product whose natural subject is hemmed in and made comprehensible by the clearly