‘That was a posed photo’: Reflections on the process of combining oral histories with institutional photographs (original) (raw)
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L’exposition How We Are, Photographing Britain en 2007 était la première grande exposition photographique du musée des arts exclusivement britanniques consacré, la Tate Britain. Cette exposition affirmait entre autres, que la photographie britannique contemporaine aux années thatchériennes, assume sa parenté avec la photographie documentaire des années 30. Or la représentation des travailleurs a été au centre du réalisme social au cœur des pratiques documentaires des années 30.. La photographie de la fin des années 80 marquerait en revanche un retrait de la photographie sinon documentaire, du moins de la photographie engagée, passant par « une redéfinition de la photographie en tant qu’art qui réaffirme le pictorialisme sur le réalisme documentaire. »2 La représentation du travailleur allait donc se faire l’écho, d’une forme de rupture au sein de l’histoire de la photographie documentaire. Le point de départ de ce papier s’articule autours de quelques remarques à propos de l’exposition « Here we are », puis analyse les marqueurs de la représentation des travailleurs avant et après le passage à la photographie couleur, dans les différents formats d’expression qui jalonnent la photographie des années 80.
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There is a long history of using researcher-generated photography to complement verbal descriptions of culture in ethnographic research. In the recent discussions, photos are no longer treated as authentic or accurate descriptions of the field, but are instead understood as particular representations of organisational life. As manufactured visual artefacts, photos reflect the conditions surrounding their production within ethnographic practice, but at the same time their ethnographicness is contingent on the shifting interpretations and uses of images in scholarly representations. The purpose of this paper is to add to the emerging body of performative visual ethnography by re-reading and narrating a set of photos of university organisation taken originally as a part of another field research project. By presenting the photos depicting the organisation from the viewpoint of a cosmopolitan academic, and complementing the images with critical narratives about some of the personal experiences of living and working under a regime of intensifying control and managerialism, a multi-modal representation of 'how it feels being there' is offered. The challenge of photographic ethnography is to retain the specific sensitivities related to the visual format while at the same time being able to spin an accompanied narrative that enables a creative dialogue between the pictures and the words.
The Back of the Photograph: Making Meaning in the Archives
This article uses a select sample of photographs taken during the early years of American occupation of the Philippine Islands to suggest ways of approaching the layers of meaning contained inside them. It does this first by placing the images in the historical and institutional context of specific archival collections and, second, by “activating” the visual texts within and around them. In this approach, I follow the lead of Elizabeth Edwards who has stressed the instrumentality of the archives themselves, that is their ability to invest photographic images with taxonomic certainty, authority, and the dominant hierarchical values of the society assembling them. Additionally, the work of the pioneering Philippine scholar Benito Vergara is informative, particularly his argument that photography, as a privileged metropolitan mode of knowledge production, was especially well-suited to the presentation and justification of colonialist ideology. Seeing photographs of Filipinos not merely as illustrations but powerful bearers of ideology that were able to authenticate American notions of race, class, and assimilability, Vergara makes a strong case that the extension of the “Kodak Zone” to the islands was a vital part of the larger colonial project in the Pacific
Compelling Evidence: the mobilization of the Carlton Hill photographic archive across time
2017
Our project bridges the field of social work with the field of photography and archival scholarship and our interdisciplinary research team includes scholars from within social sciences and visual studies. We explore connected, transnational histories through a cultural framework and try to reconcile different viewpoints by working across historical spaces. In this paper, we focused on a single British case study, the Carlton Hill collection in Brighton that documented the area prior to it being demolished under the pretext of ‘slum’ clearance. We presented a small number of visual interventions and activities that were timed to coincide with the IVM conference in Brighton in September 2015. The collection continues to live on; the photographs, in their manifestations as physical objects or online images, continue to communicate through their itinerant languages. Our research shows that archival objects do not stay in place, the object and the auspices shift over time. New reworking...
The personal versus the institutional voice in an open photographic archive
Archival Science, 2017
In an open photographic archive where both archival institutions and the general public can upload images and provide them with descriptions, a noted difference can be perceived between the institutional voice and the personal voice. Private persons' written descriptions of their photographs tend to have a more subjective style than the neutral, objective style of descriptions written by institutional staff influenced by archival guidelines. Seven examples from the site Historypin will be analysed using semiotics, rhetoric and genre theory as theoretical approaches. Deixis is a key concept in the analyses. In order to discern the institutional voice, meta-genre documents like archival guidelines have been studied. Regarding the personal voice, it is shown how genres that evolved long before the web serve as patterns for the contributions to Historypin, and at the same time how these genres undergo a renewal in this context. The article concludes by suggesting ways the personal voice could be strengthened and that institutions might benefit from creating fictional stories emulating the personal voice.
2009
The practice and its eFFccrs in rclation [Q Goldblart's st'ries as well as other phomgraphcrs' work and my own. arc discussed funher in Chapter 2: page!. 23-29. 6 I elabor.Hc on the hisrory of (he railway'S ill chapter one of Ill)' dissenarion. David Goldblatt 3 (2007: 11-12) describes his delight on a sojourn in the 1970s to the Marico Bushveld area 4 , in confirming factual correlations between his own experiences and those of the Herman Charles Bosman's written creations. "It was exciting and strangely affirming to discover, as I went ftom farm to farm and met the LocaL peopLe, the extraordinary correLations between the facts, the spirit o/the place, and Bosman's stories". Later, in the years leading up to 2007 and 2008, Goldblatt returned to the original sites of his own photographs to reshoot in projects such at Intersections Intersected and In Boksburg.5 Goldblatt's 'returns' resonate for me as my own process in this study has been similar, in revisiting the archive of earlier work as well as the physical site of the railways and trains where the earlier work was made, to reshoot for the PLatform 24 series. The procedure for this study has been to apply a research process to the content of those images from my own archives. This has entailed photographing similar subjects again (in the same territory); a process that has aimed to reframe the earlier work together with the newer work as one overall project. The main subjects of the project are people along the journey, in the sites of the railway stations and trains that travel through them across the South African landscape mainly between Cape Town and Johannesburg. My project ' This is a descriprion from his ess:1.y. Some Afrii<allt'fS Phowgraphed, Some Afrikaners Revisited: Notes on how [hey came [0 be in Some Afrikaners Revisited. • These art mcmioncc\ in Bosman's srorics of rhe 19405 and 1960!. collcned in Mafeking Road (1947) and Umo Dust (1963). ~ Tht practice and its eFFecrs in rclation [Q Goldblart's st'ries as well as other phomgraphcrs' work and my own. arc discussed funher in Chapter 2: page!. 23-29. 6 I elabor:Hc on the hisrory of (he railway'S ill chapter one of Ill)' dissenarion.
THE RETURNED: MEMORY AND HISTORY IN CLASSIC AUSTRALIAN PHOTOGRAPHS
Media International Australia, 1995
An examination of a series of recent newspaper articles, each of which is about the 're-discovery' of some previously anonymous person who had featured in a classic Australian photograph. I use Benjamin, as well as recent debates within historiography around the filiation of memory from history, to discuss this phenomenon. I discuss the photograph's peculiar relationship to both memory and history. I locate the new role for the historic photograph as somewhere between the artefactual aura of the classic painting and the discursive mutability of the computer file. I claim a new role for the press which now commands and curates a large archive of images from our past and hence, like public monuments and ceremonies, has a stake in recuperating memory to serve history.