Representing women across the public/private divide: Kerstin Hesselgren’s image in the Swedish digital archives

Abstract

ABSTRACT It is through archives that private lives become constitutive of public historical memory, and this translation is nowhere more apparent than with highly social objects like the photograph. Photographs have uniquely malleable meanings. According to photographic anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards, these ‘relational objects’ function as mediatory materials, ‘image-objects in sets of relationships that are made meaningful through different forms of apprehension’. Scholars recognize that a photograph’s relational definition undergoes significant alteration when an image moves from the fixity of the physical archive to the networked digital archive. Yet studies illustrating this contextual gap largely avoid questions of gender and politics. This article will examine how one digitised archival photograph of the Swedish politician Kerstin Hesselgren functions as a relational object mediating between definitions of public and private, and how this mediation travels (or not) across three digital environments with varying degrees of connection to traditional archival institutions and practices.