Tibet through a Native Lens

This is an account of how a local authority archive acquired the print collection of a studio photographer and some of the implications arising from the decision to exhibit it. Lambeth Archives obtained the Harry Jacobs archive of several thousand portrait photographs in 1999 upon his retirement. The collection was distinctive and significant because Jacobs had become a photographer in Brixton in the late 1950s just as the major migration of people from the Caribbean to urban Britain in general and to South London in particular was getting under way. Jacobs was from a Jewish family out of East London but he became the de facto studio photographer for this nascent black community just as Brixton, in the borough of Lambeth, was becoming a major centre for, particularly, Jamaican settlement. Many of the passengers on the Empire Windrush, the first boat to bring post-war migrants from the Caribbean to England in 1948, had settled in this area of South London and these Caribbean and West African communities continued to grow throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Today Brixton rivals Harlem in New York in the popular imagination as an iconic black urban centre; it has become shorthand for ‘Black London’ or arguably ‘Black Britain’. The Jacobs’ photographic archive provides an unselfconscious record of the growth and aspirations of this black community from the late 1950s until 1999.KeywordsBlack CommunityPublic ArchiveFront RoomGreat London AuthorityAsian HeritageThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This thesis follows the making of an archive of the UK HIV/AIDS epidemic (AAU) through a collaboration between archival professionals; a clinician in HIV medicine; and myself, a visual sociologist and participant observer. By framing this process as the making of a boundary object, the thesis attends to the various forms of expertise that were enacted and fostered in creating the archive. The thesis argues for an understanding of expertise as implicated in but not limited to disciplinary concerns, demonstrating how various other experiences, particularly those stemming from personal histories and affective relationships, became relevant sources of ‘expertise’ in relation to the task of assembling the archive. Similarly, the thesis describes the specific advantages afforded by adopting stances that are oblique to, yet dependent on, that of the expert, such as those of ‘amateur’ or ‘apprentice’. In the course of the research process the camera was employed in taking ‘fieldnotes’ and for the purpose of keeping present spaces and archival materials that I would come to lose access to. These photographs later came to be employed as storytelling devices and now constitute an archive in their own right – a repository of traces of processes and materials that will become invisible once AAU has become established. As such, the visual archive is employed and discussed through notions of translation; as navigating the in/visibilities of the archive; and in terms of the kind of account available through the constitution of this archive of photographs taken during the research process. In doing so, the thesis attends to the archive beyond the process of storing and classifying materials, and focuses instead on the implicit, often contingent forms of selection and interessement involved in the personal, professional and institutional relationships through which the archive comes into existence, before it is a clearly defined object.

Colonial Legacies: Contemporary Lens-Based Art and the Democratic Republic of Congo by Gabriella Nugent

ABSTRACTThe impetus for this article was an encounter with thousands of photographs in an online archive of a public university in New Zealand, taken over the twentieth century. The size of the archive and the paucity of information about many images draws attention to challenges of commencing work in a large institutional visual archive. The first part of the article outlines initial forays into the archive and attempts to ‘sort’ the 22,000 plus images it contains into some form of order, utilising the categories of people, things, spaces, activities. The second part considers the history of the library as integral to an idea of the university and its role in the storing, organisation and dissemination of knowledge. It analyses archival images of the library to reflect on its place in the university, together with the limits and opportunities afforded by visual archives in histories of higher education.

From the mid-1890s on, Britain faced a new challenge in the Gulf. Growing European rivalry in the region threatened British paramountcy in Eastern Arabia and British influence in Persia. The resulting need for a stronger political presence eventually caused the British to abandon their native agency system throughout the entire region. Between 1900 and 1911, in an effort to counter the threat, the British replaced all but two of their native agencies with political agencies or consulates run by British political officers. This process began with Bahrain.

My MFA thesis and supporting exhibition focus on challenging the United States’ photographic archive that often left out African-American people. The work, through the use of appropriation and alternative photographic processes, disrupts America’s historical visual archive and notions that surround the white gaze. Through the unsettling of this visual space, new speculative narratives can be created to help imagine new futures. This work is the beginning of a process of mourning histories I have never known and reclaiming a place for myself and my family in the American landscape that is free of racial trauma.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt illustrates the “lesser of two evils” principle by relating the peculiar story of a state archive of photographs of women in swimwear. During the Nazi period, she writes, to receive a marriage license Czech women applying to marry German soldiers were required to furnish a photograph of themselves dressed in swimwear. Taking its cue from this historic example, this study traces the evolution of a phenomenon the author describes as state-incriminating, coproduced archives, visual archives that are coproduced by representatives of the legal and political order in the name of law, and by the subjects who are obliged to participate in their creation: staging and documenting their own performance to become or remain lawful citizens. Examining this kind of visual surveillance and the “extraterritorial” quality of the produced images, a line is drawn to privacy infringement in today’s professed democracies.

Chapter 2 contributes to the growing body of work about how African diasporic women center sexual empowerment in their creative expression. This chapter looks to Akunyili Crosby’s paintings as sites of sexuality agency. Akinbola argues that she utilizes her body as an archive of photographs and popular culture and an erotic transitional space between Nigeria and the United States, thus simultaneously acknowledging and resisting cultural expectations regarding love and desire, and opening possibilities for alternate forms of belonging. Akinbola examines how Akunyili Crosby’s erotically charged portraits of herself and her husband—particularly I Always Face You, Even When It Seems Otherwise (2012), The Bridge (2010), Re-branding My Love (2011), and Thread (2012)—challenge hegemonic discourses about respectable middle-class Nigerian womanhood and women’s responsibility for the transference of cultural heritage, while also seeking to integrate representations of her relationship into a shared visual archive of the Nigerian family. This chapter resists positioning her interracial relationship as an escape from the burdens placed on her as a Nigerian woman, and instead considers how her early paintings become sites of messy dwelling where she boldly acknowledges the ways her deep love for her husband exists alongside histories of colonialism and her internalized love of the West. In these works she takes ownership not only of her desires but of the ways they have been shaped by colonialism and imperialism.

Since the 19th century, construction site photographs have been a means of documenting the building process. However, the way in which the photographs are created, how they are viewed and how they are used, creates a context that influences what can be seen in the image. The question of how this evolved after 1945 still remains largely open until today. By means of a case study into the photo archive of the Antwerp firm Van Laere (1938), this article attempts to convey how the context and evolution of the company influenced the creation of their visual archive but also the stories within individual images. The history of the company is interrogated through a series of interviews and analysis of their photographic collection. The paper aims to demonstrate that this context should certainly be taken into account in any further use of photographs as source material.

This paper discusses the processes through which historical research, visual archives, and artistic production have interacted to produce a series of original artworks capturing some of the complexities of Indian indentured migrants’ experiences and identities. The images from the ‘Coolitude’ series by award-winning artist Danny Flynn apply modern screen-printing techniques to archival photographs of Indian indentured labourers. The artistic reimagining of these historical images was inspired by the ideas of Mauritian poet Khal Torabully and the work of the historical research project, ‘Becoming Coolies: Rethinking the Origins of the Indian Ocean Labour Diaspora’. The latter attempts to reinterpret the colonial Indian labour diaspora by drawing upon accounts of migrants themselves to reassess the mechanisms of migration and reassign subjectivity and agency to Indian labour migrants’ experiences. The artworks themselves seek to interrogate and challenge the stereotypical image of the so-called ‘coolie’, presenting a more nuanced view of the Indian labour migrant. This paper discusses the creation of the visual archive from which the original images are drawn, as well as the conceptual and creative processes that underpin their reimagining as original works of art.

Abstract. The production of historical cartographies with the aid of digital tools has become in recent years a very active field of study, especially in urban heritage research. In this way, contributions from disciplines such as computer vision or remote sensing allow today to integrate data from various documentary records, enriching the available urban historiography, and enabling new readings on the relationship between historical cartography and contemporary sources of information. Despite this, little attention has been paid to the use of urban street photography, which continues to be used mostly to confirm or validate cartographic hypotheses, but not as a primary source of information. Among other causes, this is because there are no standardized procedures to extract the information directly from the photographs, nor with methods that allow addressing the divergences between captures from various locations and times.To overcome this situation, a new methodology is proposed to incorporate collections of historical photographs into a cartographic creation process, for the recovery and direct use of the information contained in them. Throughout a workflow, the proposal provides special support for two sub-processing steps: i) the possibility of comparatively studying the information from various photographs, and ii) the possibility of managing and taking into account the differences in dates between different shots. For this, the proposal transfers the recovered information from the photographs (in a 3D coordinate system) to a single cartographic representation (in a 2D coordinate system), to support that data management and decision making take place directly in the map view. This is intended to overcome the practice of using the map to ‘pass clean’ discoveries made with other means and to restore instead the notion of cartographic representation as a detection and direct investigation tool.The work considers the evaluation of the proposed method through the application in a case study. We worked with the restitution of the disappeared tram system of Santiago, Chile (1900–1945) through the cartographic representation of its extinct network of railway lines, of which only some isolated fragments remain. The visual documentation was provided by the Chilectra photographic archive (1921–27) – currently managed by the Photographic Archive of the National Library of Chile – which documented the extent of the tracks layout and its installation process (Figure 1a). Thus, around 200 scanned historical photographs were reviewed and processed with the proposed method, and their information made available to a cartographic production and management process (Figure 1b), based on the historical cartography of Santiago from Hidalgo et al (2011) and Salas (2012). Finally, the obtained data is evaluated (Figure 2), identifying scopes on the recovered information and on the characteristics that the photographs must meet in the first instance to be processed.The satisfactory results obtained show that the proposed approach and method allow historical photography to be used directly within a cartographic process, as a primary source of information. This reinforces the idea of the place that corresponds to these records within the spectrum of historiographic sources, along with textual, planimetric, and other descriptions of urban interest. Likewise, the work reflects on the approach that should prevail to use the map as a research tool, and on the possibilities that such a process opens, significantly improving the use of historical photography for the study of urban heritage with cartographic representations.

Shadow Traces examines little-known visual archives attached to four historical groups of Japanese/American and indigenous women that include the Ainu who participated at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, early 20th century Japanese picture brides, Nisei women in World War II internment camps, and World War II Japanese war brides. Less historiography than a critical reflection on the meaning of visual representations within the intersectional context of empire, indigeneity, migration, war, and racism, the book guides us through various photograph archives, identifying their formations as well as our own investments in these public and private collections and what they can especially yield for feminist and Asian American studies readers. With each of these groups, their photographic images not only function as key components of their unique archives, but invite us to consider their visual histories in new ways. Photographs play an important role in how we think about documenting the present and its relationship to the past—and vice versa. Creef carefully reveals the desires we have for archives, documentation, and photographs, especially when our desires themselves guide our memories and understandings of history. Shadow Traces builds on and expands on Creef’s earlier work by focusing on the representation of Japanese, Japanese American, and indigenous Ainu women as explicit subjects of photography.

This paper suggests that Bardini’s campaign to demonstrate the value of Early Modern Italian art and artifacts when that culture was disdained followed upon the heels of Alinari’s mission of the 1850s onward to document every monumental and scenic site in Italy, including people and customs. Both agendas were promoted through photography. By dispersing images of “il Bel Paese” and its inhabitants, Alinari produced a visual archive of ruined monuments and vanishing customs, stimulating a sense of Italian identity among the peninsula’s inhabitants whose characteristics were so richly documented. Bardini, in turn, photographed sculptures and objects aesthetically displayed and evoking an artisanal past, leading to an increased regard for, and heightened monetary value of, the items so evocatively displayed in his showrooms. Unlike Alinari and other firms, Bardini was not a professional but was the only dealer early on to develop an expertise in photography. These skills were crucial in promoting and marketing the Golden Age of Italian art. Peasants, posed and placed within picturesque settings, and ‘portraits’ of sculptures or household furnishings against neutral backgrounds, entered into the mental and visual stock of observers by way of photographs, resulting in turning an imagined Italian identity into a concrete reality.

This article aims to discuss the making of space and community in the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem, by introducing a collection of photographs from the AGBU Nubar Library in Paris, which were gathered and archived in the 1920s and 1930s. Taking into consideration the multi-layered history of the refugees and orphans who inhabited this place in the post-WWI years and the older presence of Armenian communities and religious institutions in Palestine, it analyses the ways memories act on the making of an Armenian communal space in Jerusalem. A crucial issue raised in this article regards the utilisation historians can make of such a photographic archive from the perspective of constructing a social history of twentieth-century Armenian Jerusalem. More than other available sources, the visual archive brings into partial view the experiences and lives of those who were forgotten or ignored in the post-genocide period, showing how such memories contribute to the melting and merging of segmented pasts within the space of community.

Since the beginning, at least from an idealistic perspective, journalism has been considered as a public service and should serve democracy. Despite the relationship between democracy and journalism deteriorates rapidly, this liberal understanding of journalism is still used to evaluate the journalistic work. This relationship should be protected as a value and a target in order to maintain journalism as a meaningful social institution. But how can this objective be achieved in the current difficult conditions, which are the neoliberal working conditions changing the production of news dramatically and responsible for the declining journalistic quality in the first place? Relatedly, an important consequence of the change in the knowledge production and news production process is the increasing precarization of journalistic labour. In this respect, it is important to question how journalism maintain to claim fulfilling its basic function with the precarious journalists, who are obliged to behave individualistic, disorganised, competitive and as human capitals. It can be safely said that only journalists who have secure working conditions, basic rights and freedom of speech protected under law can produce quality information serving democratic process. And these are the exact rights under attack by neoliberal turn. The study will focus on the question of how we can grasp “the relationship between journalism and democracy”, which is substantially a liberal understanding, in the neoliberal period when precarious conditions have turned into a norm. In this context, the problematic aspects of insisting on the proposals of ancient liberal solutions to that degenerating relationship, such as journalism ethics, which almost completely ignores contemporary working conditions, will also be pointed out. In addition, the role of media, technological developments and social media will be addressed from the perspective of precarization and the process of capital accumulation. Information, whether as a daily communication or intellectual production, has been possible to be dispossessed in the contemporary capital accumulation process. In neoliberal capitalism, the decline of democracy is accompanied by a decline in the quality of journalism. With the heavy attacks on journalism and academia, Turkey sets an example on this subject. In Turkey example, after the 1980 military coup neoliberal policies have gained momentum with the support of privatizations, financialization and deunionization and they have taken effect also in journalism sector. And there is a strong connection between the precarization in knowledge production processes and the current situation of journalists and journalism. Journalists' struggle for freedom of press is inseparable from the struggle to improve working conditions. Job security, social rights and other demands are the subject of a general struggle for civic rights, in which readers of the journalistic work are also involved. The precarious conditions of the journalists connect them with all other sectors subject to similar conditions and ultimately with the society, as precarization is becoming the dominant production process in general. Because the most of the audience of the journalists are also the member of the precariat or becoming one rapidly, precarity and precarious conditions connect journalists and their audience. And this concrete and obvious base of connection is also a possible junction point for lots of other people and sectors. Journalists are the direct party/part of this struggle. Starting from this, a far-reaching political struggle against the same perpetrator, who is responsible for the dispossession of not only journalists’, but also of whole society’s civic and labour rights, is urgently needed all over the world.