Visual Archive Research Articles

El archivo visual y la memoria literaria de la Transición, dos instantáneas posfotográficas: Javier Cercas y Marta Sanz

Este artículo aborda el auge de la cultura visual en la literatura española y, en particular, el papel que desempeña el archivo visual sobre la Transición en las tramas literarias contemporáneas. En primer lugar, se define el nuevo régimen visual contemporáneo desde los presupuestos de la teoría estética y la crítica de las ideologías para explicar cómo la digitalización ha extendido el valor de lo serial, y no de lo único e irrepetible. En este contexto, llamado posfotográfico, el valor documental de lo fotográfico se ha visto alterado y ya no posee la función verificadora que tuvo cuando se almacenaba física y materialmente en los archivos históricos. Los almacenes de la memoria colectiva se conforman hoy según el paradigma de la inmaterialidad que dictan las nuevas tecnologías para la captación de imágenes. El artículo explica cómo determina el análisis político y cultural de la Transición la manera en que el escritor incluye este archivo visual de la memoria colectiva en su obra. Esta explicación se realiza en particular mediante el comentario crítico de las obras de Javier Cercas y Marta Sanz.

“Populus Means the People, Ladies and Gentlemen.” A Visual Archive of Peasant Protests during the Post-Socialist Transition

The article is devoted to peasant protests organized in the period of the post-socialist transition in Poland. The mainstream public sphere is reluctant to bring up the memory of these protests, suppressed as it is by the story of the transition as a period of reveling in capitalism and building a civil society. The author views the radical protest movement as the first mass and serious opposition against the new neoliberal politics of the state. Using Charles Tilly's category of "repertoires of contention," she analyzes the tools used by farmers: road blockades, occupations of government buildings, performances of food wasting and examples of peasant visual activism. The article is accompanied by Michał Januszaniec's visual essay, which uses a diverse range of visual materials from the period.

Management of audio-visual records at the National Archives of Namibia

The study sought to determine the role that the National Archives of Namibia plays in the management of audio visuals in an attempt to curtail the deterioration of audio-visual archives which are kept in various organisations, some of which are unknown to the National Archives of Namibia. A qualitative method was applied in the study. The case study used the interpretive paradigm which enabled the researcher to triangulate the data collection instruments. Interviews, questionnaires and observation checklists were used to collect data. Content analysis was carried out to analyse data from interviews, document review and the observations. While Excel software provided descriptive statistics on graphs. The results indicated that AV materials were created and stored by various organisations, including the National Archives of Namibia, which oversees the management of all records. The Archives Act (Act 12 of 1992), section 4(1), gives a mandate to the National Archives of Namibia for control over records and archives of all formats in government offices, offices of local authorities and statutory institutions. Nonetheless, there are instances where AV materials are not deposited or stored in appropriate conditions. It is also apparent that different cataloguing and classification systems are used by different organisations. It is clear that most of the organisations manage AV materials in the same way as paper formats records. There is also an inadequately skilled workforce who were given a responsibility to manage AV materials. The study was limited to the Khomas region. Since there are 14 regions in Namibia, the findings cannot be generalized to other regions. Future studies should cover other regions. The results point to the need for the National Archives of Namibia to adopt an integrated approach to the management of AV records. This will require the NAN to work in cooperation with public sector institutions and empower them to preserve AV materials while, at the same time, they continue to deposit copies with the National Archives of Namibia. Unlike previous studies on management of audio visual archives in Namibia, this study included other organisations. The results give a clear picture of the role the National Archives plays in the management of audio visual records and archives.

The Trophy and The Appeal: Colonial Photography and the Ghosts of Witnessing in German Southwest Africa

To work with images of atrocity is a fraught project. Sedimented constructs shaped through racist and settler colonial violence continue to define the production and consumption of the visual, as well as memory practice and scopic politics. These retinal sedimentations must be looked at plainly and addressed openly, to name the ways in which history and identity shape the function of the eye. I turn to the understudied visual archive of German colonialism in South West Africa, with an emphasis on colonial photography, with the aim of tying the visuality of colonial violence in German South West Africa to broader studies of colonial photography, images of racial violence, and the ways in which these images circulated as discourse. I am particularly concerned with the location of witnessing, and the ways in which things look differently from different positions—what I refer to through the concept of parallax—and the effects of this on visual consumption. Images of violence travel, through a visceral witnessing that can be grotesquely pornographic—in the words of Claudia Rankine, “the dead body as an object that satisfies an illicit desire”—or evidentiary. I use viscerality in this context to think about a methodology of witnessing that attends to embodiment, experience, and feeling. The resignification of images, however didactic and captioned, depends on the eye and the gut of the viewer—the transhistorical viewer is not a passive or innocent witness. This is especially important in the context of the pornotroping tendency of white supremacist culture to fetishize the image, particularly of Black injury and death, and the ability of images of violence to re-traumatize survivors.

Visual Sociology of the Vernacular Urban Landscape: An Interview with Jerome Krase

Visual sociologist Jerome Krase looks at how cities change with immigration, globalization, and gentrification, with a focus on Brooklyn as well as comparative work in cities around the world. He focuses on what can be learned through direct observation of the vernacular landscapes of neighborhoods where the interface between the public and private domains is individually and communally appropriated. He has argued consistently that ordinary residents have the power to change the meaning of a place by changing how it looks. His sociological practice has involved photography for decades, and he has developed a large visual archive of urban neighborhoods around the world. This illustrated interview focuses on the articulation of domestic, commercial, and real-estate practices, especially in Brooklyn, New York, and on the displacements, exchanges, and adaptations that characterize both vernacular agency and the academic use of the concept of “vernacular” across the social sciences.

Making Space

In this interview, artist and scholar Deborah Willis describes the work of excavating and organizing the history of Black photography. Willis’s groundbreaking scholarship helped to formally establish an archive of Black visual practice before libraries and cultural institutions began to purposely catalogue such materials. Across projects, she has engaged questions of beauty, citizenship, Black culture, and family history from the nineteenth century to the present by closely examining the camera practices of legendary photographers and the cultural contexts surrounding iconic images. In this interview, Willis describes her research as a student relying on periodical records as well as on the support of Black artists such as Roy DeCarava, Carrie Mae Weems, Gordon Parks, and James VanDerZee. This conversation with the author intertwines Willis’s personal history and the history of creating a visual archive to offer a look back and a look forward at the practice of Black photography.

Teaching the History of Sexuality with Images

Abstract This article outlines how an in-depth engagement with visual archives has transformed the author’s pedagogical practice. It argues that working with visual sources like photographs and illustrations offers students important opportunities to develop key academic skills, and to think critically about archives and sources. It details how working with such rich materials makes space for personal reflection and discovery, especially for students engaging with histories of sex and sexuality for the first time. Outlining the strengths of this approach, it explores some of the tensions and obstacles inherent in doing this kind of work—discussing, for example, the ethical dilemmas faced when reproducing and disseminating sexualized images in the classroom, the complexities of handling student reactions, and the activities students and the instructor have created to negotiate these issues.

From Camera to Canvas

This article explores the entanglement of Congolese popular painting with photography through the case of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who was assassinated in 1961. Lumumba’s final public appearance was immortalized in a series of photographs and newsreel footage that was disseminated around the world. The author contends that the events thereafter are frequently envisioned by Congolese popular painting, as it takes over from the operations of the camera in an era largely defined by the photographic. The article suggests that photography and Congolese popular painting are enmeshed in the creation of a visual archive around the figure of Lumumba. Furthermore, it examines the indebtedness of popular painting to photographic culture as well as other sources in the “colonial contact zone.”

Odd Man in: The Methodist Reverend and the Photo Archive

This article examines a small sample of photographs within the context of a large-scale visual archive–the Methodist Church’s 257 mission albums. Buried inside one of the “South American” series, three photographs and a small map tell the story of Reverend Willis C. Hoover, who was forced to step down as pastor of the Valparaiso congregation (Chile) in 1910. Yet the annotations surrounding the pictures indicate that they should no longer be there. The continued presence of these photographs in the archive raises questions about the value attached to photography for institutional history on the part of the Church itself, but also for historians trying to make sense of archival collections. To what extent can discrepancies within archives be considered meaningful of the way specific collections were put together? Should they rather be treated as mere contingencies in the “serendipitous” process of assembling such large collections, to use Elizabeth Edwards’ term? This article argues that although these pictures may seem out of place in the visual repertoire of the Church’s publicity material, their lasting presence reveals deep-seated concerns about missions and history within the Church.

FILM DOKUMENTER “BENA NA NA PIA NA NA NA’A” PADA TRADISI MEMBANGUN RUMAH SUKU BENA

Bena tribe which originally from Nusa Tenggara Timur is one of the tribe that survive with its own tradition until today. One of their belief is a symbol of their house as a human. Thus, their houses have given name. Every house represents female or male. Since they start to design the house up to finalize the building process, it has 17 steps. Every step has its particular ritual, if they do mistake on the development process, Bena Belief they will experience the disaster. Their custom is never well- documented, therefore Bena Na Na Pia Na Na Na’a as a documentary film is designed as a visual archive in the form of video. The artistic research methods using qualitative approach. The data collection used ethic and emic observation, semi structured interview, and visual recording data. The result was analyzed and interpreted as a script, then collaborated using visual data to be a documenter film which inform the ritual, belief and development process of Bena Traditional House

Stefano Bardini’s Photographic Archive, “il Bel Paese”, and the Golden Age of Italian Art

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.

Flesh made word: sacramental visibility in the Bardi Panel of Santa Croce, Florence

Discussions of early Franciscan visual archives frequently center on questions of dates and source texts, historical considerations of conflicts within the Order, and an authorial eagerness to narrate stylistic development in the direction of representational realism. This article offers an analysis of an exemplary thirteenth-century vita panel—the Bardi Panel of Santa Croce, Florence—that resists the pull of textual hermeneutics and social context as explanatory foundations. It argues, instead, that the visual rhetoric of the painting works to install a specific style of theological seeing. The Bardi Panel does this by constructing the body—the glorified body of the saint and the social body of the Order—as sacramental objects. The Franciscan body, figured through the lens of sacramental visibility, is doubled, at once an image of itself and a medium for the presence of another; it is acipher, a visible surface that renders legible sanctified interiority and divine confirmation. This textualized body, it is suggested here, comes complete with protocols for reading that aim to capture the desire of an imagined audience and train their seeing to a form of seeing beyond. This approach frames sacramental visibility in the Bardi Panel as both a way of seeing and a way of representing what is seen.

Holy Terror!: Islamophobia and Intermediality in Frank Miller’s Graphic Novel

The graphic artist Frank Miller represents an innovative force in the field of graphic novels who pushes the medium into new territories. One such territory is Islamophobia and terrorism in his graphic novel Holy Terror (2011). This article explores how Islamophobia has been mediated and how media systems of the twenty-first century forge Islamophobia into new shapes asking: How does Frank Miller’s aesthetics of silhouetted bodies reframe Islamophobia in an interpictorial and intermedial discourse of images? To what extent do Miller’s graphic stylizations of Islamophobia remediate elements of his previous work on fictional (super)heroes and historical leaders from Batman to the 300 Spartans? I argue that Miller’s visual narrative participates in the Islamophobic discourse of American popular culture by appropriating a wide array of popular culture visual archives for a propagandistic call for Muslim “Othering.” Holy Terror references news media, films and television series, 9/11 photography, familiar comic book heroes, and, of course, Miller’s own oeuvre. Thus, the graphic novel represents what I conceive as a virtual agora where different media converge to negotiate public discourses on Islamophobia. I will turn to the medium of graphic novels to first reveal how Miller’s narratives and silhouette aesthetics of (super)heroes have become complicit with Islamophobic responses to the crisis of 9/11; second, to trace the discourse of Islamophobia in post-9/11 America in Miller’s work; and, third, to reveal how this discourse interlinks with the patriotic logic of the fight against terrorism.

The Civil War Dead and American ModernityBattle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the U.S. Civil WarI Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War LettersThe Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White

The Civil War Dead and American ModernityBattle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the U.S. Civil WarI Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War LettersThe Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White

Visual methods and the study of Balinese art collections

Digital tools offer new possibilities for visual research, and such tools can provide methods for revitalising our understanding of the field of culture. Despite the importance of the visual as an element of culture, it is only in the last decade that the visual as a phenomenon of seeing has been a major feature of theoretical and methodological approaches to Southeast Asia. The long traditions of art history, anthropology and related fields in Southeast Asian studies have hitherto been focused on empirical documentation. In studying one aspect of the visual archive created by the polymath Gregory Bateson during his partnership with Margaret Mead, I will draw on methodologies that have their origins in Bateson's writings. These methodologies find fresh conditions in digital environments, in ways that allow us to bring into play a variety of theories of the visible.

Looking Up, Talking Back: Voice and Visibility as a Digital Human Right

This essay draws from capabilities theory to argue that visual literacy, which combines technical skills, knowledge, and ethics, is an essential human capability in the digital age. It builds on the idea of democratic voice to posit that individuals need to control the way they are seen and to visually account for their lives in order to achieve a balanced system of “veillance.” Human beings are surveilled at unprecedented rates in the digital age. In conversation with Gates, who describes the way forensic specialists are learning to mine visual archives to craft coherent crime-solving narratives; Ristovska, who points out that court officials remain overly wedded to logocentric logic; and Spiesel, who reminds us of the dangers of naive realism, this essay focuses on the right of those who are watched to craft their own sousveillance while also understanding the power, limits, and ethical implications of visual communication.

Material memories of travel: the albums of a Victorian naval surgeon

This paper considers the visual archives of maritime scientific exploration, from coastal sketches to ethnographic observation. It focuses on seven albums of John Linton Palmer, a British naval surgeon who served in the Pacific in the 1850s and 1860s, which are today part of the collections of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). Through their drawing, recording and collecting, naval surgeons like Linton Palmer played a significant role in the development of natural history and ethnography during the nineteenth century. The paper discusses the historical significance and potential contemporary uses of the Linton Palmer albums in the context of three forms of memory-making: firstly, the documentation of topographic, antiquarian, ethnographic, microscopic and other field observations by means of drawing; secondly, the assembling of such materials into personalised albums, part of a distinctive nineteenth-century naval tradition by which the experience of travel was re-collected (in the case of Linton Palmer within the scientific culture of late-Victorian Liverpool); and thirdly, the contemporary uses of such forms of visual heritage in a variety of contexts from family history to Indigenous land claims.

Safeguarding Strategies of Sound Archives and its Meaning to the Pacific Region

Sound archives and connected visual archives are all the time challenged by a speedy deselection of items that follow daily demands of decision making according to cultural policies and economic necessities. These challenges are imposed upon specific archival materials of a value yet incomprehensible to our recent level of knowledge. Since we are not able to fully understand all dimensions of collected materials which is often accumulated to serve single publications or written qualifications, their contents are in many ways inaccessible, not only physically or digitally. My paper in this regard is based on experiences with small scale archives in Asia situated in universities and research institutions, which do store rich collections on analogue carriers or as digital files yet do often not follow up with maintenance and quality control in terms of accessibility. A paradigm shift towards a better understanding of the maintenance and quality matter is seemingly the only way out in order to keep those items of which importance for future uses is not guaranteed. The consequence of these thoughts can lead to strategic suggestions that can be applied to many cases, especially in a region with permanent environmental and social tournaments such as the Pacific Region.

La fotografía artística como referente en la visualización del espacio escolar


 En este articulo la fotografía artística se presentará como enfoque metodológico para el concepto visual de la educación fundamentalmente de dos formas: en primer lugar, propondremos la validez e influencia de la infor­mación estética por encima de la información documental en las investiga­ciones educativas basadas en imágenes; en segundo lugar, a través de un en­sayo visual, propondremos diversas composiciones visuales acerca de cuatro temas fundamentales para la construcción del concepto de educación. Los ar­tistas visuales en fotografía han tratado el ámbito escolar de forma recurren­te, produciendo una amplia colección de imágenes educativas que trasciende el valor documental de la fotografía. Nuestra hipótesis es que éstas imágenes pueden ser determinantes en nuestras intuiciones e ideas acerca de la escue­la y la educación. En el trabajo que presentamos a continuación, distinguimos entre fotografía artística y documental fundamentalmente para señalar la decisiva influencia que puede tener el uso explícito de la información estética por encima del recurso al realismo referencial del que hace uso la fotografía documental. La más clara evidencia la muestra el impacto que han tenido las imágenes de los artistas a lo largo de la historia de la educación. Por otro lado, nuestro discurso visual se estructura en base a cinco foto-ensayos, organi­zados en base a dos fotografías del autor con dos citas visuales de la historia de la fotografía. Estos han sido compuestos fotoensayos contraponiendo los cuatro principales temas que la fotografía ha preferido tradicionalmente: el espacio escolar, el alumnado, el profesor y las interacciones entre ellos. En los fotoensayos que presentamos a continuación, proponemos lecturas cru­zadas entre estos cuatro temas. El resultado de estas interferencias visuales y asociaciones libres propone algunas conclusiones visuales de nuestro estudio.

Chasing the Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Landscapes in Skate Video

This article explores the centrality of China’s cities to skate video; the most popular form for capturing, circulating, and consuming skateboarding. China’s urban growth produces endless spots to skate; a spot is assemblage of objects and surfaces that offer the opportunity to perform skateboarding maneuvers (tricks). Skate video is the substance of skate culture, the once quintessentially Californian pastime turned global subculture and industry. After skateboarding left the skatepark for the streets in the 1990s, and once video became easier to circulate digitally through streaming platforms in the mid-2000s, the search for spots to perform and capture unsanctioned street skateboarding spread to China’s urban landscapes, beginning with Shenzhen. China’s cities are sites of global desire among skateboarders for the perfect surfaces and obstacles created in the built environment and the speed at which they are produced. Using skate video as an archive I make four arguments. First, China’s cities imputed with a mythical character; endless spots produced with miraculous speed. Second, skate videos re-map China’s cities through the skater’s gaze, a form of urban knowledge both unique and widely shared. Third, the search for spots indexes urban development in China, privileging the recent and shunning the past. Fourth, skateboarding in China’s cities create spaces for inter-cultural encounter between skateboarders and authority, the public and other skateboarders. The article concludes by discussing the utility of skate video as an alternative visual archive of urban China for foreign audiences and increasingly for skate communities in China itself.