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- Convenors:
-
Jürg Schneider
(University of Basel)
David Zeitlyn (Oxford)
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- Stream:
- Social Anthropology
- Location:
- Appleton Tower, Seminar Room 2.05
- Sessions:
- Thursday 13 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The visual parallel to archival silence is blindness. Can the empty spaces in photo archives become an opportunity for alternative viewings, drawing productive power from the contents, no matter how perceived?
Long Abstract:
We will explore parallels in the relationship between an external reality and both archives and photographs. Both have little natural connection and/or directly reflecting external reality. Both show traces of their becoming but must be read beyond the frame of their materiality and the connections between order and meaning must be disentangled in order to gain and reveal significance. However, the archival order always contains several voids - deliberate and unintended - that are due to the process of the archives' emergence in changing contexts. Thus, various types of silences and blindness constitute the archive order. How can these silences be broken or made to resonate? What happens when we are no longer able to grasp them with the simplifying gaze of habit? How can connections and disruptions that emerge from archives' silences and blindness be used fruitfully by scholars working with and in photo archives?
Trouillot talks of archival silence, the Comaroffs of reading across and Stoler along the archival grain. The visual parallel to silence is blindness. How can research on photo archives find a white stick or an archival equivalent to braille? Those with macular degeneration must use peripheral vision, peeking sideways. What sort of archival research might this inspire?
This panel will examine various possibilities of working with photo archives that do not see empty (negative) spaces as a deficit, but on the contrary as an opportunity for alternative viewings of the archive, drawing productive power precisely from the contents, no matter how perceived.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 13 June, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
Government policies, armed conflict, technology and the frustration of early studio photographer in Cameroon has gradually removed them from their profession. So too is the abandonment of heir archives to deteriorating conditions.
Paper long abstract:
Treasury street before the crumble of 1975 federation was the heartbeat of Bamenda in Cameroon. Today it is called "Old" treasury street. This is where important businesses and photographic professionals were launched. Walking down and across the streets, you will find old painted signpost bearing a photo studio, place in an awkward manner beside the wall of an enlarged printed post of building materials. Interestingly owned by the same person who swift from selling and taking to researcher about black and white photos. Spaces for photos are taken over by plastics pipes. Landlords renovates houses that host old photo studios without photographers' consent since they can't meet up with rent. Foreign photographers in frustration prefer to go back home especially with the ongoing armed conflict. Qualitatively, l participates, observe, interview, elicit photos and oral discussion from one neighbourhood to another, discovering monochrome photos in the gutters as l move on. Black and white photos that freeze a moment, absorb, communicate and create meanings as ethnographic material seem neglected in Cameroon. Is it government policy? What about the bureaucracy in archives? What were and how are the different ministerial red lines affecting this domain? What could be done to early photographers, to maintain their dignity and so their archives? The Yaoundé declaration? How can cease fire be hasten up so foreign photographers stay back with their repositories? These are the questions and problem that this paper attempt to address in the Cameroonian Grass field early black and white photos repositories.
Paper short abstract:
Examining the case of an institutionalised field photography collection made over 5 ethnographic missions in the late Portuguese colonial period in Angola (1965-1969), this presentation recovers the missions' context as well as specific practice through a resourceful combination of archival sources.
Paper long abstract:
During the XX century, photography-making often played a crucial part in field missions to Africa, colonial state-sponsored ones being no exception. Examining the case of an institutionalised field photography collection made over 5 ethnographic missions in the late Portuguese colonial period in Angola (1965-1969), this presentation recovers the missions' broader context as well as specific practice through a resourceful combination of archival sources. Aiming to reconstruct these missions' rationale and practice, I crisscross data from related institutional archives of the ethnological museum responsible for the missions - its visual ethnological archive as well as its historical archive. I offer visual resources grounded on sequential dimensions obtained from documents and field photographs to explore both field and archival practices followed in the establishing of an overseas ethnological project in the Portuguese late colonial context.
Paper short abstract:
A performative presentation on the personal archive of a Ugandan elder and the potential pitfalls when attempting to present it to both Ugandan and international audiences.
Paper long abstract:
Since 2008 Ugandan elder Kaddu Wasswa and I work with his collection of photographs and documents. In 2010 "The Kaddu Wasswa Archive" was published as 'a visual biography' that gave an unusual grassroots perspective on aspects of Ugandan history. I edited and designed the book, but it is co-authored with Kaddu Wasswa and his grandson Arthur Kisitu. While initially thrilled, Kaddu Wasswa expressed more and more criticism of the book over the years, pointing out some of the consequences of my choices based on blind spots that included an emphasis on his failures and a primacy to photographs over stories that I could not - and still only partially can - understand.
This paper will first position the use of my artistic practice as a research method that may contribute to the development of an 'aid for the blind' in terms of relating to archives, while building on Ariella Azoulay's positioning of the photograph as an encounter and Tim Ingold's use of the notion of correspondence. I will then introduce "The Kaddu Wasswa Archive" before discussing how Kaddu Wasswa's criticism of the book led to a new stage in our collaboration. We are currently preparing another publication and a documentary film based on photographs and documents as well as our shared experiences. Our hope is that our correspondence will generate encounters that provide insights into very different lives and times and the consequences of their contexts.
The presentation has a performative form in line with my artistic practice.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores aspects of materiality, seriality and visuality in colonial image archives, suggests the relevance of negative strips and their direct prints (contact sheets) and, as such, reflects on praxis in the colonial darkroom.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores aspects of materiality, seriality and visuality in colonial image archives, in particular the potential and relevance of negative strips and their direct prints (contact sheets). The production of photo archives throughout much of the 20th century rests in part on practices and visual communications by and between photographers and protagonists in viewing, selecting, processing, reproducing and archiving "raw" images. Drawing on colonial photo archives from the Basler Afrika Bibliographien and examples of portraiture from apartheid Namibia, the paper reflects on praxis in the colonial darkroom and suggests a closer reading "along" negative strips, their cuts and edges.