Photo Archives and the Place of Photography

This collection of essays investigates the effects of mobility and place on a range of photographic archives and explores their potential for cross-disciplinary dialogue.

The book explores photographic images used in the study of art, as well as the implications of placing European images of non-European cultures in an archive, album, library, or museum. It also addresses questions of digital space, which renders images more visually accessible, but further complicates issues relating to location. The contributors consider these issues through case studies based on a variety of archives, institutions, and disciplines. Just as photographs are conceived as unstable objects, so conventional borders between disciplines and locations are challenged and opened up with essays drawing on a range of disciplinary theories and practices. The focus of the individual chapters is global, as seen in contributions not only on Euro-American topics, but also on Orientalizing approaches to photographing the Ancient Near East, photographic archives of Bedouin subjects, and digital photographic archives in an Iranian context.

This project began with a conference, Photo Archives: The Place of Photography, held in Oxford in 2017 as part of an ongoing series on Photo Archives initiated and co-convened by Costanza Caraffa of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max Planck Institute.