Photo Archives VIII. The Digital Photo Archive. Theories, Practices and Rhetoric

Photo Archives VIII. The Digital Photo Archive. Theories, Practices and Rhetoric

The current ‘archival moment’ (Daston 2017) is characterised by the unprecedented online access to visual material, but also by deep concerns about loss of information. Scholars are confronted with the limitless production and circulation of (sometimes self-produced) digital images, as well as with the fragility of aggregated image clusters. Digitisation and digital photography are established practices, and numerous methods and approaches to the storage and retrieval, indexing, interoperability and sustainability of digital image collections have been tested, debated, applied, expanded, questioned and discarded.

These technological developments mean that more and more people all over the world are involved in creating, manipulating and collecting images. Images and metadata are copied, scraped, aggregated and rearranged in feeds, clusters and databases, both for commercial or scientific purposes. Moreover, big visual data serve as the basis for developing computer vision techniques. While these multifaceted collections evade canonical notions of the archive, archival structures and practices have become a nexus of the post-digital condition.

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Quelle: https://visual-history.de/2022/05/02/photo-archives-viii-the-digital-photo-archive-theories-practices-and-rhetoric/

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Photo Archives VIII. The Digital Photo Archive. Theories, Practices and Rhetoric

Photo Archives VIII. The Digital Photo Archive. Theories, Practices and Rhetoric

The current ‘archival moment’ (Daston 2017) is characterised by the unprecedented online access to visual material, but also by deep concerns about loss of information. Scholars are confronted with the limitless production and circulation of (sometimes self-produced) digital images, as well as with the fragility of aggregated image clusters. Digitisation and digital photography are established practices, and numerous methods and approaches to the storage and retrieval, indexing, interoperability and sustainability of digital image collections have been tested, debated, applied, expanded, questioned and discarded.

These technological developments mean that more and more people all over the world are involved in creating, manipulating and collecting images. Images and metadata are copied, scraped, aggregated and rearranged in feeds, clusters and databases, both for commercial or scientific purposes. Moreover, big visual data serve as the basis for developing computer vision techniques. While these multifaceted collections evade canonical notions of the archive, archival structures and practices have become a nexus of the post-digital condition.

[...]

Quelle: https://visual-history.de/2022/05/02/photo-archives-viii-the-digital-photo-archive-theories-practices-and-rhetoric/

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Conference: PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY WITHOUT PHOTOGRAPHS

Conference: PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY WITHOUT PHOTOGRAPHS

Screenshot Photographic History Research Centre: Annual Conference 2022 PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY WITHOUT PHOTOGRAPHS

What is the shape and size of a photographic history that is written from the point of view of having no photographs? When photographs are destroyed, lost, repressed, or never intended to be permanent, it leaves a gap in what we usually refer to as our main research material.

By chance or by design, photographs disappear every day. They might be destroyed, or lost, or designed to fade. They might be rendered undiscoverable through complicated bureaucracy, secrecy, or algorithms. Contemplating the space left without photographs, a veritable foil to the enormity of the image archive, can enrich our understanding of photographic history and methodology. The PHRC seeks contributions interrogating the photographic histories that are not image led, that excavate imageless histories.



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Quelle: https://visual-history.de/2022/02/01/conference-photographic-history-without-photographs/

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Reimagining One’s Own. Ethnographic Photography in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Europe

Reimagining One’s Own. Ethnographic Photography in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Europe

Inv.-Nr. pos/774 in der Fotosammlung des Volkskundemuseum Wien ©

The photo collection of the Volkskundemuseum Wien was established along the lines of a “comparative ethnology of Europe” in the late nineteenth century, focusing on the territories of the Habsburg Monarchy. Today, the assembled materials raise manifold questions about their origins and, as a consequence, about the visual ethnography of “one’s own”.

Just as colonial ethnography created an image of the “others,” ethnographers and folklorists in Europe approached their “own” populations within the continent. The work here is always asymmetrical; it was the ethnographers and photographers who determined what the image of those studied by them looked like. Ethnography at the time conceived “people” with a respective essence in mind. It designed primitivizing and exoticizing typologies, such as in the form of so-called type photography—a genre of images that circulated far beyond the narrow scientific context and could serve the most diverse purposes.

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Quelle: https://visual-history.de/2021/11/22/reimagining-ones-own-ethnographic-photography-in-nineteenth-and-early-twentieth-century-europe/

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The Politics of Photography: Feminist Activisms in India and Britain

GHI London: Online Exhibition „Forms, Voices, Networks: Feminism and the Media“

 

 

What kind of history does the photograph tell?
What – or whose – claims does the photograph inscribe?

 

 

 

The Politics of Photography:
Feminist Activisms in India and Britain



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Quelle: https://visual-history.de/2021/11/18/the-politics-of-photography-feminist-activisms-in-india-and-britain/

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Workshop: Transgenerational Corpographies of Memory

As part of the Images of History in Contemporary Art research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) in Bern, the workshop Transgenerational Corpographies of Memory will take place:

November 18, 2021, 2:30–6:30 pm
November 19, 2021, 9:00 am–5:00 pm

Location
Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF)
Am Neuen Markt 9d
14467 Potsdam

 

Transgenerational Corpographies of Memory is a visual art and history workshop that uses two audio-visual artistic works as a departure point to explore the dimensions and trajectories of transgenerational memory within the medium of artistic film. The workshop consists of two parts: the film screenings and the discursive program. The underlying works stage female biographies of the 20th and early 21st century based on two women’s self-narrated memories. The workshop structure is triadic, meaning that the works will be analyzed from an artistic, art historical and historical perspective in a complementary way. The aim of this transdisciplinary investigation is to explore transgenerational cultural memory work in contemporary art via pictorial “close readings.” The central questions are: How can we grasp the connection between history, transgenerational memories and artistic images of history?

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Quelle: https://visual-history.de/2021/11/10/workshop-transgenerational-corpographies-of-memory/

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Book Review: “Our Voices, Our Streets”

Cover: Kevin Bubriski, Our Voices, Our Streets: American Protests 2001-2011, powerHouse Books, New York 2020 ©

Protest is a form of expressing one’s opinions. It allows people who share the same view(s) to rightfully assemble with others to voice complaints and ideas. Bubriski’s book, “Our Voices, Our Streets: American Protests 2001-2011”, looks back at that decade through photographs united by common denominators: the lens of the Hasselblad camera and the public stage of the American streets.

Since the country’s founding, the American streets have been vibrant spaces for political and cultural expressions. They have also been places for demonstrations and protests. The First Amendment of the United States’ Constitution protects freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, and the right to petition, and prohibits any restriction of private and non-governmental persons and entities.

The first decade of the 21st century was marked by political, social, and economic events that made the American Streets a public platform for demonstrations.

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Quelle: https://visual-history.de/2021/10/26/book-review-our-voices-our-streets/

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Book Review: “Our Voices, Our Streets”

Book Review: “Our Voices, Our Streets”

Cover: Kevin Bubriski, Our Voices, Our Streets: American Protests 2001-2011, powerHouse Books, New York 2020 ©

Protest is a form of expressing one’s opinions. It allows people who share the same view(s) to rightfully assemble with others to voice complaints and ideas. Bubriski’s book, “Our Voices, Our Streets: American Protests 2001-2011”, looks back at that decade through photographs united by common denominators: the lens of the Hasselblad camera and the public stage of the American streets.

Since the country’s founding, the American streets have been vibrant spaces for political and cultural expressions. They have also been places for demonstrations and protests. The First Amendment of the United States’ Constitution protects freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, and the right to petition, and prohibits any restriction of private and non-governmental persons and entities.

The first decade of the 21st century was marked by political, social, and economic events that made the American Streets a public platform for demonstrations.

[...]

Quelle: https://visual-history.de/2021/10/26/book-review-our-voices-our-streets/

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The Material and the Virtual in Photographic Histories

The Material and the Virtual in Photographic Histories

 

The First Symposium of the Photography Network will be held virtually from October 7 through 9, 2021, jointly hosted by the Photography Network and Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen.

Over the last twenty years, the study of photography’s history has been characterized by, among other things, two opposing strands: a concentration on the photograph’s status as an object and a concern with the decidedly virtual quality of its images and practices. The 2019 FAIC conference »Material Immaterial: Photographs in the 21st Century« considered these two directions in photographic conservation, asking if the physical photograph still matters today as a source of teaching, learning, and scholarship when the intangibles of code now direct the production and archiving of images. Now, from a methodological direction, this Photography Network symposium seeks to inquire further into the historical implications of the increasing distance between photography’s status as an object and its life as what could be called the intangible »photographic.«

On one side of the ledger in historical studies, Elizabeth Edwards has long proposed that we consider photography’s object history; Geoffrey Batchen has emphasized the haptic quality of long-neglected vernacular forms of photography; the Museum of Modern Art in New York engaged a years-long conservation and curatorial project named »Object: Photo«; and the »Silver Atlantic« initiative in Paris explores the mineral histories of the medium. But at the same time, Tina Campt has asked us to »listen« to photography; Fred Ritchin has urged us to study photography’s virtual lives in social media; and Ariella Azoulay proposes that we consider the larger sphere of habits, customs, and civil contracts that surround photographic activity and its images.

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Quelle: https://visual-history.de/2021/10/07/the-material-and-the-virtual-in-photographic-histories/

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Open Up the Morgue! How Press Photo Archives are Enabling a New History of Photojournalism

Open Up the Morgue! How Press Photo Archives are Enabling a New History of Photojournalism

The Photo Morgue, The New York Times’ legendary photo archive, is so well known that ‘morgue’ has become a synonym for ‘press archive’. However, press photos in archives are far from dead. In this symposium we focus on the importance and use of press photo archives in researching the history of photojournalism.

Dutch Foreign Minister Joseph Luns takes leave of The Hague to become Secretary General of NATO, 28 April 1971,
Photo: Vincent Mentzel (NRC Handelsblad), Collection: Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (detail)

Our symposium will focus on the new field of research that has emerged over the past ten years thanks to the online publication of press photo archives. This development has turned the original negatives, colour slides and prints, which form the basis of every publication in the 20th century, into accessible research objects. The material aspects of press photographs provide a rich source on the production and dissemination of visual news in the 20th century.

 



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Quelle: https://visual-history.de/2021/06/23/open-up-the-morgue-how-press-photo-archives-are-enabling-a-new-history-of-photojournalism/

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