Studies 12

Photo-Objects

On the Materiality of Photographs and Photo Archives
Julia Bärnighausen, Costanza Caraffa, Stefanie Klamm, Franka Schneider, Petra Wodtke (eds.)
Taking the material approach to photography as a starting point the volume offers new insights into the epistemological potential of analog and digital photographs and photo archives in the humanities and sciences from a comparative viewpoint.
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This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 DE) Licence.

Taking the material approach to photography as a starting point the volume offers new insights into the epistemological potential of analog and digital photographs and photo archives in the humanities and sciences from a comparative viewpoint.

ONLINEPDFEPUB

This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 DE) Licence.

Photographs are not simply images but also historically shaped three-dimensional objects. They hold a physical presence, bear traces of handling and use, and circulate in social, political and institutional networks. Beyond their visual content, they are increasingly acknowledged as material “actors,” not only indexically representing the objects they depict, but also playing a crucial role in the processes of knowledge-making within scientific practices. This has a historical dimension: most scientific disciplines rapidly adopted photography as an important research tool. Thereby, the various material qualities of photographs afforded certain types of uses in those disciplines. Specialized photo archives were founded as interfaces of technology and science and as laboratories for scientific thought.

List of Contributors

Scholars, Scientists, Archivists, and Photo-Objects

1 Objects of Value: Challenging Conventional Hierarchies in the Photo Archive
Costanza Caraffa

2 Photographs on the Move: Formats, Formations, and Transformations in Four Photo Archives
Julia Bärnighausen, Stefanie Klamm, Franka Schneider, Petra Wodtke

3 Thoughts on the “Non-Collections” of the Archival Ecosystem
Elizabeth Edwards

4 The Accidental Trace and the Science of the Future: Tales from the Nineteenth-Century Archives
Lorraine Daston

Into The Archive

5 Where is the Archive? The Reality of Conducting Research on Atatürk Photographs
İdil Çetin

6 In the Family: Photographic Archives from India
Suryanandini Narain

7 In the Eye of the Archive: A Triumphant Autopoiesis of Photography
Katharina Sykora

Getting One’s Hands Dirty

8 Photographing Ottoman Modernity
Zeynep Çelik

9 Handling the Heavens: Things and the Photo-Objects of Astronomy
Omar W. Nasim

10 Finding Photography: Dialogues between Anthropology and Conservation
Haidy Geismar, Pip Laurenson

11 Digital Cows: Flesh and Code
Christopher Pinney

Systems of Value

12 Images for Sale: Cards and Colors at the Photothèque du Musée de l’Homme
Anaïs Mauuarin

13 Reflections on the Archive: Reconsidering the Evidence Project (1977–2017)
Lena Holbein

14 The Unbearable (and Irresistible) Charm of “Duplicates”
Petra Trnková

Canon Formation and Transformation

15 The Two Cultures of Word and Image: On Materiality and the Photographic Catalog
Kelley Wilder

16 Bruno Meyer and the Invention of Art Historical Slide Projection
Maria Männig

17 Photographing Tutankhamun: Photo-Objects and the Archival Afterlives of Colonial Archaeology
Christina Riggs

Afterword

“In the Archives, a Thousand Photos That Detail Our Questions”: Final Reflections on Photographs and Archives
Joan M. Schwartz

Information

ISBN

978-3-945561-54-6

DOI

10.34663/9783945561409-00

Publication Date

Dec. 19, 2019

Print on Demand

epubli.de

Suggested Citation

Bärnighausen, Julia, Caraffa, Costanza, Klamm, Stefanie, Schneider, Franka and Wodtke, Petra (eds.) (2019). Photo-Objects: On the Materiality of Photographs and Photo Archives. Berlin: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften.

Editorial Team

Lindy Divarci, Klaus Thoden, Linda Jayne Turner