Ambivalence of Seeing (Otherwise): Histories and Theories of Photography

Course

URL study guide

https://studiegids.vu.nl/en/courses/2024-2025/L_KNMAALG001

Course Objective

On completing this research seminar, students are able to: 1. Understand some of the key debates in photographic history and theory 2. Understand the key debates around the ethnographic photography and ethnographic museum more generally. 3. identify, understand and explain the different concepts and theories relevant for rethinking the history and theory of photography, within a global framework. 4. Relate the questions surrounding the ethnographic museum and its archives to broader academic and societal discussions around questions of representation. 5. Develop and present on their own projects on the ethnographic archive. 7. report on their own research in a structured and attractive manner, substantiating arguments with empirical evidence.

Course Content

Over the last few decades, there has been a growing interest to push photographic histories and theories beyond their conventional and well-established telling. For example, in their description to the 2003 publication Photography’s Other Histories, the editors set out to shift “the critical debate about photography away from its current Euro-American center of gravity” by breaking “with the notion that photographic history is best seen as the explosion of a Western technology advanced by the work of singular individuals.” Within this shifting terrain, photographic collections within so-called ethnographic or world cultures museums, ethnographic photographs, have played an important role. As things change, research has moved from attempts in the 80s to bring these photo collections, often taken as documentary sources, to the notice of mainstream academia, to thinking them together with theoretical models from Foucault and Barthes in the early 90s and later in the 2000s, they became sites to explore counter narratives and diaspora histories. Today there is now an increasing focus on identity, affect, ethnographies of digital technologies, and ethics. And still, like the museums themselves in which these collections can be found, these photographic objects often remain subjected to the disciplinary and interpretive regimes that the category of the ethnographic has been deemed to allow. Embedded as they are in the history and theory of anthropology, or for the museum, within the similar but sometimes more contested category of the ethnographic or Volkenkunde, their meanings are taken as given, as part of the structure of colonial governmentality, as tools in the project of racial science, evidence of the “typologizing” or the “entribing” of colonized subjects, or for their role to constrain the representational possibilities of the colonized. And while the truth claims projected onto these images have long been challenged, they still reappear in popular use, for instance in tourist advertisements for tropical holidays to reinforce in stubborn persistence of ideas about presumed others. This course takes the collections of the National Museum of World Cultures, the largest ethnographic photographic archives in the Netherlands, and certainly an important one in Europe, as starting point to explore the limits and possibilities for these images to exceed the boundaries of their categorization as ethnographic photographs. Acknowledging their troubled history, we will take the vibrant and multiple lives of these archives and objects, the (lives of) the peoples and cultures that they presume to render, to explore other affordances these collections may allow. Reading some of the seminal writings in photographic histories and theories, together with more recent writings from within and outside the field that explore, for example, the political ontology of photography, or photography and practices of listening, we will attend to the waywardness, and the worldmaking practices of many of the subjects that these images render.

Teaching Methods

The course is organized in six sessions of four hours each. During these sessions we will discuss the different readings, students will present reading response or other presentations, or working in small groups workshop some of developed in the course focusing on concrete examples from the archives.

Method of Assessment

Individual and group presentations in response to readings or to class themes.Workshops around the archives.Final paper of 3000-4000 words.

Literature

Day 1 – Photography Histories and Theory · Pasternak, Gil, ed. The handbook of photography studies. Routledge, 2020. Introduction · Linfield, Susie. The cruel radiance: Photography and political violence. University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp 5-12 · Hayes, Patricia, and Gary Minkley, eds. Ambivalent: Photography and visibility in african history. Ohio University Press, 2019. Introduction. · Hayes, Patricia, and Iona Gilburt. "Other Lives of the Image." Kronos 46.1 (2020): 10-28. Day 2 – Photography – (Art) History, Anthropology, Theory
- Pinney, Christopher. "Photography and anthropology." (2011).
- Edwards, Elizabeth. "Anthropology and photography: A long history of knowledge and affect."Photographies8.3 (2015): 235-252.
- Edwards, Elizabeth Facing History: Photography and the Challenge of Presence Day 3 – Photography’s Other Histories. · Pinney, Christopher and Nicolas Peterson. Photography's other histories. Duke University Press, 2003. Introduction. · Thompson, Krista A. Shine: The visual economy of light in African diasporic aesthetic practice. Duke University Press, 2015. (chapters to be confirmed) · Lien, Sigrid, and Hilde Wallem Nielssen, eds. Adjusting the Lens: Indigenous Activism, Colonial Legacies, and Photographic Heritage. UBC Press, 2021. (chapters tob e confirmed) Day 4 Ethnographic Photography and the Archives of the Everyday · Campt, Tina, et al., eds. Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography. Steidl Verlag, 2020. Introduction and Chapter (TBC). · TBC Day 5 and 6
- Beyond the Boundaries – Fabulation, Listening, Waywardness Listening, Fabulation, · Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward lives, beautiful experiments: Intimate histories of riotous Black girls, troublesome women, and queer radicals. WW Norton & Company, 2019. · Tina Campt, 2017. Listening to Images, Duke University Press, pp. TBD. · Odumosu, Temi. "The crying child: on colonial archives, digitization, and ethics of care in the cultural commons."Current Anthropology 61.S22 (2020): S289-S302. (Art) Projects
- Woman to Go – Matilda ter Heijn
- Colonial Saturnalia
- Anouk Stekete
- https://www.cases-rebelles.org/the-exhausted-bodies-of-the-colonial-spectacle/
Academic year1/09/2431/08/25
Course level6.00 EC

Language of Tuition

  • English

Study type

  • Master