Empires of the Visual: Photography and Colonial Administration in Africa

Landau, Paul S.

doi:10.1525/california/9780520229488.003.0006

Cited by 25 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…Photographic images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. 42 Sontag's critique of photography may have been developed in reference to war photography, and particularly photographs of the Vietnam War, 43 but it also may be, and has been, 44 extended to a critical engagement with photographs of the bodies of 'others' taken in colonial times and now residing in archives and museum collections in former imperial metropoles. In this context the 'taking' of pictures has been read as being closely allied with techniques of colonial governmentality and forms of voyeurism intrinsic to the ideological constitution of otherness.…”

Section: Ethics and Ambivalence Of The Photographmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exposure: the ethics of making, sharing and displaying photographs of human remains

Harries¹,

Fibiger²,

Smith³

et al. 2018

Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal

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This article will query the ethics of making and displaying photographs of human remains. In particular, we will focus on the role of photography in constituting human remains as specimens, and the centrality of the creation and circulation of photographic images to the work of physical anthropology and bioarchaeology. This work has increasingly become the object of ethical scrutiny, particularly in the context of a (post)colonial politics of recognition in which indigenous people seek to recover dominion over their looted material heritage, including the remains of their dead. This ethical concern extends to the question of how and under what circumstances we may display photographs of human remains. Moreover, this is not just a matter of whether and when we should or should not show photographs of the remains of the dead. It is a question of how these images are composed and produced. Our discussion of the ethics of the image is, therefore, indivisible from a consideration of the socio-technical process by which the photographic image is produced, circulated and consumed.

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Section: Ethics and Ambivalence Of The Photographmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exposure: the ethics of making, sharing and displaying photographs of human remains

Harries¹,

Fibiger²,

Smith³

et al. 2018

Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal

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show abstract

“…In particular, wedding photographs draw on the techniques of portraiture. Portraits as representations have a dual function as both honorific and repressive (Landau 2002); as honorific, they aim to archive and represent the objects one has collected. Portraits also generally aim to represent the individual self.…”

Section: Happy Objectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The promise of happiness: desire, attachment and freedom in post/apartheid South Africa

Mupotsa

2015

Critical Arts

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This article examines wedding photographs. The wedding day is read as a staging of the achievement of desire and love, articulated through the use of space, objects and artefacts to project a vision of the self. The wedding ritual is not only framed by the presence of the camera, the gaze of the camera actually makes sure that the script is followed. This staging of romance is read through the notion of the 'bridal gaze', which places the figure of the bride at the centre of the achievement of fairytale romance and the promise of a future 'happily ever after'. The images and affects of happiness in these 'love plots' are implicated in processes of identification and subjectivation that rely on relations of the gaze and 'the look', logics of self-image and self-possession, and the ritualised performance of romantic love as a site of freedom. I argue that nostalgia is invoked as a narrative strategy in wedding photographs in ways that place wedding rituals and the photographs produced out of them in and out of time with the present. The promise of happiness shared by the individuals 'in love', and the audiences that share in the ritualised performance of it, reflect the desire for inclusion within the progressive narrative of freedom in post/apartheid South Africa and the recognition of its flimsy presence, absence, promises and failures.

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“…For Leonard Bell [2002: 96], in the context of the colonial encounter, the photograph, which is bound up with multiple meanings and representations, is a ''metaphor for dualities, ambivalences, and [the] sheer oddities that could characterize [such] relations.'' Numerous scholars have illustrated how photography was employed to document colonialism and successful assimilation [Ryan 1997;Schwartz and Ryan 2003;Hight and Sampson 2002;Aird 2003;Edwards 1992;Landau 2002;Margolis and Rose 2004;Williams 2003;Lydon 2005]. In the colonial era, the commodification of indigenous peoples-in the form of postcards, for instance-made them a public text, which was ''used to tell or illustrate any number of stories'' [Sandweiss 2002: 215].…”

Section: Photography Race and The Family Albummentioning

confidence: 99%

In/Visible Sight: Māori–European Families in Urban New Zealand, 1890–1940

Wanhalla¹

2007

Visual Anthropology

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This article examines the multiple ways in which persons of mixed descent were invisible in most New Zealand cities during the first half of the 20th century. It is argued that living as mixed descent was a highly visible experience during the 19th century, but this increasingly gave way to invisibility during an era of statesponsored assimilation. Invisibility was a strategy for survival and success in the mainstream society, but was often accompanied by cultural loss. It is argued that oral histories, in conjunction with the family photograph album, provide an important way in which to recover lost histories, and that the descendants of persons who disappeared into urban New Zealand in the first half of the twentieth century are employing the family photograph album to assert their Māori identity and overcome a history of dispersal and loss.

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Empires of the Visual: Photography and Colonial Administration in Africa

Cited by 25 publications

References 0 publications

Exposure: the ethics of making, sharing and displaying photographs of human remains

Exposure: the ethics of making, sharing and displaying photographs of human remains

The promise of happiness: desire, attachment and freedom in post/apartheid South Africa

In/Visible Sight: Māori–European Families in Urban New Zealand, 1890–1940

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