The NWO Program in Cultural Dynamics in
cooperation with Bring Your Images presents:
Framing the Archive
New Directions in Photographic Traditions and Modernities
A symposium on the role of the image inside and outside the archive
With visiting scholars:
Carolyn Hamilton
Chair of the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative,
University of Cape Town
Karen Strassler
Assistant Professor of Anthropology,
Queens College of the City University of New York
ADDITIONAL PRESENTATIONS – Sophie
Feyder, Annie Goodner, Christoph Rippe
VENUE
Tuesday 18 October, 2011
13.00 – 17.00
Faculty of Social Sciences, Universiteit Leiden,
Pieter de la Court gebouw, Room 1a27
Wassenaarsweg 52, 2333 AK Leiden
Carolyn Hamilton
The Life of the Archive
Why explore the life of an archive, and what might it mean to study its “life” as opposed to writing its history?
The proposition of an archive having a life is, on the face of it, counter-intuitive. Once safely cloistered in the
archive, we imagine that a record, an object or a collection is preserved relatively unchanged for posterity.
Locked up thus, does it even have an ongoing history worth investigating, let alone a life?
My presentation considers the methodological imperatives and intellectual potentials that underlie
investigation of the conditions of production of a record, and the conditions of existence of the archival
set-up in which it comes to be lodged, where conditions of production are understood to be ongoing over
time, to continue after the deaths of the primary collectors. The presentation puts forward the argument
that the conditions within the archival housing and what happens to the record once in the archive, allows
us to understand much about how an itself changing archival housing changes, frames and reframes a
record. Changes in forms of archival housing, and changes in cultures of record keeping, in turn, have to be
contextualised within changing public, political and academic environments.
It is at this point that I find it more useful to think about the biography of an archive, rather than its history.
Histories of archives generally confine themselves to an understanding of archives as things. The real meat
in a history of an archive lies in the story of its making and the narrative typically ends once the collection
is safely installed in a formal archival setting. If dealt with at all, subsequent developments are invariably
postscripts of one sort or another because changes, the heart-beat of any history, are by definition, the
antithesis of the archival endeavour.
However, it is a central contention of my current body of work, from which the presentation is drawn, that
archives have lives that extend well beyond the time of their establishment. And secondly that they have a
backstory which has to be taken into account when we attempt to engage them. Recognition of the life of
an archive pushes us to a further recognition that a history of the archive might not be methodologically
sufficient for our purposes. A subject with a life requires rather a biography. The concept of a biography
recognises that the subject of the study moves through time changing in response to changing contexts,
and itself causing change, interacting, influencing and being influenced by, the world in which it moves. The
challenge here is to track the iterative and recursive relationship between, say, a collection on the one hand,
and public, political and academic discourses on the other, one shaping and reshaping the others, and in
turn being shaped.
Karen Strassler
The Person and the Archive
Allan Sekula’s seminal article, the Body and the Archive, argued that photography in the 19th century
generated a “shadow archive,” a visual rendering of the social terrain that ordered bodies hierarchically
within it. By showing the interdependence between the gaze of the state at the criminal body and the
privatized and sentimentalized gaze of the bourgeois elite at their own images, Sekula challenged the
ideological division that construes “state” and “public” images as discrete from “private” and “domestic”
images. In this paper, I build on this insight by shifting attention to the unstable status of the bodies
posed within the frame of the photograph and made to stand as figures within a larger social body. This
instability comes from the body’s inherent potential to be personalized in three ways. First, the body may
be recognized as a person, in the sense of a unique being defined by experience, memory, and social
affiliation. Second the image may be taken up and refigured within personal projects of memory and vision,
thereby making statements that run counter to those of the archive itself. Finally, the camera’s accessibility
and technologies of reproduction and dissemination make possible the production of alternative archives
so thoroughly interpenetrated by personal acts of witnessing and by bodies that assert their status as
persons, that the very nature of the archive is transformed. Without romanticizing the “personal” as a space
of redemption or resistance, we may nevertheless recognize its potential to disturb the archive from within.
Symposium Schedule
Framing the Archive: New Directions in Photographic Traditions and Modernities
18 October 2011
Faculty of Social Sciences, Universiteit Leiden,
Pieter de la Court gebouw, Room 1a27
Wassenaarsweg 52, 2333 AK Leiden
13.00Opening Remarks
13.15 – 14.15 14.30 – 15.30 Caroline Hamilton – The Life of the Archive
Karen Strassler – The Person and the Archive
Coffee Break
15.50 – 17.00 Research presentations by Sophie Feyder, Annie Goodner,
Christoph Rippe
17.00 Closing Remarks by Dr. Oliver Moore, Faculty of Humanities