Geotagging Photographs in Student Fieldwork

This resource paper provides guidance for staff and students on the potential educational benefits, limitations and applications of geotagging photographs. It also offers practical advice for geotagging photographs in a range of fieldwork settings and reviews three free smartphone applications (apps) for geotagging photographs (Flickr, Evernote and Panoramio). Geotagged photographs have the potential to encourage post-fieldwork student reflection on a landscape. A short case study of first-year undergraduates who geotagged photographs as a method of data collection is outlined. This resource paper also briefly discusses the use of student-owned devices in fieldwork which may reduce pressure on departmental budgets.     

Children's Understanding of Aerial Photographs

As aerial photographs are widely used in geography education, it is important to know how children's understanding of these representations develops through the school years. We review research that has addressed children's understanding of the content of aerial photographs, and we describe a series of studies in which children used information from aerial photographs to carry out spatial tasks in a large space. We demonstrate that using an aerial photograph can be an aid to subsequently using a map, and we discuss the educational applications of the research with aerial photographs.     

Indigenous Modernities: Missionary Photography and Photographic Gaps in Nauru

This essay examines a set of photographs created by Philip Delaporte, a German-American missionary working for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions on the island of Nauru in the early 20th century. At the time Nauru was a German colony, but the phosphate industry had brought a varied group of settlers and influences that added to a pre-existing series of inter-Pacific connections. The photographs were produced just prior to the full realization of the mining industry and the widespread ecological destruction it brought to the island. In many ways, Delaporte’s photographs are typical, recording the mission’s various projects and successes. However, Delaporte’s unique position as an ambiguous colonial figure on the eve of World War I, and Nauru’s own complex relationship with modernity, invite alternate readings of these images. Outside of Delaporte’s original intention, the photographs record other experiences: the workings of Indigenous modernity in the midst of a place increasingly subject to the inflows of global, colonial capital.     

Condition reporting and monitoring of archaeological sites: The use of large-scale vertical aerial photographs in New Zealand

Abstract

Large-scale aerial photographs (approximately 1:2000 to 1:10000 scale on the negative) have a number of virtues for condition reporting. The same site can be photographed at intervals so that rate of change can be measured. The record is objective and it gives sufficient detail to observe not only patterns but also the details of condition in such matters as past repairs, sheep tracking or the existence and state of repair of fences. In addition, photographic prints provide a ready basis for annotation. They are the primary record of condition and may highlight and focus the needs for conservation intervention. Archiving of photographs makes possible future study in the light of new research interests. Monitoring using photographs taken at regular intervals is also recommended.     

Photographing dispossession, forgetting solidarity: waiting for social justice in Wentworth, South Africa

South Africans today inhabit a fragmented and discontinuous landscape, often despite their most cosmopolitan intentions. Grounded in the Coloured neighbourhood of Wentworth in Durban, this paper asks how remains of the past appear as differently temporalised artefacts, some buried in the archaic past and others more readily used to critique the present. In particular, I explore photographs of inmates of a concentration camp from 1902, township youth appropriating a specific commons in the early 1980s, black political photography from the late 1980s, and film wrestling with the ambiguities of post-apartheid political life in a Coloured neighbourhood next to an oil refinery. What unites these moments is not just a meta-theoretical concern with photography as both documentary and aesthetic, but the specific political uses of images, exemplified by the work of two black political photographers. Their practice provides cues for situating these other photographs in a long century of multiple dispossessions. The paper explores when and how photographs might shock the viewer into recognising resemblances, connections and potential solidarities, not just with the past, but with subaltern critique of racial space and subjectivity in the present. I suggest how we might view photographs from various moments relationally, to understand how, in one corner of contemporary South Africa, people continue to wait for justice despite uncertainty and official dissimulation, in a state of anticipatory frustration.     

Engendering the Slum: Photography in East London in the 1930s

Photographs are not truthful records of reality. They are images that are always interpreted, and this essay looks at some critical interpretations of photographs taken in the 1930s of white working-class women in the streets of East London. It pays particular attention to two current critiques that tend to address two different kinds of photographs (and in so doing to constitute them as distinct genres): a Foucauldian account of photography as a form of disciplining surveillance, and a Lacanianinfluenced analysis of photography as a disruptive reminder of absence and death. By examining documentary photographs and family snapshots from the East End in the 1930s I argue, first, that both of these critical accounts require an explicit consideration of the constitution of sexual difference, since both implicitly reproduce regressive visions of (working-class) femininities. Secondly, I argue that feminist revisions of both should be deployed together in order to effect a destabilising critique of the constitution of sexual difference through photographs. I elaborate that argument by considering a third series of photographs, commissioned by Stepney Borough Council in 1937 to record housing condemned as slums in the borough. In discussing that series, I suggest that through its organisation of the spatiality and corporeality of the women photographed outside their houses that were to be demolished, a radically uncertain femininity is conjured.     

Family photographs and domestic spacings: a case study

This paper elaborates the argument that domestic space should be considered as the product of relations that extend beyond the home. It examines one common domestic object – family photographs – and explores how the particularity of this photography and the specificity of its display by white middle-class mothers with young children in South-east England produce just such an extended domestic space. The stretched space co-produced by these mothers and photographs is also a form of stretched time, and it is integrative in complex ways; it contains different kinds of absences which disturb but do not break its cohesion. The paper also discusses why the display of family photographs is done almost exclusively by women.     

A female war correspondent on the Italian front, 1915–17: the Austrian travel journalist and photographer Alice Schalek

In July 1915, Alice Schalek was accredited to the Austro-Hungarian Kriegspressequartier (War Press Office) as one of a small number of female war correspondents, publishing her war reports and photographs in the prestigious Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse and in the illustrated German magazine Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. Schalek’s writings and photographs were very popular, but also sharply criticized in some quarters for their alleged lack of objectivity and a tendency to glorify the war. Her most prominent critic was the Austrian writer and journalist Karl Kraus, whose negative judgment dominated Schalek’s historical reputation for many decades. Focusing on Schalek’s assignments to the Italian front during 1915–17, this article looks at the working conditions faced by Schalek as a female war reporter and reconstructs the war images she transmitted to the public through her writings, photographs, and lectures. Moreover, it asks in what ways Schalek’s work reflects a female perspective on the war.     

Pics or It Didn't Happen: Reading Photographs in the Reef Tank Community

In 1961, Lee Chin Eng jumpstarted the reef hobby, a hobby dedicated to the modeling of coral reefs in captivity, with an article in Tropical Fish Hobbyist. He illustrated the article with eight photographs; these images were meaningful to the hobbyists viewing them and they conveyed both information about the tank system and also claims about Lee's expertise. This paper examines three genres of photographs—landscapes, active, and passive portraiture—that appeared in Lee's article and how and why they have proliferated in the reef hobbyist community over the last sixty years. By tracing the history of these genres, we can better understand natural knowledge producers rely on photographs to exchange knowledge and cement community identity.     

News Photographs and Environmental Agenda Setting

Who and what influences the issues that policymakers attend to is central to the question of how power is exercised in politics. This study builds upon research by Soroka that proposes an expanded model of agenda setting as a means to examine how the media influences issue salience for the public and policymakers. It expands on Soroka's model by investigating the hypothesis that photographic attention to environmental issues in the news media influences issue salience for the mass public and governmental decision makers. There is little research that substantiates the idea, but it is widely believed that photographs have influence on the policy agenda. I use a dynamic, multidirectional model to estimate whether the volume of news photographs, in addition to news stories, influences issue salience among the mass public and policymakers. Data are longitudinal and measures of attention are operationalized as the number of congressional committee meetings, concern for the environment as a “most important problem” in public opinion polls, environmental news stories in The New York Times, and environmental news photographs in Time magazine. Results suggest that photographic attention does influence environmental policy agenda dynamics in some counterintuitive ways that are distinct from the effects of the news stories. While news stories appear to increase public attention toward the environment, they have little influence on policymaker attention. News photographs, on the other hand, appear to drive congressional committee attention but elicit an ambivalent public response.     

CHOOSING NOT TO LOOK: REPRESENTATION,REPATRIATION, AND HOLOCAUST ATROCITY PHOTOGRAPHY1

This essay considers, from ethical and historical‐critical perspectives, alternatives to unconditional public access to Holocaust atrocity photographs. Photographic images have become the common coin of public awareness and historical information about the Holocaust. For the generations immediately following the genocide, atrocity photos and images of Nazi crimes served as vital testimony. For succeeding generations, however, access to certain “recirculated” images (Barbie Zelizer) has created a sense of familiarity with the Holocaust and with the National Socialist era that may prevent, rather than facilitate, engagement with the historical subject, particularly for students. Few of the victims of the Shoah pictured in either the best known or the least circulated images were willing subjects. As such, the bulk of Holocaust and National Socialist photography should perhaps fall under the same category as the results of Nazi medical experiments: they have been rendered inadmissible because they are ethically compromised materials, made without the participants’consent. While I am not advocating the wholesale destruction of Holocaust photographs, I will suggest that removing them from view or “repatriating” them might serve Holocaust memory better than their reduction to atrocious objects of banal attention. Just as the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 provided a mechanism for the reclassification of human remains, from ethnographic to spiritually sacred artifacts, we should consider what a similar reclassification of Holocaust photographs could offer. Have Holocaust atrocity photographs reached the limits of their usefulness as testimony?     

Gender in the frame: photography and the performance of the nation narrative in early twentieth-century Ireland

This article considers the role of visualising in the formation of the nation narrative. It foregrounds the significance of gender performance in early twentieth-century Irish cultural nationalism. Prior to the consolidation of a hegemonic narrative of state, spaces existed for the exploration of a range of possible projections of identity. This study focuses on one of those possibilities, namely a series of costume photographs where gender is literally performed. A contextual reading of these photographs is offered in order to situate them within the formation of the nation narrative. The gender of the nation is enacted through performativity, which through its repetition comes to be seen as natural. The photographs under consideration here undermine that process of naturalisation by revealing a more complex and contradictory history of the relationship between gender and nation. The omission of this more complex representation in the Irish narrative, it is argued, reveals how monopoly of narrative is integral to both hegemonic control in the visual field and how we understand the nation.     

Making meaningful space for oneself: photo-based dialogue with siblings of refugee children with severe withdrawal symptoms

The current study explores the use of children's photographs to establish a dialogue about everyday life with healthy siblings of refugee children with severe withdrawal symptoms (SWS). Asylum-seeking refugee children in Sweden with SWS have been officially observed since 2000, yet research has overlooked their healthy siblings. We studied three healthy siblings and found photography to be an applicable communicative tool. When parents focus their attention on the ill child, the healthy children create space for themselves and indicate both resilience and vulnerability. We suggest that, together with a dialogue, children's own photographs are useful for research with refugee children in vulnerable situations.     

Moving pictures: Memory and photography among the Arhuaco of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta,Colombia

This article traces the changing uses and meanings of a set of ethnographic photographs that represent a contentious period in the history of the Arhuaco, an indigenous group that inhabits the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, in Northern Colombia. Based on archival sources and fieldwork, I explore their role in the 1910s when they were created by Swedish anthropologist Gustaf Bolinder, and also analyse indigenous re-significations and contests over the meaning of the photographs in 2010s as a process that is intertwined with their present struggles. I study their use by an Arhuaco media-maker who incorporated them into a historical documentary film and debates among community members around possible interpretations of the pictures. Through this case study I seek to contribute to the expanding scholarship on the history of anthropological photography, and in particular to recent efforts to move beyond vertical colonial readings and emphasize indigenous agency. I argue for the need of a more nuanced understanding of indigenous and non-indigenous uses of photography that takes into account a shared history and does not naturalize differences. Furthermore, I trace the changing meanings of photographs in order to illuminate the historicity implied in the process of attributing meaning to the past.     

The Application of Great War Aerial Photography in Battlefield Archaeology: The Example of Flanders

Abstract

During the Great War, millions of aerial photographs of the frontline and area behind the trenches were made by the combatants. Such aerial photographs (APs) are a major source for the study of Great War heritage. Studying the APs required a new methodology, involving the processing of APs in GIS models to produce a detailed inventory of war traces. This approach provides reliable digital and analogue maps on which all visible traces are minutely recorded. Through this, we hope to meet the growing necessity of a professional and scientific archaeological research of the Great War.     

Art and the meaning of things

Bronner, Simon J. Grasping Things: Folk Material Culture and Mass Society in America. Louisville: The University of Kentucky Press, 1986. xv + 247 pp. including photographs, chapter references, and index. $24.00 cloth.

Ewers, John C. Plains Indian Sculpture: A Traditional Art from America's Heartland. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986. 239 pp. including photographs, appendix, and bibliography. $39.95, cloth.

Shadbolt, Doris. Bill Reid. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986.192 pp. including photographs, select bibliography, and chronological list of illustrations. $39.95 cloth.     

Framing the past: situating the archaeological in photographs

Archaeology continually reproduces its own images. Speaking archaeology’s visual language is one way we prove membership in the discipline. Many aspects of this visual language have become so naturalized within archaeological representation as to be almost unquestionable: the cleaning of the site, the use of scale, and particular framings and perspectives. How, then, is the production of particular photographic images of archaeology related to the practice of archaeology? Does archaeology look a certain way (in photographs) or are archaeologists reproducing an archaeology according to the way it is thought it should look? Using examples of early photographs from Latin American archaeological expeditions, this article investigates not only photography as an applied technology for scientific recording, but also its power to situate archaeological knowledge. Drawing on recent reflective and critical developments in both the history of archaeology and visual anthropology, it uses five focal points – trace, objectivity and authenticity, sight/site, still lifes, and still lives – to argue that early-twentieth-century archaeological photographs of Latin America participated in the generation of an ‘authentic’ past rather than simply paid testament to it.     

A neolithic case of Down syndrome

The aim of the study is to draw attention to the existence of a Neolithic figurine from Greece with characteristics compatible with Down syndrome. We have reviewed the relevant medical and archaeological literature, and we have compared photographs of the figurine with photographs of a patient with typical Down syndrome (DS). From the above data we conclude that the 7000 years old artefact may well be the most ancient representation of the disease in Western civilisation.     

A neolithic case of down syndrome?*

Abstract

The aim of the study is to draw attention to the existence of a Neolithic figurine from Greece with characteristics compatible with Down syndrome. We have reviewed the relevant medical and archaeological literature, and we have compared photographs of the figurine with photographs of a patient with typical Down syndrome (DS). From the above data we conclude that the 7000 years old artefact may well be the most ancient representation of the disease in Western civilisation.