Photographic methods to detect colourants in archaeological textiles

Protocols for photography of archaeological textiles to detect components of differing chemistry that are indicative of colourants were developed. Parameters of light source, camera distance, filter type, film type, film speed, and aperture size were evaluated for visible, UV-reflectance, UV-fluorescence, and infrared photography. Using these techniques facilitates selective sampling for further analysis that maximizes critical data acquisition while minimizing destruction of the artefact. Hence, forensic photography of archaeological perishable materials should be regarded as a precursor to destructive analytical methods.     

How to picture race?

The purpose of the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology, SIRB, was to survey the Swedish people according to its race criteria. In this research process photographs were used to document and portray the different races living in Sweden. This article examines how the photographs were used in this process: What pictorial rhetoric did they use and what did the photographs bring to the research process? The result shows that SIRB did not succeeded in developing consistent methods of portraying race. The style and formula of the portraits varied; sometimes environmental aspects came in to focus, sometimes bodily aspects. These methodological shortcomings must be attributed not only to the fact that the institution was working with a new and immature scientific medium – photography – but also that it operated inside an immature scientific discipline. The race scientific community had no joint theories and methods to work with, and did not know how to affiliate with other disciplines – such as anthropology, focusing on environmental factors, or medicine, focusing on bodily aspects. But the lack of methodological consistency was not just a shortcoming; it could also be used to bias the material in a way that served the ideas of eugenics.     

Hospital Drama: Visual Theatres of the Medical Rendezvous from Asylum to Hospital with Reference to Specific Works by Anna Furse

Abstract

This paper is informed by Furse’s practice as a theatre maker in two fields of output that are connected by two factors: first, the presence of the woman patient — hysteric/subfertile respectively — within the clinical gaze; second, the significance of the womb to each pathology. In the treatment of each (explored in Furse’s theatre), lens based technologies play their part, whilst the cultural and medical can be seen to have overlapped to produce specific meaning with regard to Her body and its spectacularity. The article presents an overview of some of the key issues in precisely how the woman’s body becomes spectacular within this prosthetic medical gaze and how the medical — and theatrically designed spaces to represent these — become meaningful and potent proxemics that in turn inform medical/ theatrical spectatorship. Overarching nineteenth-century protocols at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris (where Furse’s Augustine (Big Hysteria) is set) to contemporary imaging technologies used in the treatment of subfertility with Assisted Reproduction Technologies (the topic of her Art of A.R.T. projects), it examines the way in which photography develops through cinema to X-Ray, ultrasound and then 3D/4D ultrasound to ‘capture’ the woman’s body in ways by which she becomes muted and exposed. These occular technologies that extend the gaze, first to an exterior subject and then, eventually, traversing the flesh without knife, lend specific performativity to the ‘patient’ women, within the context of hysterias and reproductive impairments respectively. Finally, issues of suspension of disbelief are addressed. The spectator’s faith in the screen-based image of Her spectacular body is interrupted in Furse’s work, which is also keenly interested in the effect of such imagery on the woman’s sense of Self. The historical and cultural leaps in this article argue that there is indeed a trajectory through the history of medical imaging since the first application of photography to anatomy to the more advanced scoping technologies of medical imaging today, and that in each era, the production of these images remain fraught with cultural implications.     

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.     

Valkeapää's Use of Photographs in Beaivi áhčážan: Indigenous Counter-History versus Documentation in the Age of Photography

This article examines the photographic material of the Sámi cultural mobilizer Nils-Aslak Valkeapää's Beaivi áh?á?an (The Sun, My Father), published in 1988, with theoretical perspectives from anti- and postcolonial studies. The analysis focuses on how Valkeapää's use of photographs involves that the colonial past is examined from the vantage point of the anti-colonial present of the 1980s. Valkeapää's re-contextualization of photographs from ethnographic collections assembled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a book he called a family album of the Sámi is discussed as an example of Sámi counter-history that is part of the decolonization process. When analysed with perspectives from anti- and postcolonial studies, the documentation of the way of life of the Sámi people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries exemplifies a practice which has constructed the Sámi as the others of modern society. The article discusses how the construction of the Sámi as the others of modernity is deconstructed and challenged in present-day indigenous identity politics.     

‘Nomad Villages’ in north‐eastern Jordan: from Roman Arabia to Umayyad Urdunn

The traces of dispersed houses in desert or steppic regions of northern Jordan and southern Syria have been augmented by recent discoveries and fieldwork. The evidence suggests that they are dated to the Umayyad period, although often with traces of Late Roman/Jafnid (Ghassanid) origins. The new discoveries allow an enrichment of our knowledge for the period and provide a contrast with the better known Desert Castles and Qusur that dominate the evidence for this period.     

HOW WE LIVE WITH THE PAST NOW

Michael Roth's new collection of essays, written over the last two decades, is held together by its author's pervasive concern with human temporality: our individual and collective passages through time, recorded by the faculty of memory, which pose some of our most intractable problems. The essays treat, and indeed provide a map to, several adjacent areas of inquiry: the history of the psychopathology of memory in the long nineteenth century; the vicissitudes of the trauma‐concept from its relatively modest medical origins to its postmodern apotheosis; and photography as a medium and art form embroiled in our relationship with the past. Roth's major interventions are threefold. First, while persuaded of the value of the psychoanalytic version of the trauma‐concept, he critiques the so‐called traumatophilia of postmodern theorists who, usually with reference to the Holocaust, seek to invest trauma with ethical valences and powers of legitimation or even, as in the case of Agamben, raise it to ontological status. Second, through his fine‐grained account of Freud's convergence with and divergence from his French colleagues, especially Charcot and Janet, Roth argues that the stunning breakthrough of psychoanalysis was to take the past seriously, to recognize the inevitable penetration of the past into the present in the human psyche as well our affective investment in and need to narrativize the past. For Roth, Freud's continued relevance today resides in what he has taught us about living with the past. Finally, Roth begins to develop the concept of “piety” as an attitude toward the past that fuels the writing of history. He leaves the concept in rudimentary form, but his evocative remarks suggest the fruitfulness of developing it further.     

Commercializing academic knowledge and reputation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: photography and beyond

Abstract

This article argues that Hermann Vogel (1834–1898), the head of the photochemical laboratory of the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg, was not exceptional in pursuing business undertakings throughout his academic career. After highlighting the involvement of higher education employees of various disciplines and institutions in the photographic industry as consultants, patentees, and entrepreneurs, I more closely examine the commercial activities of Vogel and those of Adolf Miethe (1862–1927), Vogel’s successor in Berlin. This analysis points to a notable continuity through time. It shows that these scientists’ decades-long engagement in commercial work was not materially affected by (1) their salary levels, (2) the emergence of industrial research in the photographic and optical industries, and (3) changes in the amount of government funding for scientific research. In addition, it reveals that the Prussian education ministry maintained a strong focus on reputational risks in handling complaints concerning commercial activities of these academics.     

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.     

‘Sensing with’ photography and ‘thinking with’ photographs in research into teenage girls' hanging out

In this paper, I approach photography as a multisensory practice that can deepen participant engagement in youth research. I argue that this engagement opens up possibilities for embodied reflection. I focus on the creative potential of both ‘sensing with’ photography and the event of ‘thinking with’ photographs by discussing two inter-connected methods: photo-walks and photo-talks. The insights are based on my research into the ways in which teenage girls live and hang out with their urban environments. My thinking draws on writings within material or ‘post-human’ geographies, non-representational theory and participatory research.