This major international conference was convened by Geraldine Johnson (University of Oxford), Deborah Schultz (Regent's University London), and Costanza Caraffa (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz—Max-Planck-Institut). It is the sixth in the Photo Archives conference series. This conference took place on April 20–21, 2017. The conference investigated photographs and photographic archives in relation to notions of place. In this context, place was used to explore both the physical location of a photograph or archive, as well as the place of photography as a discursive practice with regard to its value or significance as a method of viewing and conceiving the world. Photographs are mobile objects that can change their location over time, transported to diverse commercial, artistic, social, academic and scientific locations. The photograph’s physical location thus has an impact upon its value, function and significance; these topics were explored at the conference through a range of archives and across disciplines. How might the mobility of photographs open up thinking about archives and, in turn, classificatory structures in disciplines such as Art History, Archaeology and Anthropology, or in the Sciences? The conference also addressed questions of digital space, which renders the image more readily accessible, but complicates issues relating to location. What is the place, or value, of the photographic archive in the digital age? It was sponsored by the Kress Foundation, the John Fell Fund and the History Faculty's Sanderson Fund at the University of Oxford, and Christ Church, Oxford.
Nina Lager Vestberg (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) discusses the digital condition of photography through a phase model of digitisat...
Shamoon Zamir (New York University Abu Dhabi) discusses the 'The Family of Man' exhibition and its related archives. Apart from early reviewers and co...
Pascal Griener (University of Neuchatel) discusses photographic reproductions of the French crown jewels made for their auction in 1887. During the se...
Catherine E. Clark (MIT) discusses the life cycle of anonymous photographic archives. This paper examines the trope of ‘trash to treasure’ in the hist...
Estelle Blaschke (University of Lausanne) discusses the development and growth in use of microfilm during the 1920s and 1930s. The use of photography ...
Kelley Wilder (De Montfort University) discusses photography as a scientific protocol This talk examines the idea that photography has entered into th...
Chitra Ramalingam (Yale University) discusses photographic collections within science laboratories Experimental practice in laboratories sometimes gen...
Luke Gartlan (University of St Andrews) discusses Victorian arctic photography in The Arctic Regions (1873) and an unpublished album. William Bradford...
Christina Riggs (University of East Anglia) discusses the 'forgetfulness' of photo albums from excavations in colonial and interwar Egypt. Almost ever...
Christopher Morton (University of Oxford) discusses the concept of the relational museum applied to an album from the Anthropological Society in Londo...