C.7 The Critical Image Forum, ca. 2023: Archival Practices and the Networked Image
Fri Oct 20 / 13:30 – 15:00 / KC 206
chairs /
- Erin Silver, University of British Columbia
- Althea Thauberger, University of British Columbia
The Critical Image Forum (CIF) is an interdisciplinary research cluster and public humanities project at The University of British Columbia that focuses on issues related to photography and expanded documentary practice. In 2023-2024, CIF will initiate a SSHRC-funded public program, “Archival Practices and the Networked Image,” to develop, through an examination of the dynamics of image repositories, an understanding of how the temporality of images enables relationships to emerge between our current moment and its histories and possible futures.
In her 2020 book Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography, Shawn Michelle Smith proposes that there is a “temporal recursivity” that is “intrinsic to photography, a backward and forward movement inherent to the medium that invites such returns.” A recursive approach to photography engages the medium as bound to its representational outputs but displaces where truth value lies: the repetition, representation, or reenactment of the image (and redeployment of its techniques) over time. As such, the material and conceptual repositories in which photography resides—the “historical” archive and the “contemporary” network—must also be rethought; CIF’s 2023-2024 program offers an expansion and application of “recursivity” toward archival practices and networked images. Rather than assuming archives are the exclusive purview of the past, and networks of the future, the program is structured around the following questions: What tools can we deploy to critique networked culture and the mass image proliferation of the present through questioning the power structures embedded in technologies of image collecting? Can we build archives of the future through conscientious networked habits in the present? How can we understand historical migration networks as pathways for the distribution of images? How can connections between images telegraph meaning across time periods, helping to articulate relationships across past, present, and future spaces?
The 2023 UAAC conference will offer a platform to present the CIF’s past, current, and future research and introduce (and generate) the local, national, and international projects that will be mobilized through the “Archival Practices and the Networked Image” program.
keywords: archives, activism, image networks
session type: panel
Erin Silver is a historian of queer and feminist art, visual culture, performance, and activism, and an Assistant Professor of Art History and Critical and Curatorial Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Taking Place: Building Histories of Queer and Feminist Art in North America (Manchester University Press, 2023) and Suzy Lake: Life & Work (Art Canada Institute, 2021), and co-editor (with Amelia Jones) of Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (Manchester University Press, 2016) and (with taisha paggett) the winter 2017 issue of C Magazine, “Force,” on intersectional feminisms and movement culture. Silver’s writing has appeared in C Magazine, CAA Reviews, Canadian Art, Ciel Variable, Prefix Photo, Fuse Magazine, Momus, Performance Matters, Visual Resources, and in the volume Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World (ed. Martha Langford, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), as well as in various exhibition catalogues in the areas of Canadian photography and queer and feminist art.
Althea Thauberger is an artist, filmmaker and educator known for place-based experimental documentary projects involving collaborative research and production. The final works–films, videos, audio recordings, and photographs–are reflections on local histories and sociopolitical power dynamics including ones involved in the production process itself. Thauberger is a settler of German-Russian and Scandinavian descent, and is based in the unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory. She is an Assistant Professor at UBC’s Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory where she teaches photography, studio art and cultural theory. Thauberger’s screenings and exhibitions include the Kaunas Biennial, Lithuania; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; The Toronto Biennial of Art, Art Gallery of Southern Alberta; The National Gallery of Canada; the inaugural Karachi Biennale 2017; Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver; La musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; 2012 Liverpool Biennale; 17th Biennale of Sydney; the occupied Kino Zvezda, Belgrade; VIVO, Vancouver; The Berkeley Art Museum; Manifesta 7, Trento; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg; BAK, basis voor aktuele kunst, Utrecht; The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; The Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Vancouver Art Gallery; The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax; Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; White Columns, New York; and The Power Plant, Toronto.
From Event to Archetype: An Examination of Bias and Contradiction in Evolving Archival Descriptions
- Reilley Bishop-Stall, McGill University
My current research surrounds the enduring presence of historical photographs as they are remobilized, reconstituted and circulated across different disciplines, institutions and platforms. The paper I propose for the Critical Image Forum panel on Archival Practices and the Networked Image will focus on my experience remotely researching the Black Star Collection of press photographs now housed at the Image Centre in Toronto, On., for a forthcoming publication. With the migration from newsroom archive to research centre, the identity and use of the collection was fundamentally changed and occurred as part of an ongoing trend to rescue or rehouse increasingly obsolete media languishing in “photo morgues” since the decline of print newspaper and magazine industries. With this migration, photographs that were once linked to specific moments easily become archetypes of larger movements, and the shift from physical archive to networked database has necessitated experimentation with different means of cataloguing, caring for and managing access to these images. My research on the Black Star Collection concerns one of these attempts made by the Image Centre to collaborate with a metadata company that merged crowdsourcing and machine learning to generate descriptive search terms more familiar to common Internet users than to professional archivists, academics or historians. Although driven by optimism and innovation, my research found that the terms generated by such systems – often opaque, perplexing and contradictory – tended to reflect and retain entrenched structural and societal biases, particularly in relation to photographs of BIPOC subjects.
keywords: photography, networked images, archives, search terms, photojournalism
Dr. Reilley Bishop-Stall is a settler Canadian art historian whose research is centered on Indigenous and settler representational histories, contemporary art and visual culture with a specific focus lens-based media, archival practice and ethics, anticolonial and activist art. Dr. Bishop-Stall received her PhD from McGill University and was awarded the university’s Arts Insights Dissertation Award for the year’s most outstanding dissertation in the Humanities. Her work as been published in a number of books and peer-reviewed journals including Photography & Culture, Art Journal Open, and The Journal of Art Theory and Practice. She has held a Horizon Postdoctoral fellowship with the Inuit Futures in Arts Leadership: The Pilimmaksarniq/Pijariuqsarniq Project, and a Limited Term Appointment in the Histories of Photography at Concordia University. Dr. Bishop-Stall has recently joined the Department of Art History at McGill University as Assistant Professor of Art and Visual Culture in Canada.
The State of the World: Rehearsing an Abolitionist Reading Practice
- Hadley Howes, Queen’s University
The Daguerreotype of boulevard du Temple at noon (1839) marks a monumental moment in the history of (what Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls) the “imperial technology” of photography. This image has been historically celebrated in the Western canon as documenting “the first human being to be photographed”: a “man having his boots polished” who stood still long enough for the seven-minute exposure to impress his image on the plate. Dionne Brand sees the photograph otherwise, however, writing in her poetry/essay The Blue Clerk (2018) that, in this image, she sees “the state of the world.” This vision of the image–the lived relations and intimacies that escape capture by the shutter’s blades–is the counter-reading Brand challenges us to bring to the colonial archive.
Dylan Rodriguez describes an "abolitionist reading practice" as reading beyond what is immediately perceived to include the conditions under which the information emerges. If the conditions for the emergence of the Daguerreotype of the boulevard, and its inscription into the archive, are rooted in imperial powers that seek to know, possess, make and destroy worlds, then acknowledging and reckoning with these conditions is, according to Azoulay, a method of attending to “the recurrent moment of original violence,” and beginning to “unlearn imperialism.” Examining the conditions of meaning-making about the boulevard recorded in the archives of European and North American press reveals the kind of work these (white gentlemen) scholars wanted to do when they read the image in 1839, 1937, and yesterday. By following the traces of Brand’s seeing and reading practices (given as poetry) alongside the archive of the photograph’s history as a monumental artifact of imperial technology, this presentation rehearses an abolitionist reading practice that counters the sense-making project of Western aesthetics and transforms the world into what is, therefore, possible.
keywords: photography, poetry, gesture, abolition, critical archival studies
Hadley Howes works from the position of a white, queer, trans, settler, artist, scholar, and educator based in T’karonto. Their research interests in abolitionist aesthetic practices, critical archival practices, (counter-)monument and art in urban spaces is informed by their professional experience creating public art and their extensive international exhibition history as a visual artist working in research-rich, site-responsive and multimedia installation. They are currently dedicated to collective engagement and imaginative processes of co-creation, and studying conflict-resolution, Kinbaku, Filipino martial arts, and gutters. Hadley is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston/Katarokwi, on Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabek territory.
“Too Many Bosses in this Home”: Architectural Photography as Kinship Network in Bureau of Indian Affairs Industrial Surveys, c. 1922
- Maura Lucking, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
In March 1922, the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs organized an industrial survey to report on the status of Native homes recently built on allotments–reservation lands subdivided into individual parcels. Outfitted with cameras to document their findings, agency superintendents observed subsistence industries and property improvements at these modern homesteads. It remains the most complete record of the nation’s indigenous peoples near the height of their mistreatment and dispossession.
The surveys track allottees’ parcel, age, blood quantum, citizenship, and family, along with commentary and a photograph of the house in question. Only occasionally were people pictured, strange given the detail captured about fluctuating or extended family members. I argue this tension between photograph and text is due to the discovery that expansive, multigenerational kinship networks persisted, despite allotment’s intended disruptions to them. Focus on the self-built, single-family home as the primary referent upheld this assimilative biopolitical fantasy, despite the presence of contradictory information just out of frame.
Working from the Waaswaaganing Ojibwe survey, one of the most checkerboarded reservations, this paper analyses the contrast between settler aesthetics–balloon frame homes built from white pine lumber–and indigenous kinship–visitors caring for sick elders or making maple sugar with friends. One surveyor opined that, despite a new building, “there are too many families and too many bosses in this home.” I ask how this colonial archive exceeds the intentions of its makers and how its genre as an architectural photograph allows us to deconstruct the narratives of property, modernization, labor, and respectability the survey depends upon. The racialized aesthetics of these building ‘portraits’ endure in real estate and home improvement media and timber framing remains valorized despite its devastating effects on forest ecologies and traditional artisanship. Today, digitized proxies are increasingly accessible to descendants and researchers in the vicinity of these homes; their logics of standardization, shared by the framed house itself, allow them to return now as evidence of ongoing indigenous lifeways rather than simply acculturation.
Description of Allotment 140 for To to tom (Sam Doud, blind), Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, Surveys of Indian Industry, 1920-1922, Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Archives at Chicago.
keywords: architecture, photography, Native American, survey
Maura Lucking is a historian of architectural modernism and the nineteenth century U.S. She is interested in design as the intersection of connected histories of race, craft, land, and labor.
Her book project provides an architectural history of the Land Grant college movement. In it, she studies the relationship between government policy, land use, campus planning, and design pedagogy at schools founded after the U.S. Civil War, considering the role of design practices in Black and Native dispossession as well as the construction of new racial identities. Another interest is in sociotechnical and media histories of architectural representation, including mechanical drawing & blueprinting, architectural photography, and mortgage and loan documents. New research considers the paperwork practices of state and philanthropic institutions organizing homebuilding projects in Indian country.
Her scholarly work has been supported by the Winterthur Museum, the Huntington Library, the Graham Foundation, the Society for Architectural Historians, and the Getty Research Institute and has appeared in Grey Room, the Getty Research Journal, Thresholds, Faktur, and the Journal of Architectural Education.
