From 'colonial' photographs to historical presences

In this lecture I use ‘paths and trackways’ as a central metaphor through which to examine processes that have, in recent decades, transformed approaches to the archival photographic deposits and accruals. These processes shift photographs in colonial archives and museums from moribund deposits of past practices and ideologies, to vibrant spaces of contested histories and multiple subjectivities – is that from colonial objects to historical presences.  If archives and their photographs, as physical entities, are prone to decay, dissolution, and rearrangement, they are also increasingly mobile epistemically. Photographs have emerged active spaces where assumptions can be challenged, and newer and larger intellectual contexts can emerge. In particular, I consider three major pathways – the evidential, the experiential and the historiographical – as complex sites of connection where  my central metaphor shapes the empirical and conceptual potential of photographs and the conditions of their visibility. The lecture marks the opening of the workshop Encounters with the Photographic Archive on April 9, 2025.

Elizabeth Edwards is a visual and historical anthropologist. She has worked extensively on the social and cultural histories of photography, especially in colonial environments, and on photography and history. She is Professor Emerita of Photographic History at De Montfort University, Leicester, where she was founding director of the Photographic History Research Centre. She has Honorary Professorships in the Department of Anthropology University College London, and University of Durham. From 2016-22 she was Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Victoria and Albert Museum Research Institute, London. Until 2005 she was Curator of Photographs at Pitt Rivers Museum and lecturer in visual anthropology at ISCA, University of Oxford, where she is now Research Affiliate. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2015.  She is on the advisory boards of the Kunsthistorisches Institut (Max Planck Gesellschaft) in Florence, and until 2024, the National Science and Media Museum (Science Museum Group), Bradford, IAS in Durham, and numerous editorial boards. Her most recent books are The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination (2012), Photographs and the Practice of History (2022) and the co-edited What Photographs Do: the making and remaking of museum cultures (2022).