WORKSHOP 'Comparative perspectives on photography in French and British colonial contexts: heritage, research, politics'
© Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford & © Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, Bohumil Holas
Participants can either attend onsite or online.
To attend the event onsite, please register here
To attend the event online, please register here.
Convened by Charlotte Bigg (CNRS, Centre Alexandre Koyré, Maison française d'Oxford) & Christopher Morton (Head of Curatorial, Research & Teaching and Associate Professor, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford)
Colonial photographic archives have increasingly been acknowledged as ‘contested, critical sites of collection, reflection and re-invention' (Tamar Garb), raising issues at the intersection of heritage, research and politics. How these issues have been formulated and addressed in museums, universities and societies has sometimes differed across locations and cultural traditions. This informal workshop brings together curators, historians and anthropologists to take stock and compare perspectives on photography in French and British colonial contexts, taking as a focus photographic archives kept at the Pitt Rivers Museum as well as those constituted by the Instituts Français d’Afrique Noire that operated across French West Africa in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
10th May
2:00- 2:30 Tea and coffee
2:30 - 6:30 PM: session 1 at the Maison Française d'Oxford
Christopher Morton (Pitt Rivers Museum), Introductory remarks
Anaïs Mauuarin (Ghent University/Musée d’Art et d’histoire de Bruxelles), "IFAN’s Photographic Policy: Images at the heart of Colonial Science" (per videolink)
Julie Cayla (Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris), “From Colonial Science to Transnational Heritage. The photographic constellation of the Institut français d’Afrique noire (IFAN)”
4:30- 4:45: Tea and coffee break
Fatima Fall et Ismaila Camara, (Centre Recherche et de Documentation du Sénégal- CRDS, Saint Louis, Sénégal), Les fonds photographiques au CRDS et chez des privés à Saint-Louis (per videolink)
Carine Peltier-Caroff (Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris), “la politique documentaire et les projets de recherche des collections de photographies du musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac”
6:30 -7:30 PM: Wine and cheese
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11th May
9:30-11:30 AM: session 2 at the Maison Française d'Oxford
Anna Sephton (Pitt Rivers Museum/University of Brighton), “Stretching Queerness, Inhabiting Whiteness: Irene 'Freddie' Heseltine's Photographic Collection of 1930s South Africa”
Anne Friedrike Delouis (MFO/Université d’Orléans), “The photographic archive of a German museum ethnologist’s private mission to India: stylistic experimentation and commercial entanglements in the 1930s”
11:15- 11.30: Tea and coffee break
11:30- 12:30 AM: Keynote Lecture
Mirjam Brusius (German Historical Institute, London), “(Counter-)Archives and the photographic construction of heritage”
12:30-1:30 PM: Lunch break
2:00-4:30 PM: session 3 at the Pitt Rivers Museum (for speakers only)
2:00 - 3:00 PM: Viewing of archives and group discussion (research room)
3:00 - 3.30 PM: Refreshments in the Natural History Museum café
3.30 - 4.30 PM: Final remarks and round table discussion, led by Elizabeth Edwards (De Montfort university/university of Oxford/V&A Research Institute)(research room)
