KNOWLEDGE AND VISION

PROJECT: Knowledge and Vision: Photography within the Portuguese colonial archive and museum (1850-1950)

PHOTOGRAPHY AND COLONIALISM

Throughout the second half of the 19th century, photography became a major instrument for forging national, colonial, and individual identities, and a new way of conceiving and communicating knowledge. From the 1850s and up to the 1950s it also constituted the main form of making the world visible. The hegemony of photography was contemporary with the hegemony of European colonialism. Beyond this temporal coincidence, photography became part of the multiple aspects of a colonial culture and a determinant historical object in its archive and museum – the spaces and places, both public and private, where material, written and visual objects very often completed their journeys. Photography not only represented colonial experiences and geographies. It also forged them in multiples ways.

Among the many ways in which photography was used in a colonial context we can refer: Firstly, as an instrument of Knowledge: by being, from the mid-1850s, an inseparable tool of the various scientific knowledges that used the colonies as a laboratory; but also by becoming a fundamental instrument for the specific colonial sciences which developed within all European colonial contexts by the late 19th century through institutions, exhibitions, museums, congresses or journals specially dedicated to colonialism. Photography played a central role in the relationship between colonialism and knowledge; Secondly, as a vehicle for propaganda, actively used by colonial governments and institutions. By annihilating the distance between metropolis and colonies and by showing colonised places and peoples to those who did not travel to the colonies but, at home, felt part of an imperial citizenship. Thirdly, photography was also widely used by the colonial subjects, In Asia or in Africa.

Throughout the second half of the 19th century, the access to photographical technologies was appropriated by Indians and Africans in multiple ways: from the opening of professional studios to the uses of photography as a way of forging their own identities and their own nationalist agendas, sometimes against colonial rule. Photography as resistance and memory was, thus, also a way of subverting colonial rule.

BEYOND THE VISIBLE: PHOTOGRAPHY AS AN HISTORICAL OBJECT

This project had an historical perspective but benefited from a interdisciplinary approach. Despite our interests in different colonial geographies we tried to address some common problems: to understand photography as an object in itself (and not only as a surface for showing other objects), and as part of a written and material culture from where it should not be isolated. Beyond its technical novelty as a representational device, photography constituted a major cultural change, enmeshed in the creation of new forms of social, political and cultural relationships. Photography is embedded with a wider culture and it should not be isolated from it.

We tried to explore the history of one photograph or a group of photographs: what was the context of its production? How was the photograph kept, exhibited, reproduced, collected and disseminated? Where is it now, in a museum, in an archive, in a public institution or in a private house? Who saw it, who wrote on it, and who used it and how? What were the ideological uses of photography in a specific exhibitionary context, from a colonial exhibition in the metropolis to a universal exhibition in another European capital? Was it reproduced as a postcard or in an academic journal, a travel book, or a magazine of wide circulation? How is photography embedded in the idea of reproduction and exhibition?

CIRCULATION, MOBILITY AND REPRODUCTION

If this project was centred on the idea of the Portuguese metropolitan colonial archive, photography itself is particularly subject to mobility, globalisation, transnationalism, transcolonialism, reproduction, visibility and transformation. Photography was a privileged object circulating within the culture of deliveries that very often united different kinds of materials in the same place: from plants and ethnographical objects to private or administrative correspondence. If its portability made it a travelling object, its reproductive possibilities multiplied its discursive meanings. The photographic postcard and the development of publications illustrated with photography meant a profound transformation in the diffusion of images of the colonies.

Photography – its history, exchanges, reproductions and uses – within a colonial context was the main subject of this project. The interdisciplinary research team – some with pioneering work on the subject, others, recently arrived but highly motivated – had the challenge of bringing an object such as photography into the recent historiographical trail of colonial studies. The novelty and originality of the project came both by bringing together researchers, archivists and librarians and work that had until now remained fragmented and dispersed; and by exploring an extremely rich material – collections of photographs produced in the Portuguese colonial context that exists in the national archives, libraries and museums– inscribing it within the international theoretical and critical historiography that has approached such a subject.

Having in mind the already long tradition of thinking of photography in French or British historiography, it appeared as an urgent task to make the same challenge in Portugal. Therefore, by promoting the knowledge of the existing archives, through this Site, by organising a Conference, a Course and a Cinema Cycle and by publishing the Book The Empire of Vision: Photography in the Portuguese Colonial Context (1860-1960) (Lisboa: Edições 70, 2014), we see this project as a point of departure, more than as a conclusive task.