The Matter of Photography: Decay, Conservation, Afterlives

Abstract

To the chagrin of the people invested in their immutability, photographs are objects of active and unruly matter. This panel interrogates past and present practices for (and against!) the archiving and conservation of photographs, paying particular attention to the photograph’s development as a technoscientific object as well as the technoscientific practices that have been brought to bear on its maintenance. What are the material conditions of the representational work that photographs are made to do? How do institutional practices of preservation and use produce ontologies of the photograph—and who shapes those ontologies, while working in artistic, laboratory, museological, clinical, colonial, or postcolonial settings? Taking the concepts of deterioration and instability as analytical categories, we offer inventive and open-minded approaches to the materials that mark photographs as temporal and temperamental entities—from the silver of a daguerreotype to the light that transforms it, the synthetic dyes that produce photographs’ colors and then fade over time, the paper that can be scratched and torn. We also ask after the bounds of the photograph: where does the photograph end and its material and technical infrastructure begin? Where do ghosts of the photograph regenerate in other documentary and creative practices, and for what purposes? We hope that thinking through the afterlives of the photograph’s materiality will engender additional perspectives on what makes photographs matter—to scientific and nonscientific communities. The papers draw from a wide range of disciplines, including history, anthropology, art, museum studies, and critical heritage studies.

Chair

• Grace Kim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Discussant

• Chitra Ramalingam, Yale University

Individual Presentations

• Fixing and Fading: Preservation Anxieties and Material Histories in Photographic Science - Chitra Ramalingam, Yale University

• Archival and Evidential Aesthetics in Cypriot Documentary Photography - Elizabeth Anne Davis, Princeton University

• Portrait and Scan - Jenna Grant, University of Washington

• Infrastructures of Color and the "Skins" of Mark Rothko's Paintings - Grace Kim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Session Organizers

• Grace Kim, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

• Chitra Ramalingam, Yale University