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The ‘long 19^th century’, identified in the West with the age of the rise of nation states, is also the century of the ‘invention’ and diffusion of photography, as well as the birth of modern archival science. Photography was soon placed at the service of the iconic needs of nation states. The photographic collections and archives, both public and private, founded between the second half of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th century, thus had the function of restoring and creating the fragmented image of the nation, on the one hand, and helping to construct the image of a nation, on the other. Yet the problem of the representation of the national identity is clearly not limited to this period. Following the Second World War, the subsequent disintegration of the world colonial system, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the national question was once again placed at the centre of attention but now in a planetary dimension. The debate of the contemporary world is thus torn between globalization and forms of national, or even sub-national, particularism. It is also having to face the question of the proliferation of images in a globalized world, in the age of digital media and internet, with its simplification of production (or over-production) of images and access to them. Despite these changing historical conditions, however, photographs have continued, and will continue, to be gathered in collections and archives, with the aim of giving visual substance to the image world of the national identity, and contributing to its formation.

The conference is aimed at studying the relation between photography or photographic archives and the idea of nation, yet without focusing on single symbolic icons and considering instead the wider archival and sedimental dimension.

The conference forms part of a series of international meetings dedicated to photographic archives and the interaction between photography and the academic and scientific disciplines, with a particular focus on the history of art. After London (June 2009), Florence (October 2009) and New York (March 2011), the fourth meeting in the series will once again be held in Florence (October 27-29, 2011).

PHOTO ARCHIVES IV: THE PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE AND THE IDEA OF NATION

Programme

THURSDAY, 27 OCTOBER 2011

14.30: Alessandro Nova (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz): Welcoming remarks

14.45: Costanza Caraffa (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz), Tiziana Serena (Università degli Studi di Firenze): Introduction

15.00, Opening Keynote: Elizabeth Edwards (DeMontfort University, Leicester): The Invisibility of History: Photography, the Colonial, and the Refiguring of Nation

16.00: coffee break

16.30: Tiziana Serena (Università degli Studi di Firenze): Cultural Heritage, Nation, Italian State: Politics of the Photographic Archive between Centre and Periphery

17.15: Bernhard Jussen (Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt): Towards an Iconology of Medieval Studies: Approaches to the Pictorial Formation of Historical Knowledge in Modern Scholarship

19.00, Evening Keynote: Joan M. Schwartz (Queen's University, Kingston): Images and Imaginings: Photographs, Archives, and the Idea of Nation

FRIDAY, 28 OCTOBER 2011

9.30: Roberto Mancini (Università Iuav di Venezia): La fabbrica degli albanesi. Lo studio fotografico Marubi e la definizione della identità nazionale del ‘paese delle aquile’ tra età moderna e contemporanea

10.15: Ewa Manikowska (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw): Turning local into universal. Museums, Photography and the Discovery of Poland’s Cultural Patrimony (1918-1939)

11.00: coffee break

11.30: Justin Carville (Dublin / Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dun Laoghaire): Performing Ethnography/Projecting History: Photography, Archives, and Irish Cultural Nationalism

12.15: Josko Belamaric (Institut za povijest umjetnosti – Institute of Art History, Split, Croatia): Il ruolo della fotografia nel Kulturkampf attorno al 1900 in Dalmazia

lunch break

15.00: John Mraz (Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico / Princeton University): Archives & Icons: Constructing a Postrevolutionary Identity in Mexico

15.45: Julia Adeney Thomas (University of Notre Dame, Indiana): A War without Pictures: Japan's Official Photography Magazines as National Archive

16.30: coffee break

17.00: Pietro Clemente (Università degli Studi di Firenze): Resistenza, memoria e fotografia nei processi identitari dell’Italia postbellica

17.45: Rolf Sachsse (Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar): Microfilm Services and Their Application to Scholarly Study, Scientific Research, Education and Re-Education in the Post-War Period: a Draft Proposal by Lucia Moholy to the UNESCO Preparatory Commission, 1945, and its Prehistory in Modern Art

18.30: Patricia Hayes (University of Western Cape, South Africa): The 'struggle archive' and the Loss of the Subject: Portraits of Namibian Contract Workers by John Liebenberg, 1986

SATURDAY, 29 OCTOBER 2011

10.00: Martha A. Sandweiss (Princeton University): Majestic Landscapes and Disappearing Indians: Photography and the Invention of an American West

10.45: Martina Baleva (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin): Von der fotografischen Inflation zur nationalen Revolution. Konstruktionen bulgarischer Nationalrevolutionäre im fotografischen Bild

11.30: coffee break

12.00: Lucie Ryzova (University of Oxford / Cairo): Mourning the Archive in Egypt: Vintage Photographs in the Age of Neoliberalism and Digital Reproduction

12.45: Round Table / Final Discussion

Organization: Costanza Caraffa (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, caraffa@khi.fi.it)  and Tiziana Serena (Università degli Studi di Firenze, tiziana.serena@unifi.it)

Location: Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut, Photothek, Via dei Servi 51, 50122 Florence

Contact: Maja Häderli (haederli@khi.fi.it)

BPH exclusively revealed that London's V&A Museum was to open a new photography gallery in October (see: http://britishphotohistory.ning.com/profiles/blogs/exclusive-vampa-to-open-new). The opening is scheduled for 25 October 2011.

A permanent new gallery to show highlights from the V&A’s internationally renowned collection of photographs will open this autumn, considerably extending the space dedicated to photographs at the Museum. The gallery will launch with a display of works by key figures of photographic history including Victorian portraits by Julia Margaret Cameron and significant works by Henri Cartier-Bresson,Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, Diane Arbus and Irving Penn.The gallery will chronicle the history of photography from its invention in 1839 up to the 1960s,after which developments in scale, concept and technology mark a shift in approach andappearance. The display will be re-curated every 18 months.

Temporary displays, primarily showcasing contemporary photography, will be shown in the V&A’s existing photographs gallery.A broad range of works will be displayed in the new gallery, including the oldest photographin the V&A collection, a daguerreotype from 1839 of Parliament Street from Trafalgar Square in London.

Other highlights will be an early botanical photograph created without a camera by Anna Atkins (1854); a dramatic seascape by Gustave Le Gray praised at the time for its technical and artistic accomplishment (1856); and a commanding portrait by Robert Howlett of Isambard Kingdom Brunel standing in front of the chains of The Great Eastern ship (1857). Laterworks on display will include Curtis Moffat’s camera-less photograph of a dragonfly (about 1925) influenced by Man Ray’s pioneering style and an astonishing scientific photograph by Harold Edgerton of the coronet formed by a single milk drop falling into liquid (1957).

There will also be two ‘In Focus’ sections, each featuring a photographer represented in depth in the V&A collection. The first will be dedicated to British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who used long exposures and soft focus to create some of the most powerful portraitsof the 19th century. The second will present Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the most influentialphotographers of the 20th century, who used a small hand-held camera to capture the extraordinary in the everyday.

In 1856, the V&A became the first museum to collect photographs and in 1858, was the first to exhibit them. The V&A is home to the UK’s national collection of the art of photography, one of the largest and most important in the world. The gallery, formerly a study space, is being designed by the V&A’s design department as part of the V&A’s FuturePlan to transform the Museum through new galleries and redisplays of itscollections. Architectural details will be restored, including ten magnificent semi-circular paintings, commissioned in the 1860s as part of the original decorative scheme, to illustrate the principles of art education and show the highest achievements from the history of art. 

Image: Julia Margaret Cameron, Circe, 1865.