Excavating Experience: Photographs and Difficult Histories

Elizabeth Edwards (PhotoCLEC, University of the Arts London)

East European Memory Studies Research Group Seminar

Wednesday 2 February, 5:00pm

CRASSH, Cambridge

ABSTRACT

This paper explores methodologies for thinking about photographs entangled in

difficult and contested histories. It explores ways in which a ‘critical forensics’ can be

used in relation to photographs of ‘everyday’ colonial encounter to suggest ways in

which photographs might reveal subjective experiences of events.

Drawing on methodologies developed in connection to Eastern European histories,

the paper is concerned with how we might find ways of thinking about photographs in

difficult histories, which do not simply stall us on questions of the limits of visual

representation, or in reductionist arguments of spectacle or gaze which deliver the

subject of the photograph as passive content. Rather it uses photographs to excavate

the subjective experience of people as social beings who experienced events for

which photographs have come to stand.