http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29901 Search the Channel search http://archive.nyu.edu/simple-search http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29909 Title: Vernaculars in Translation: 'A Cold War Tourist and His Camera'<br/><br/>Langford, Martha<br/><br/>Abstract: Cold War culture presents as a binary system: East and West;encirclement and containment; international communism and democraticcapitalism; patriotism and contagion; escalation and detente. This dualpattern is also stamped on photographic culture and experience. IconicModernist photography, exemplified by the era's picture magazines andphotographic exhibitions, symbolizes global divisions as strugglesbetween light and shadow--between unexamined truths and unspeakableinvisibilities. As repositories of collective memory, these publicpresentations have been scrutinized for their ideological messages.Still underconsidered is the bulk of the period's available data, thesnapshot world, which colourfully constitutes a hidden 'history frombelow'. Enshrining the nuclear family in a time of potential nuclearannihilation, the domestic slide show is both product and producer ofCold War conditioning. 'A Cold War Tourist and HisCamera'(McGill-Queen&rsquo;s University Press, 2011), co-authored bypolitical scientist John Langford and myself, draws on a particularlyapposite collection, a study in Cold War vernacular photographyoccasioned by the curriculum of Canada's National Defence College in1962-63. Among these Cold-Warriors-in-training was our father WarrenLangford (1919-1997), who visited theatres of Cold War defence andideological struggle in North America, Africa, and Europe, creatingslide shows for his family along the way. My paper introduces ourstudy's correlation of Cold War orthodoxies and photographic experience,and considers the implications of translating our father's slide showfrom the private to the public realm.<br/><br/>Description: Conference paper presented March 25-26, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29904 Title: The secret life of sculpture: notes from Giovanni Mariacher's fototecaat Padua<br/><br/>Bell, Peter Jonathan<br/><br/>Abstract: Giovanni Mariacher, the esteemed museum director and professor of arthistory, left his collection of photographs to the Civic Museums ofPadua at his death. My survey of this archive last summer underlinedthe breadth of his expertise and the extent of his scholarship, whichspanned all aspects of the arts of the Veneto. Even when the visitordoesn't find what he had hoped to, the photo archive can provide newperspectives on familiar objects and issues, offering as it does a lookthrough the lens--or through the shoebox--of another. While I did notfind the trove of photographs of unpublished sculpture from Venetoprivate collections that I might have hoped for, the photographs ofsculpture that I did find, mostly of familiar objects in the museums ofVenice and Padua, provided new insight to issues of condition,attribution, and display. The paper will outline some fresh startssuggested by photographs of sculpture in the Mariacher archive, andreexamine the scholar's writings on sculpture in light of his collectionof images.<br/><br/>Description: Conference paper presented March 25-26, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29910 Title: The Richard Offner Photo Archives at the Institute of Fine Arts: SeeingPaintings in Black-and-White, or Methodologies of Connoisseurship<br/><br/>Kanter, Laurence<br/><br/>Abstract: 'We need not even speak of the absence of color. Photography has notyet learnt to reproduce that with any accuracy or reliability.' RichardOffner, 'An Outline of a Theory of Method,' 'Studies in FlorentinePainting,' 1927 Among the least well-known and most under-utilizedresources at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York is the photographcollection amassed by Richard Offner during his four decades asProfessor there. Offner's photo archive differs materially fromcomparable collections assembled by his predecessor, Bernard Berenson,or such collections as those formed by his contemporary, Gertrude Coor,or pupil, James Stubblebine (the latter two also preserved at theInstitute of Fine Arts), in that it was not principally meant as a toolfor sorting large categories within the history of art but rather as anaid to making fine distinctions within categories, congruent withOffner's aims as a connoisseur. Also unlike the compiler of any otherart history photo archive, Offner was acutely sensitive to thelimitations of photography as much as he was to its benefits. 'Ifphotography were an entirely mechanical process it would render thepictorial object with a calculable difference from it. Unhappily,photography is largely an interpretative affair. It has this in commonwith general artistic practice, that the result is determined by thewhim and genius of the operator, and the camera is only one of thedeterminants of the result.' (Offner, Ibid., 1927) Thus, Offner'sobjection to color was only in part due to the lag in photographictechnology. It was more fundamentally an objection to introducing onemore subjective, uncontrollable variable to his research material.<br/><br/>Description: Conference paper presented March 25-26, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29908 Title: The Frank Caro/C.T. Loo Archive: Treasures of the Eye and the Mind<br/><br/>Kawami, Trudy S.<br/><br/>Abstract: The Frank Caro/C. T. Loo Archive in the IFA, NYU, is a two-foldtreasure. It preserves a visual record of Chinese art in North Americafrom the 1930s through the 1960s as it passed through the hands of thepremier dealer of Chinese art, C. T. Loo, and his successor Frank Caro.Encompassing Shang bronzes, Buddhist sculpture, Song paintings and ChingDynasty decorative objects, it is a panorama of master works now inpublic collections across the country and an incomparable document ofprovenance. In addition, the archive preserves at least part of itsoriginal structure: index cards of works sold and unsold in severaliterations of the business; huge (and fragile) glass negatives of photosfrom the 1930s apparently from C. T. Loo's Paris establishment; hundredsof celluloid negatives with the dimensions and purchasers carefullynoted on the frail glassine sleeves, and a card file recording the shiftof works from the Loo numbering systems to the Caro system. Theserecords allow one to trace the business of Chinese art in the 20thcentury as well as its aesthetic appreciation. At present un-indexed andwithout cross-references, the archive yields its information only to themost tenacious researcher.<br/><br/>Description: Conference paper presented March 25-26, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29916 Title: The Black Body and the Photographic Archive<br/><br/>Willis, Deborah<br/><br/>Abstract: Researching beauty through photographic archives is a paradox. I willdiscuss a variety of factors that has transformed and informed mythinking about the politics of creating and preserving an archive onblack beauty. I will discuss images published in newspapers in the1920s that began as an archival project in the black press focusing onthe topic of 'exalting black womanhood.' In my research I have come tobelieve that a photograph of a black subject is persuasive and pervasivein determining how beauty is discussed in contemporary culture. PosingBeauty in African American Culture, the research project, will alsoexplore the contested ways in which African and African American beautyhas been represented in a historical and contemporary context through adiverse range of media including photography, film, and advertising. Theimages featured challenge idealized forms of beauty in art and popularculture by examining their portrayal and exploring a variety ofattitudes about archiving images through topics and categories such asrace, class, and gender. I will reflect upon the ambiguities of beautyin an archive, its impact on contemporary research projects, and how thedisplay of beauty affects ways in which we see and interpret the worldand ourselves. I discovered early on in this research, there is noconsistent visual record of black female self-representation in earlyphotography. I did find, however, a 'Runaway Slave wanted' noticeboasting a '$50 reward,' that described the desire to have a 'rathergood looking' house servant 'returned to the subscriber'--an indicationof beauty and desire voiced in the public arena of slavery. A croppedcarte-de-visite, pasted to the handwritten ad suggests, in my view, thatthis enslaved woman named 'Dolly' had been photographed for her owner,who then reproduced multiple images. My research offers a framework inwhich to imagine the history behind photographs housed in private andpublic collections and digital archives. Also central to my work is anongoing critique that focuses on how photographs empowered anddehumanized the black body since the 1840s. I noticed in six years ofteaching courses focusing on the topic of the black body and beauty, Ihave found that the subject is popular among both freshmen classes andgraduate students. Race, class, gender and ethnicity became factors ofeach class discussion, as did the central question of how beauty isconstructed, envied, and accepted in visual culture. Our discussionsranged from personal perceptions to society's contradictoryrelationships with beauty to the possibility of creating new standardsfor collecting photographs on the topic of beauty.<br/><br/>Description: Conference paper presented March 25-26, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29915 Title: The Art Historian as Ethnographer: Ananda Coomaraswamy's Photographic Archives<br/><br/>McCauley, Anne<br/><br/>Abstract: The difficulty of reading the extant photographic archive of anyindividual or institution as an intentional and consistent creation isreadily apparent in the case of Ananda Coomaraswamy. A self-taught arthistorian with a Ph.D. in geology, Coomaraswamy has been celebrated forhis contributions to the study of Indian art and civilization in theUnited States and his career as the first curator (and source) of thecollection in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. His use of photographyoriginated with the remarkable photographs taken by his wife, Ethel,between 1903-06 that were used to illustrate his first book, 'MedievalSinhalese Art' (1908), which undoubtedly sensitized him to the demandsof printing, cropping, and masking. Like most art historians, hecontinued to amass commercial photographs of Indian sculpture, wallpainting, and architecture, but also took up the medium himself afterhis divorce from Ethel in 1910, which allowed him to make copies of theprints he purchased as well as shoot his own images during subsequenttravels to Asia. After characterizing the ways that Coomaraswamy'spublications were indebted to his photographic archive, this talk willfocus more specifically on the presence of ethnographic photographs ofIndian craftsmen (taken by Ethel) and the large number of images ofdancers, musicians and entertainers that distinguish the archive fromthose of other art historians in the early twentieth century.Coomaraswamy's belief in the racial continuities between contemporaryfolk practices and traditional Indian sculpture and his ideas about thesources of sculptural poses in dance informed his collection as well ashis field research. Parallel to but quite different from Aby Warburg's'Bilderatlas' and concept of 'Pathosformel', Coomaraswamy's use ofpopular photographs ranging from tourist postcards to dance programsbecome the visible equivalents of his early political support for Indiannationalism and Guild Socialism.<br/><br/>Description: Conference paper presented March 25-26, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29911 Title: Scrapbooks as Archives<br/><br/>Leja, Michael<br/><br/>Abstract: In personal scrapbooks from the middle of the 19th century, printsclipped from magazines and newspapers come to replace traditionaldrawings and autographic images. This development documents the risingmass production and circulation of pictures. Scrapbooks spanning atransitional period preceding the rise of carte-de-visite albums mayprovide an archive charting the permeation of daily life bymass-produced images.<br/><br/>Description: Conference paper presented March 25-26, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29913 Title: Reassemblage: Italy's 1930s Illustrated Magazines as Visual Archives<br/><br/>Pelizzari, Maria Antonella<br/><br/>Abstract: The paper presents a new research project that investigates Italianphotomontage through the pages of illustrated magazines published in theThirties. These magazines--released in Milan by Mondadori, Rizzoli,Bompiani--have become a critical source to learn about an artisticpractice that was pervasive at this time. Unfortunately, the originalmock-ups have been destroyed, and the photographers' archives have beenrarely kept together, thus these illustrated magazines offer the onlycontext to see these works and understand the inner workings betweenphotography, architecture, fashion, publicity, and the graphic arts.This presentation shows the early results of a larger research that aimsto study the politics involved in Italian modern photography and montagethrough its magazine culture, taking into consideration the issuesdebated for the earlier Weimar culture and media. Photomontage hasoften been considered a revolutionary art form geared towards socialchange but, in the case of Italy, it served a more reactionary politicalpropaganda bound to Mussolini's Fascism (1922-1943) and the growingindustrial capitalism. A close analysis of these works suggests acomplex negotiation between the artists and the politics of this time.Undermined as reactionary and propaganda art altogether, Italianphotomontage reveals a rich creative exchange between Italy and Europeanavant-garde art (Surrealism, Dada, Bauhaus), presenting an alternativelanguage, at times even a rupture, from the art of the regime conceivedas a 'return to order.' This project uncovers new works and redefinessome important authors like Munari, Veronesi, Nizzoli, discussing thereasons why they should be reclaimed from dusty and often inaccessibleoff-site storages.<br/><br/>Description: Conference paper presented March 25-26, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29912 Title: Pictorial. Remain(s). Hidden. Archives. On the Personal Picture Archiveof the German Historian Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006)<br/><br/>Markantonatos, Adriana<br/><br/>Abstract: Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006) was the first chairholder for the theoryof history in Germany and he is still considered one of the mostimportant international conceptual historians. The name Koselleck oftenseems to be equivalent to the standard work 'GeschichtlicheGrundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialenSprache'(edited by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck,1972-1997). Not quite as well-known as this is that already since theearly 1960s--so before the actual renaissance of what today isassociated with 'iconology' connected to the names of Aby Warburg andErwin Panofsky--Koselleck had been intensely dealing with 'visualartifacts', in particular with memorials. Apart from language Koselleckconsidered pictures to be an indispensable and important factorconcerning historical understanding and political communication. Since2009 Koselleck's picture archive is now being stored by the GermanDocumentation Centre for Art History--Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, whereashis actual scholarly bequest has been acquired by the German LiteratureArchive. In cooperation, both institutions are going to make Koselleck'sremains available for research and initiate their own research projects.By the scientific inventory of both written and pictorial bequest in itsmedial entirety the cooperating institutions aim to establishintegrative text- and picture-based research. Reinhart Koselleck'sremains at the German Documentation Centre for Art History--BildarchivFoto Marburg consist of a comprehensive picture collection which issupplemented by thematically corresponding text material and a library.The complex stock of about thirty thousand pictures, which Koselleck hadbeen collecting rather 'hidden' at the basement of his private homesince the early 1960s till his death, primarily includes photographs,drawings and notes taken by Koselleck himself, mainly dealing with thehistory of European war memorials and equestrian monuments. By thisrather idiosyncratic collection of snap shots, press-cuttings andpicture postcards Koselleck underlined his manifold interdisciplinaryinterest in the political power of pictures, even reaching into everydayculture. Though some of Koselleck's investigations on politicaliconology have been published and several conferences have taken place,his pictorial remains indicate that most of his theoreticalconsiderations and photographic reflections have 'remained hidden' andare now waiting to be revealed.<br/><br/>Description: Conference paper presented March 25-26, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29914 Title: Local Space/Global Visions: Archives, Networks and Visual GeographyAround 1900<br/><br/>Rice, Shelley<br/><br/>Abstract: This project began as a paper given for a lecture series, 'The Geographyof Photography: American Photography,' at the Art History Institute ofthe University of Zurich in the Fall of 2009. The title of the seriesintrigued me. What, in the era of Thomas Friedman's 'Flat World,' wasthe 'geography' of American photography? Can we still, in the 21stcentury, define a nation's artistic production by the nationality of itsmaker, or the locale of its production? And was such an idea even validin earlier stages of photography's history, given the medium'spropensity for reproducibility and portability? My interest focusedparticularly on the moment around 1900 when small cameras, half tonereproduction processes, and multinational corporations came on thescene, and photographic production and distribution expandedexponentially. The creation of a vast network of photographic (andpseudo-photographic) prints in the late 19th century set the stage forthe establishment of what can reasonably be referred to as a 'worldculture' of imagery. Local representations, stereotypes and conventions,when globally produced, commoditized and exchanged, formed the syntax ofan international language, literally the currency for communicationbetween diverse nations, cultures and linguistic groups. For theZurich project, I began to explore how this historical shift affectedwhat I'm calling the visual geography of 1900. The first stage of theresearch centered on two very different projects of this era--AlfredStieglitz's magazine 'Camera Notes' and Albert Kahn's 'Archive of thePlanet' in Paris--in an attempt to understand the divergent ways inwhich significant photographic practitioners comprehended, visualizedand manifested the spatial and temporal changes that were transformingtheir world. While working on this paper in Switzerland, I came acrossthe PhotoGlob AG collection, 11,000 photochrom images (mass producedlithographic color prints obtained from black and white photographicnegatives, with colors added by hand) stored in the Central Library inZurich. Between 1896 and 1911 the Swiss company had subsidiaries inEngland and Detroit and over 200 independent suppliers on everycontinent. A branch of the tourist industry, Photoglob AG exhibitedscenic views at Universal Expositions, on cruise ships and in ThomasCook boutiques, and published more than thirty sales cataloguescontaining at least 12,000 images (including post cards). For a scholarobsessed with visual networks and distribution at the turn of the lastcentury, this was the Mother Lode, and the archives (in Zurich and inthe Library of Congress, which houses material from the Detroitsubsidiary) quickly became an integral part of the ongoing project. Mypaper will present aspects of this work-in-progress, some things I'velearned from research in these diverse collections. I will be especiallyinterested in focusing on the ways in which the visual geography of thishistorical moment--its emphasis on networks, franchises, portability anddistribution, its inherent tensions between the local and the global,the artistic and the commercial, the elite and mass--can illuminate theperils and possibilities of our own contemporary image world.<br/><br/>Description: Conference paper presented March 25-26, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29903 Title: Index Marks the Spot: Photography's Archival Traces<br/><br/>Bear, Jordan<br/><br/>Abstract: 'The following is the method of obtaining the Calotype pictures.Preparation of the Paper. Take a sheet of the best writing paper,having a smooth surface, and a close and even texture. The watermark, ifany, should be cut off, lest it should injure the appearance of thepicture.' Talbot's admonition to neophyte calotypists that watermarksbe excised from the sheets of writing paper then widely used is perhapsthe earliest indication of an ongoing uneasiness about the incursion ofexternal graphical marks into the photographic field. This inaugurationmakes all the more striking the current status of the watermark inphotographic practice, and its integral relationship to the archive asboth a physical locus of scholarly research and as a conceptualapparatus reflective of some of modern culture's most fraught empiricaltendencies. The digital watermark today is an assertion of propertyrights, emblazoned across the center of most images that alreadyoperating within an archival repository. The prominence of thewatermark is intended to disfigure the picture, and to dissuade theunauthorized reproduction of the image by making it ostensibly unusable.There is, however, a contradiction inherent in this approach, for theassertion of the image's authenticity--that is, its authorizedreproduction from its legitimate source--comes only by way of makingthat image into something entirely different. The indexical relation ofthe photograph to its archive can only be securely claimed bytransforming the photograph into an image which makes it unlike its'original', distinct from the property that is claimed. The way we knowfor certain that we are looking at an authentic iteration of thearchival image is, paradoxically, not through a visual identity betweenthe two, but rather by confronting an image that has been corrupted bythe addition of the archive's graphical logo. This paper will explore agenealogy of the current paradox by examining a particular subset ofarchival photographs that sought to reconcile the necessary infiltrationof external graphical marks with the privileged referentiality ofnon-intervention. The photographically-saturated newspapers of the1920s and 1930s sought to balance readers' thirst for images of deathand destruction with the inevitable belatedness of the photographer'sarrival on the scene, and accomplished this with the refinement of apeculiar genre: the photo-diagram. Tabloid and mainstream papers alikeserved their viewers a steady diet of post-facto reconstructions ofcatastrophic accidents and grisly discoveries. These images, more oftenthan not, were insufficiently decipherable to serve the evidentiaryclaims for which they were adduced, and an elaborate system of arrows,daggers, circles, and crosses were graphically added in paint or ink byhand to help guide the viewer's attention to the salient detail. Thephoto-diagram is such a disruptive genre because of its refusal tosublimate the marks of its creation to either the conventionalverisimilitude of photography or the broader archival program with whichthat verisimilitude has been in accord. It announces the insufficiencyof the image for comprehending the world, and insists upon theindispensability of supplementary information, the very thing that isendangered by the kind of current digitization projects that are rightlybeing interrogated by scholarly organizations. In this strangely hybrididiom of the photo-diagram, photography's indexicality and itsmultiplicity seek reconciliation in ways that indicate something germaneabout the digital crossroads at which we now find ourselves.<br/><br/>Description: Conference held March 25-26, 2011, at the Institute of Fine Arts/NYU. http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29905 Title: Imag(in)ing Medieval Stones: Arthur Kingsley Porter, Photography, andthe Study of Romanesque Sculpture after World War I<br/><br/>Brush, Kathryn<br/><br/>Abstract: This paper examines Arthur Kingsley Porter's legendary earlytwentieth-century project to capture the visual culture of the MiddleAges through the camera's lens. Porter, who taught at Yale (1915-1919)and Harvard (1920-1933), vaulted to international fame with theappearance of 'Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads' (10 vols.,1923). This widely circulated publication, which featured nineportfolio volumes of photographs, had a profound impact on the study ofRomanesque sculpture in both Europe and the United States for much ofthe twentieth century. The 1,527 images in this publication, however,formed only a small part of the photographic archive assembled by Porterduring the years of his professional activity (ca. 1908-1933). Thispersonal archive, given to Harvard's Fogg Art Museum in 1949, and now inthe Special Collections of Harvard's Fine Arts Library, consists ofapproximately 35,000 images of medieval architecture and sculptureacquired by Porter from a variety of sources and 11,000 photographs madeby Porter and his wife Lucy in the course of their European travels. TheArthur Kingsley Porter Collection of photographs helped to shape thevision of several generations of students and scholars educated atHarvard. This paper will outline the history and formation of thePorter Collection. It will focus in particular on the photographicproduction of Porter and his wife in the years immediately after theFirst World War when 'Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads' wasin preparation. Drawing on archival sources in addition to the imagesthemselves, this paper moves within and beyond the photographic frame toexplore the specific contexts in which the Porters engaged with theimaging of eleventh-and twelfth-century sculpture. This paper aims notonly to suggest some of the ways in which Porter's photographic practicemobilized his scholarly imagination as he formulated his novel theories,but also to position his photocentric interpretation of the past inrelation to the work of his contemporaries.<br/><br/>Description: Conference paper presented March 25-26, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29919 Title: Hidden Archives of Amateur Cinematic Material: Making Orphan WorksAccessible to Scholars<br/><br/>Besser, Howard<br/><br/>Abstract: Only recently have large moving image archives recognized the value ofcollecting amateur material. In this Talk, Howard Besser will first layout the value of this type of material and the increased scholarly useof it. He will then discuss the interplay between cinema studiesscholarship and the works collected by archives. Finally, he willdiscuss recent collaborative efforts to make this hidden material more accessible. http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29902 Title: From Street to Storage: 'Grupo de Fotografos Independientes' in thePersonal Archives of Armando Cristeto<br/><br/>Birkhofer, Denise<br/><br/>Abstract: This talk will relate my experiences working with the personalphotography archives of Armando Cristeto, a photographer and historianliving in Mexico City. Cristeto was a member of the photographycollective known as the Grupo de Fotografos Independientes, one of thenumerous cooperatives of artists known as Los Grupos proliferatingduring the late 1970s in Mexico. Founded by Cristeto's brother AdolfoPatino, the Fotografos sought to reach new audiences by taking theirexhibitions out onto the street, where their works could interact withthe urban context and be appreciated by new classes of people. Theirexhibitions were installed along the sidewalks of Mexico City, employingclothesline to hang their photographic prints, or were even paradedthrough the streets on wheeled carts. This ephemeral and interactivemethod of display bordered on the performative, and carried aninstitutional critique in the avoidance of traditional exhibitionvenues. Due to the transient nature of the practices of the FotografosIndependientes, research in 'hidden archives' like Cristeto's isessential to understanding the group's production. This paper willexplore how the activities of the Fotografos can be reconstructedthrough the assembly of photographic documentation preserved inCristeto's archives, including the images produced by the group'smembers themselves in addition to photographic records of theirtemporary exhibitions and events. This research comprises a part of mydoctoral dissertation, which considers the theme of 'the street' inphotography in Mexico City after 1968. http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29917 Title: Biographical Note<br/><br/>Wosh, Peter http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29906 Title: All That's Fit: Nationalist Struggle and Early Photojournalism in Egypt<br/><br/>Davies, Clare Phyllis<br/><br/>Abstract: This paper explores the ambiguous function of state-controlled publicphotojournalistic archives in Egypt just prior to the popular uprisingsthat began on January 25, 2011. In this context, the archive persistedas an uneasy site of memory under the auspices of a thirty-year regimethat insisted on its own ahistoricity, instead deploying images ofhistoric events and personages towards self-mythologizing ends. Myresearch focused originally on the development of early photojournalismin conjunction with the emergence of anti-colonial and nationaliststruggle in Egypt, and photojournalism's role in producing anddisseminating images of the nation prior to 1952. Despite limiting thescope of this research to photographs already approved by censors forpublic consumption through publication, gaining access to longstandingphotojournalistic archives at the periodical publishing houses of AlAhram and Dar al Hilal in Cairo presented many obstacles. I address thegenerative role of erasure and obfuscation in the production of thephotojournalistic image and its archive both in relation to thisproblematic of access encountered over the course of a research processundertaken in the summer of 2010, and the images of a nation encounteredin those photographs dating to between c. 1919-1952, which I wasultimately able to examine.<br/><br/>Description: Conference paper presented March 25-26, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2451/29907 Title: 'A Huge Blunder from Beginning to End': Colonial Archives and the HongKong Commission of Baron Raimund von Stillfried<br/><br/>Gartlan, Luke<br/><br/>Abstract: This paper examines an album of photographs of the visit of the RoyalPrinces Albert Victor and George of Wales to the British colony of HongKong in 1881-1882. As an official commission of the Governor-General SirJohn Pope-Hennessy, the Austrian photographer, Baron Raimund vonStillfried, endeavoured to satisfy his patron's demand for a deluxesouvenir of the royal visit. This case study emphasizes the potential ofofficial commissions to embarrass their colonial masters and render themechanisms of colonial bureaucracy open to public scrutiny. As the fullfinancial cost of the commission became known, the subsequent publicscandal threatened to compromise the photographs' intention astestaments of colonial order and authority. The controversial history ofthis commission effectively ensured the photographic album's burial incolonial archives as a compromised document of state maladministration.To borrow Christopher Pinney's recent term, it provides a salientreminder of the potential 'poison' of photography for the operations ofcolonial governance. This paper highlights the hazards of photographyfor the purposes of colonial officials and the potential of colonialarchives to reveal alternative histories of photography's unrulyrelations with colonial and institutional power.<br/><br/>Description: Conference paper presented March 25-26, 2011.