Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation 9783110331837, 9783110331813

Table of contents :
Content
Foreword
Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation
Introduction: Photographs, Archives and the Discourse of Nation
Photographic Archives and the Idea of Nation: Images, Imaginings, and Imagined Community
Photo Archives, Identity, Heritage
Photography, the Archive and the Invention of the American West
Performing Ethnography / Projecting History: Photography and Irish Cultural Nationalism in Ulster
Before the Museum: Photography and the Construction of the Canon of Polish Material Culture
Dalmatia in the Visual Narrative. Georg Kowalczyk and Cornelius Gurlitt: An Atlas of Photographs of Dalmatian Monuments
Monumenta Historiae Patriae: Marubi’s Photographic Documentation (1858–1970) and the Birth of the Albanian Nation
Toward an Iconology of Medieval Studies: Approaches to Visual Narratives in Modern Scholarship
Microfilm Services and their Application to Scholarly Study, Scientific Research, Education and Re-Education in the Post-War Period
Cultural Heritage, Nation, Italian State: Politics of the Photographic Archive between Centre and Periphery
Photo Archives, Revolution, National Heroes
“And the Bombs Fell for Many Nights.” Stefano Lecchi’s photographs of the 1849 Siege of Rome in the Cheney Album
Archives and Icons: Constructing Post-Revolutionary Identities in Mexico
Photo Archives as Construction
“You need not take a camel …”: The Archive of the Afghan Tourist Organization Holly Edwards
Compound Nation: Migrant Worker Portraits in the Politics and Photography of 1980s Namibia
Nostalgia for the Modern: Archive Fever in Egypt in the Age of Post-Photography
Afterword
Photographs as Strong History?
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Costanza Caraffa and Tiziana Serena (eds.) Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation

Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation

Edited by Costanza Caraffa and Tiziana Serena

This publication was made possible through the generous support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Regione Toscana.

ISBN 978-3-11-033181-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-033183-7 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039003-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin / Munich / Boston Typesetter: SatzBild, Ursula Weisgerber Printer: Beltz Bad Langensalza GmbH, Bad Langensalza Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Content Foreword 

 VII

Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation 

 1

Costanza Caraffa and Tiziana Serena Introduction: Photographs, Archives and the Discourse of Nation  Joan M. Schwartz Photographic Archives and the Idea of Nation: Images, Imaginings, and Imagined Community  Photo Archives, Identity, Heritage 

 3

 17

 41

Martha A. Sandweiss Photography, the Archive and the Invention of the American West 

 43

Justin Carville Performing Ethnography / Projecting History: Photography and Irish Cultural Nationalism in Ulster   59 Ewa Manikowska Before the Museum: Photography and the Construction of the Canon of Polish Material Culture   77 Joško Belamarić Dalmatia in the Visual Narrative. Georg Kowalczyk and Cornelius Gurlitt: An Atlas of Photographs of Dalmatian Monuments   95 Roberto Mancini Monumenta Historiae Patriae: Marubi’s Photographic Documentation (1858–1970) and the Birth of the Albanian Nation   119 Bernhard Jussen Toward an Iconology of Medieval Studies: Approaches to Visual Narratives in Modern Scholarship   141 Rolf Sachsse Microfilm Services and their Application to Scholarly Study, Scientific Research, Education and Re-Education in the Post-War Period   167 Tiziana Serena Cultural Heritage, Nation, Italian State: Politics of the Photographic Archive between Centre and Periphery 

 179

VI 

  Content

Photo Archives, Revolution, National Heroes 

 201

Isotta Poggi “And the Bombs Fell for Many Nights.” Stefano Lecchi’s photographs of the 1849 Siege of Rome in the Cheney Album 

 203

Martina Baleva The Photographic Portrait of Georgi Benkovski, or the De-Archiving of the National Hero   221 John Mraz Archives and Icons: Constructing Post-Revolutionary Identities in Mexico   239 Photo Archives as Construction 

 263

Holly Edwards “You need not take a camel…”: The Archive of the Afghan Tourist Organization   265 Patricia Hayes Compound Nation: Migrant Worker Portraits in the Politics and Photography of 1980s Namibia   279 Lucie Ryzova Nostalgia for the Modern: Archive Fever in Egypt in the Age of Post-Photography   301 Afterword 

 319

Elizabeth Edwards Photographs as Strong History?  Contributors  Index 

 335

 331

 321

Foreword For some years the Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max Planck Institute, has been involved in redefining the role of photo archives of art and docu­ mentary photography in the humanities. Traditionally, photo libraries have been seen as simple repositories of photogra­ phic reproductions of works of art. Classification and cataloguing systems, as well as the way scholars use photographic material, tend to reduce photographs to their visual content. The digital age, by creating distance from analogue photography, has sharpe­ ned our perception of its ‘mediality’ beyond its purely reproductive character. In recent years we have begun to look at our holdings through new eyes, considering photo­ graphs not only as instruments of research, but also as research objects themselves. Our new approach considers photographs as material objects that exist in time and space. They have a biography (or often biographies) that unfold in social con­ texts. One of these contexts is the photographic archive in which they are preserved. This is an ensemble formed not only by the photographs and their mounting boards, stamps and inscriptions, but also by card catalogues and inventory books, and by the photo boxes and their spatial arrangement on the shelves according to the classi­ fication system of a specific photo collection, as well as by digital instruments. The photo archive is a place where not only (visual) information is provided, but also where knowledge is sedimented. On the basis of these premises we have proposed a terminological, but above all methodological, shift from ‘photo libraries’ to ‘photo archives:’ photographic collections such as the Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz must be considered archives as a first step towards highlighting their epistemological potential. Our aim is precisely to explore the epistemological depth of photo archives and documentary photographs from both an art history and an interdisciplinary perspective. A milestone in this programme has been the “Photo Archives” initiative, a series of international meetings dedicated to photographic archives and the interaction between photography and academic and scientific disciplines, with a particular focus on the history of art. The first conference was held in London at the Courtauld Institute of Art in June 2009, and the second in Florence at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz in October 2009. These resulted in a publication, Photo Archives and the Photo­graphic Memory of Art History, which appeared in 2011, following the Photothek’s earlier pub­ lication Fotografie als Instrument und Medium der Kunst­geschichte.1 The third confer­ ence in the series was organised by the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University,

1 Costanza Caraffa (ed.), Fotografie als Instrument und Medium der Kunstgeschichte (I Mandorli, 9), Berlin / Munich 2009; ead. (ed.), Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History (I Man­ dorli, 14), Berlin / Munich 2011, here especially ead., “From ‘photo libraries’ to ‘photo archives.’ On the epistemological potential of art historical photo collections,” pp. 11–44.

VIII 

  Foreword

which discussed “Hidden Archives” in March 2011. With the fourth conference, in Flor­ ence, “Photo Archives IV. The Photo Archive and the Idea of Nation” (October 2011), we pursued the aim of broadening the perspective to beyond the confines of art history. The topic was the result of reflections shared with Tiziana Serena, who worked with me on the organisation of the conference and the editing of this volume of proceedings. The conferences offered an important stage for international interdisciplinary exchange on the functions of photo archives as scientific laboratories in the twentyfirst century. They supported the formation of a community and international network of scholars and institutions interested in continuing the debate. An even wider com­ munity came together to subscribe to the “Florence Declaration for the Preservation of Analogue Photo Archives,” launched in 2009 by the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz as an attempt to integrate analogue and digital formats.2 For these reasons the “Photo Archives” series should not be considered closed. Rather it is our intention that it should be open to the initiatives of other scholars and institutions who wish to take over the organisation of new study meetings. Some international players have already expressed their intention to promote future editions of “Photo ­Archives.” There are many issues still to address, among them the role of university photo collec­ tions in the establishment of art history as an academic discipline between the nine­ teenth and twentieth centuries, as well as questions that once more go beyond disci­ plinary boundaries, such as the presumed objectivity of photography in the analogue and digital world. These activities have naturally had an impact on our daily commitment as archivists, our way of working with the photographs and on the photographs, and on associated research projects. It seems to us that the very interrelation between the theoretical, methodological, scholarly-historical and practical elements in the work in photo archives, and especially in our Photothek, is a strength to be pursued and consolidated. We have been able to achieve this in recent years thanks to the support of the directors of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Alessandro Nova and Gerhard Wolf, and also thanks to collaboration and exchange with individuals to whom, also on behalf of Ute Dercks and Almut Goldhahn, I would like to express our gratitude: Patricia Rubin, with whom the “Photo Archives” series was conceived and launched; Elizabeth Edwards and Joan M. Schwartz, irreplaceable interlocutors in our projects; and finally Tiziana Serena – the conference and the book we have produced together are only the tip of the iceberg of a deep intellectual association. Costanza Caraffa

2 www.khi.fi.it/en/photothek/florencedeclaration/index.html.

Florence, August 2014

Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation

Costanza Caraffa and Tiziana Serena

Introduction: Photographs, Archives and the Discourse of Nation When, in October 2011, we introduced the conference that gave rise to this book, if you were to enter the terms “kurdistan” and “photography” into a web search engine, you would have found the website akakurdistan.com among the top ten or twenty results. The website presented itself as a borderless space, [that] provides the opportunity to build a collective memory with a people who have no national archive [nor an expression of their nation, it should be added]. Images and recollections serve as testimony to the long and suppressed history of the Kurds.

This “living archive,” as it is defined, is the result of an international exhibition and a book published in 1997, and republished in 2008: Kurdistan: in the Shadow of History.1 Its author is the noted American photographer Susan Meiselas, who, among other things, won an award for her documentation of the 1978 revolution in Nicaragua. In reality, the book and the site are not modern photographic ‘reportages,’ but rather a collective work on the construction of memory, a collage of photographs, letters, documents and testimonies collected by a team of researchers led by Meiselas and enriched, on the website, by new contributions that users are invited to submit. Even visually, the book and the website feature a network of multiple narratives and are not intended to suggest an objective truth – but Meiselas’ authorial stamp is very clear. The project provides a platform on which to explore concepts of identity and citizenship in dialogue form and in a territory-free context (that of the Kurdish community scattered across the world, but also the virtual world of the Internet). Akakurdistan.com is an example of an ‘invented archive’ – an archive conceived in the absence of a specific territorial context (as classic archival science would expect) which provides online sources (photographic and otherwise) from different (physi­ cal) origins and different producers. Thus it only exists – or better existed – as such on the Internet. The comments forum is also interesting, with threatening tones creeping in on the conflict between the Turks and the Kurds. More submissively an Armenian voice, while recognising the Kurdish cause, points out that a part of the territory contested today was once inhabited by Armenian victims of the 1915–17 genocide – this reminds us that there is not only one ‘truth’ in national affairs. Most of the comments express the gratitude felt by the Kurds for this virtual archive, reminding us of another of the contradictions of this project, which discusses the Kurdish nation, identity and

1 Meiselas 2008 (1997).

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 Costanza Caraffa and Tiziana Serena

culture in their relations with places specific to them, but which stems from an outside initiative, in this case American. We said that akakurdistan.com only existed on the Internet: in fact, since 2011 the website has ceased to exist as such at the address www.akakurdistan.com. It has been integrated into Susan Meiselas’ website, as is clear from a current consultation of the search engines: we find it under the address www.susanmeiselas.com/akakurd­istan complete with all the pages and original functions but in a frozen state (this inclu­ des the comments, which stopped in January 2011 and therefore do not cover recent highly topical developments involving the region). The fact that it is no longer a ‘living’ archive, but has rather, so to speak, ‘archived’ itself, is demonstrated by its reference to the past on the photographer’s website, where it appears  – significantly  – under “Archive Projects.”2 The same internet research, using the terms “kurdistan” and “photography,” as well as to groups of images on sites such as Flickr, now leads us to another promising result, the website kurdistan-photoshelter.com, which presents itself as “The Photo­ library of Kurdistan” and has an objective similar to akakurdistan.com’s: [This is] a digital library dedicated exclusively to photographs of Kurdistan and the Kurdish people, in Kurdistan and around the world. Our goal is to archive and preserve for current and future generations a continually expanding photographic collection that depicts the country and people of Kurdistan.3

The initiative, which was started in 2008 and is based in Hewlêr (Erbil), the capital of the autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq, is this time of clearly Kurdish origin, but there is no transparency about its promoters. The website has a more institutional appearance than Meiselas’, which had a highly personal feel, and for submissions primarily targets libraries, museums, photo agencies and professional photogra­ phers, and only secondarily private individuals keen to share photographs from their personal or family archives on the site. In fact the galleries include photographs by internationally renowned reporters, such as Chris Kutschera, who are referred to as the respective copyright holders. Even images not covered by copyright on kurdistanphotoshelter.com have a discreet digital watermark with the wording “The Photo­ library of Kurdistan.” The comment function is not available, as it is clearly reserved for a presence on Facebook – it would be worth carrying out a targeted exploration of this field.

2 “The site akaKurdistan functioned as an extension of the book project and a borderless space, provi­ ding the opportunity to build a living, collective memory with a people who have no national archive.” See [20.08.2014]. The old site was also monitored by the Library of Congress, see [20.08.2014]. 3 . The site can also be accessed through the address [20.08.2014].

Introduction 

 5

This short description and the comparison with akakurdistan.com, as well as confirming the speed of change on the Internet, may suggest some observations on the diverse dynamics, players and intentions in the formation of ‘invented archives,’ as well as on the different degrees of transparency, accessibility and usability  – to avoid the risky concepts of objectivity and truthfulness – of the photographic mate­ rials presented as the illustration and foundation of a specific ‘idea of nation.’ In other historical and geo-political contexts, the formation of photo archives in the service of a national idea may respond directly to a hegemonic project: an example is the archive of colour images of the Russian Empire created between 1909 and 1915 by Sergei rapher Mikhailovic Prokudin-Gorskii (1863–1944).4 From 1905, chemist and photog­ Prokudin-Gorskii developed a technique to produce colour ­pictures: on the same glass plate he produced three black and white negative images of the same subject, first using a red, then a green and then a blue filter. From the tri-part negatives he produced slides which, using a special ­projector, were projected through the corresponding red, green or blue filters and superimposed over each other. The photographic prints produced by Prokudin-Gorskii from the same negatives, and collected in albums, were on the other hand ‘normal’ black and white positives. Using the technique of digichromatog­raphy it is now possible to reassemble the three matrices of each image and create two e­ ntirely new things: first, new colour photographs, although digital (in particular digital colour renderings and digital colour composites), almost like those projected at the time for educational and illustrative purposes, which however never existed as material objects at the time of Prokudin-Gorskii and which we now see after they have been subjected to various levels of post-processing (fig. 1);5 and second, as a consequence, a photographic archive different to the one left by the photographer. The dramatic effect of colour photography, with which many were conducting exper­iments at the time, but which was not yet widespread, was here linked to the ephemeral moment of performance and projection. The technique was so effective that in 1909 it convinced Tsar Nicholas II to support Prokudin-Gorskii’s ambitious project logistically and financially to create a complete visual colour record of the entire Russian Empire. Until 1915 the photographer travelled the length and breadth of the vast territory photographing the diverse landscapes, the variety of monuments and the numerous subject peoples of the Tsar. The corpus therefore meets different criteria of the photographic archiving of the national heritage understood in its different meanings: city and countryside, architec­ tural monuments and works of art (photographed in churches and monasteries with a white sheet hastily arranged as a backdrop), industry and infrastructure (including the emerging railway and the waterways), and finally the variety of peoples, trades, and religious groups (figs. 2, 3). In the current online presentation this last part of the

4 Allshouse 1980; Garanina 1999; Adamson / Zinkham 2002; Koehler 2013. 5  [20.08.2014].

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 Costanza Caraffa and Tiziana Serena

Fig. 1: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii: Successive stages of grinding a stone egg (Imperial Lapidary Works, Ekaterinburg). Digital colour composite from digital file from black and white glass negative (with three frames and three-colour separation, 24 × 9 cm), 1910. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington D.C., LC-P87-4024 [P&P] LOT 10335-A.

c­ ollection is brought to us under the somewhat refined title of “ethnic diversity”;6 but photographing the Tatars, Dagestanis, Armenians, Ukrainians and Kazakhs on behalf of the Tsar in their tradition­al costumes satisfied a need not only to d ­ emonstrate the ­geographic extent of the Empire, but also – and primarily – to declare the ­supremacy of the Empire itself with respect to the individual national identities, which lacked their own statehood. The Russian patriotic rhetoric is in fact asso­ciated with an imperia­listic and ­orientalistic gaze in pictures that segregate the subject peoples as minori­ties, as part of the whole.7 With the revolution of 1917 the raison d’être of Prokudin-Gorskii’s under­ ­ taking ­ disappeared. When the photographer left Russia in 1918 some ­photographs and ­negatives considered to be of strategic interest were confiscated. In 1948 the archive was sold by his heirs to the Library of Congress in Washington, which, beginning in 2000, has re­stored, digitalised and put the entire collection of over 2,600 images online.8 It would be interesting to know more about the underlying intentions why an American government institution, at the start of the Cold War, acquired a visual record of Russia’s Tsarist past at a time when the immense Russian Empire still existed, albeit under the control of the Soviets.

6 This is the online version of an exhibition organised in Washington in 2001 by the Library of Con­ gress, current holder of the collection (see below), entitled “The Empire That Was Russia. The ProkudinGorskii Photographic Record Recreated” ( [20.08.2014]). 7 See Dikovitskaya 2007. Some of the nations represented here became independent after the dis­ solution of the Soviet Union; others, for example Dagestan, are still part of the Russian Federation. 8 Of these, 1,900 of which derive from the digitisation of triple negatives, and around 700 from scan­ ning original black and white positives. See [20.08.2014]. The website of the Library of Congress provides detailed information about the collection, the photog­ rapher and his technique, as well as about the archiving, cataloguing, reconstruction and processing actions carried out on the photographic prints and negatives, alongside links to other sites offering digitised material by Prokudin-Gorskii.

Introduction 

 7

These few examples prompt a wide range of questions about photographs and texts, photographic and paper documents and sources (of reality and of themselves), real and virtual archives, invented archives, the different degrees of materiality of photographs and archives, the accessibility of sources and archives, the migration of archives and various problems of sedimentation, the presence of spontaneous or guided processes in the formation of the collective memory, and the key players in­volved in the formation of an archive and in its custody. These were the main themes explored in the conference “The Photographic Archive and the Idea of Nation,” which took place at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz in October 2011 as part of the “Photo Archives” conference series presented in the foreword to this book. Colleagues from different disciplines were asked to question the potential collec­ tive ­identity arising from sedimentation practices concerning photographic images, starting from the beginning of its history. Hobsbawm’s “long nineteenth century” – identified in the West with the rise of nation states – is also the century of the ‘inven­ tion’ and diffusion of photography, as well as of the birth of modern archival science. Photography was soon placed at the service of the iconic needs of nation states, or of organisations inspired by nationalist ideologies but not yet incorporated in a state system. The photographic collections and archives, both public and private, founded between the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century thus had the function of bringing together the fragmented image of the nation, recognised for example in the artistic and monumental heritage (as in Italy), the wonders of the natural world (as in North America), or in the traditions and customs of the population (as in Russia or Ireland). Yet the problem of the representation of national identity is clearly not limited to this period. Between the two world wars, in the era of reconstruction and regimes, the idea of the nation also discovered in the signifier space and in the order of the pho­ tographic archive the possibility to foster, determine and re-determine its own image and its narratives, as well as to draw upon it as a reservoir for writing and illustrating history. Following the Second World War and the subsequent disintegration of the world colonial system, and then following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the national ques­ tion was once again placed at the centre of attention but now with a global dimension. The events of recent years and months, from the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ to the upheavals in Eastern Europe, have made the topic highly relevant and provided new nuances to the discussion of what a national identity is founded on. The debate in the contemporary world is thus torn between globalisation and forms of national, or even sub-national, particularism. It is also having to face the question of the proliferation of photographs in a globalised world, in the age of digital media, the Internet and social networks, with their simplification of the production (or over-production) of images and access to them. Despite these changing historical conditions, however, photographs have contin­ ued, and will continue, to be gathered in collections and archives, with the aim of

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 Costanza Caraffa and Tiziana Serena

Fig. 2: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii: Armenian woman in national costume, Artvin. Digital colour composite from digital file from black and white glass negative (with three frames and three-colour separation, 24 × 9 cm), 1905–15. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington D.C., LC-P87-7256 [P&P] LOT 10336.

Fig. 3: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii: Georgian woman. Digital colour composite from digital file from black and white glass negative (with three frames and three-colour separation, 24 × 9 cm), 1905–15. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington D.C., LC-P87-7234 [P&P] LOT 10336.

giving visual substance to national identity, and of contributing to its formation. The sedimentation of images has been and will continue to be expressed in a variety of forms, ranging from the private photo album (whether or not kept in a public archive) and institutional archival fonds to so-called ‘invented archives’ on the Internet and the use and re-use of photographs in social networks. A photograph – whether analogue or digital – is still able to play this role better than other types of document, since by its very nature it is linked to the concept of identity as self-recognition. The insistence, ever since the first writings on photogra­ phy, on the ‘acheiropoietic’ character of the photographic technique – literally, “not made by hand” – is at the basis of the process whereby we tend not to question what we ‘see’ in a photograph, however conscious we now are of how much it might have been manipulated. Our confidence in the equivalence between photography and

Introduction 

 9

‘truth’ has also made it the privileged instrument in representations of the idea of nation. So the question of what ‘national truth’ might be hidden behind the presumed ‘visual truth’ is often evaded. On the basis of this paradigm, photographs are considered not just as illustra­ tions, but as irrefutable documents of national identity, destined to be gathered in a catalogue and in an archive. The consequence is that in a photographic archive created or used in the name of a certain idea of nation, and understood as the organ­ isation of forms of knowledge, linked or opposed to power, it is possible to trace com­ plicity with the political and cultural strategies that underlie the formation of the same idea of nation. The idea of a photographic catalogue of the nation was one of the sources of ­insp­iration for “Photo Archives IV.” The papers presented here investigate the ­relationship between photography and the idea of nation, yet without focusing on single symbolic icons and instead considering the archival dimension. It is here, in the photographic archive, that the critical mass of photographic documents able to furnish a variety of representations and interpretations has been accumulated: in this way it functions strategically as a device able to influence cultural orientations. The photographic archive is never a neutral container of images – rather it is an organic but never definitive accretion of sedimentation processes. The origins and history of each archive – insofar as it is imbued with changing political and cultural meanings – confer a supplementary value on the individual parts that compose it; photographs are a case in point. It is in the context of the archives that photographs assume their most authoritative status as documents, and it is here that a good part of their biography as material objects is transacted. Equally, photographic archives are themselves dynamic organisms which are active in time and space, which may change their roles and character, and which must be understood in terms of their materiality and social biography. The materiality of photographs and photo archives as a critical strategy is one of the interests connecting us to our colleagues Elizabeth Edwards and Joan M. Schwartz, who as members of the Scientific Committee have worked with us to give substance to this project.9 One of the issues that the essays collected in this volume aim to address, start­ ing from a critical approach to the postulate of the truth of photography, archive and national identity, is the establishment (sometimes the institutionalisation) of photo­ graphic archives, their evolution and transformation, and their neglect or their redis­

9 Of their numerous and important publications we limit ourselves to mentioning the following: Edwards / Hart 2004; Edwards / Hart 2004 / 2012; Edwards 2009; Edwards 2012; Edwards / Lien 2014; Cook / Schwartz 2002; Schwartz 1995 / 2012; Schwartz 2000. This is also one of the programmatic points of the “Florence Declaration for the Preservation of Analogue Photo Archives,” which the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz launched in 2009 during the second conference of the “Photo Archives” series, and which aims to promote integration between the analogue and digital formats. See: .

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 Costanza Caraffa and Tiziana Serena

covery, in relation to the ways in which they are exploited for nationalistic purposes, or for purposes of creating national identity or collective memory. Here the dialectic between public and private memory is also important – it per­ vades the image we briefly wish to discuss in conclusion (fig. 4). It is one page of a small, four-page album created by a graphic designer, Italian Jew Albe Steiner, on 25 June 1945 for the fourth birthday of his daughter Luisa. The family memories, which are at the same time historical memories, entrusted to this very young child are passed on through a collage of photographs and comments by her father, who up until a few weeks earlier had fought in the Resistance in a communist partisan brigade in the Val d’Ossola, in Piedmont. The title Albe Steiner chose for this page (“while daddy is in the mountains with the partisans”) mixes paternal tenderness with an awareness of the historical importance of that moment. “Grandfather Mario [who] shall return no more,” below, is Luisa’s maternal grandfather, Mario Covo, a Jew himself and a victim of a Nazi roundup in 1943.10

Fig. 4: Albe Steiner: “mentre il papi è in montagna coi partigiani […] e il nonno MARIO non ritorna più.” Album page for the fourth birthday of daughter Luisa, collage with three photographs 6 × 6 cm each, 25 June 1945. Private archive Luisa Steiner. 10 The album is kept in the private archive of Luisa Steiner, who we thank sincerely for allowing us to use the image. On Albe Steiner, his wife Lica Covo and the family, see Steiner / Begozzi 2011.

Introduction 

 11

This page reminds us, among other things, that an album is one of the embryonic forms of a photographic archive. It reminds us that in examining the dynamics of the formation of national identity we should also consider minorities, in this case the Italian Jews. It reminds us too, a few years after the celebration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification (1861), that the idea of nation is not an immutable entity, but is rather always intended to be re-negotiated, even in times of conflict, such as the Italian Resistance to Nazi-Fascism and the historical revision­ isms we are witnessing today. The imperative “do not forget” resonates across the whole page by Steiner: the relationship of this type of photographic document with time, history and memory is marked by the inherent reference in the photograph to a direct eyewitness testimony. On the other hand, in the very moment in which the present is photographically docu­ mented it becomes a document of the past; and the documentation of fragments of the past in easily communicable photographic images permits their use as pledges for building the future of the nation. The archive is the appointed place to ensure this step. While in recent years there has been a wave of initiatives and publications on the topic of photography, geogra­ phy and national identity,11 and while research into archives and in particular into photographic archives is at the same time consolidated and more active than ever,12 it seems to us that an exploration of the intersection between these two fields, photo archives and the idea of nation, may fill a small gap and – we hope – act as a stimulus for further research.13 We believe the theme to be particularly relevant, not only from a scholarly but also from a political and ethical point of view, if we think of some of the geo-political scenarios discussed in the papers and also of the financial cuts in culture that are affecting many archives, not only photographic, throughout the world, and in particular in Italy. What we have briefly outlined are the premises that we share with the authors and on which the contributions published here are based. The case studies dis­ cussed in this introduction and in the papers that follow often touch on geo-politics or highly topical areas of conflict – however we are, of course, aware that the list is full of gaps.14

11 See for example Schwartz / Ryan 2003, but also the series of conferences “Geography of Photogra­ phy – Frühe Fotografie in islamischen Ländern: The Indigenous Lens,” which started in 2011 at the University of Zurich. 12 See, among others, Kelsey 2007; Tagg 2009; Serena 2010, 2012; Caraffa 2011a, 2011b; Pijarski 2011; Caraffa / Serena 2012. The main titles by Elizabeth Edwards, Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook are already listed in note 9. 13 Especially Elizabeth Edwards already points in this direction (see Edwards 2012). 14 Obviously every case study could be interesting, and we hope that new studies on the relation­ ship between the photo archive and the idea of nation may involve geo-political areas deemed to be particu­larly topical, such as China and India, or areas of conflict such as Israel and Palestine.

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 Costanza Caraffa and Tiziana Serena

The section Photo Archives, Identity, Heritage contains a group of papers on the major topic of heritage as a symbol of national identity – heritage in its various meanings, understood as natural and landscape heritage, artistic and monumental heritage, and the cultural heritage of peoples. Martha Sandweiss shows how the great photographic surveys of the American West visually freed it from the presence of the natives even before their segregation became an accomplished fact. Justin C ­ arville examines Irish nationalism, describing it in terms of participation in the e­ xperience of local and national history, set against the context of the revivalist culture, C ­ atholicism and the independent practices of three photographers who created an extensive visual archive. The creation of an independent Polish state went hand in hand, ex­plains Ewa Manikowska, with the formation of photographic archives which had to appropriate the symbols of a national past that illustrate the national artistic and­ ­cultural heritage even before the existence of a museum system. Joško Belamarić’s paper ­contextualises an important photographic atlas on Dalmatian monuments from 1910 within the graphic, literary and essayistic production of the time elucidating the role of ­photography in the formation of a cultural and ­national identity in ­Dalmatia. The identity processes of Albania are studied by Roberto Mancini, who starts with an analy­sis of the archive of a dynasty of photographers, the Marubi, understood as a particular place of writing (in the absence of an official Albanian language) and of the ­narration of the metaphor of nation. Tracing ­Charlemagne in German and French history books from around 1900, Bernhard Jussen offers a c­ ontribution to an ­“iconography of historical scholarship” and the history of dialectics between ­photography and other illustration techniques used in books. The history of the inter­ action between photographic and archiving techniques is enriched by a document that Rolf Sachsse sets in the context of the creation of UNESCO and the late work of Lucia Moholy. Tiziana Serena discusses how in Italy the idea of a natural ­condition (“naturalness”) of the nation could only be based on the legitimisation offered by the historical-artistic heritage of the peninsula; this approach gave rise to an ambivalent and contradictory photographic archiving project of longue durée, which from histo­ ricism reaches the present day. The next section of the volume, Photo Archives, Revolution, National Heroes, is dedicated to a ‘performative’ form of heritage where the functions of the photographic archive shift towards metonymic categories (for instance, the people and the hero). Isotta Poggi discusses one of the most dramatic moments of the Italian Risorgimento, the aesthetics of the ruins and a very early example of war reportage coming together in Rome in 1849, in the salt print album of Stefano Lecchi, which was produced fol­ lowing the siege of the Roman Republic by the Austrians, French and Spanish. Martina Baleva introduces the demystification of the Bulgarian national icon in a philological operation of “de-archiving” which digs at the roots of the indexical character of the photographic portrait. John Mraz discusses some iconic images of the Mexican revo­ lution, at the same time investigating the relationship between professional photo archives and national photo archives.

Introduction 

 13

The last group of papers, Photo Archives as Construction, focuses on one of the leitmotifs of the entire volume: the ascertaining of the constructed and arbitrary nature of photographic archives. The papers in this section are also united by a post­ colonial perspective which more or less directly fits with the other authors too. Holly Edwards envisions an archive of the Afghan Tourist Organization by analysing the use of photography in communicating a national idea to the outside and touching, inter alia, on gender issues. Patricia Hayes refers to the recent revival of a group of ‘private’ photographs of workers segregated in a mining compound in Namibia – the images had remained dormant since 1984 in the archive of a photographer otherwise known for his political involvement. Lucie Ryzova presents the diffusion of public and private historical photographs through social networks, such as Facebook, in turbu­ lent present-day Egypt, as a case of the re-use of images and photo archives, or postphotography, but also the continuous re-negotiation of the idea of nation through the photographs themselves. The series of papers is opened with a contribution from Joan M. Schwartz and closed with one from Elizabeth Edwards. The former, in outlining the theme of our volume in the specific case of Canada, offers the reader a sort of guide to the main con­ cepts of ‘images’ and ‘imaginings,’ the photographic archive and the nation, as well as on their encounter in the context of nineteenth-century nation-building. The latter analyses the working mechanism of the combination photographic archive / idea of nation in the construction of national narratives, founded on the one hand on the dialectic between magic and evidence, and on the other on the indexical character of photography and the feeling of presence it transmits. Elizabeth Edwards’s definition of photographs as bearers of “strong histories” acts as the perfect conclusion to our journey and, at the same time, launches new possibilities for investigation and inter­ pretation. All that remains is to thank Elizabeth Edwards and Joan M. Schwartz once again, as without their intellectual and moral support we would never have been able to put this undertaking together. Of the many colleagues who have followed the prog­ress of the project closely, we would like to express our gratitude to Hannah Baader, Ute Dercks and Almut Goldhahn. We would like to thank the Directors of the Kunsthis­ torisches ­Institut in Florenz, Alessandro Nova and Gerhard Wolf, who gave us the ­ rganise the conference, which was also supported by the Samuel H. opportunity to o Kress Foundation, the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Rome, and the Department of History, Archaeology, Geography, Arts and Performance of Florence University. ­Heartfelt thanks to the staff of De Gruyter Verlag, and in particular to Katja Richter, for the ­professionalism with which they supervised the production of the volume. Very special thanks goes to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Regione Toscana, whose generous support enabled the publication of this book. Finally, we wish to thank the authors, who with their contributions and new views on the photographic archive and the idea of nation have enriched the reflec­ tions which, on our side, inspired the origins of this project in the year in which Italy

14 

 Costanza Caraffa and Tiziana Serena

celebrated the anniversary of its unification (2011). Overall, what emerges from the initial results published here is that the strength of the photographic archive in its relationships with the idea of nation does not reside in the symbol of the reunifica­ tion of the signs and the promise of the archive, nor in the documentary capacity of the individual photographs and the fortunate icons of heroes and monuments, but rather in the possibility of offering a supplementary meaning  – a supplement that is inherent in the nature of its photographic materials, in writing practices related to them, and in the semantisation of the photographs themselves. Photographs are genuine social objects that shape the archive system. It is in these characteristics of the photographic archive that the possibility of renegotiating all of those “terms, and traditions through which we turn our uncertain, passing contemporaneity into the signs of history”15 resides, which under the auspices of an idea of nation have condi­ tioned its formation, development and interpretation. Florence, August 2014

Bibliography Adamson / Zinkham 2002: Adamson, Jeremy / Helena Zinkham, “The Prokudin-Gorskii Legacy: Color Photographs of the Russian Empire, 1905–1915,” in: Comma, v. 3–4, 2002, pp. 107–144. Allshouse 1980: Allshouse, Robert H. Photographs for the Tsar: The Pioneering Color Photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, New York (NY) 1980. Bhabha 1990: Homi K. Bhabha, DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation, in: id., Nation and Narration, London / New York (NY) 1990, pp. 291–322. Caraffa 2011a: Costanza Caraffa (ed.), Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History, Berlin / Munich 2011. Caraffa 2011b: “From ‘photo libraries’ to ‘photo archives.’ On the epistemological potential of art historical photo collections,” in: ead. (ed.), Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History, Berlin / Munich 2011, pp. 11–44. Caraffa / Serena 2012: Costanza Caraffa / Tiziana Serena (eds.), Archivi fotografici. Spazi del sapere, luoghi della ricerca, monographic issue of Ricerche di Storia dell’arte, 106, 2012. Dikovitskaya 2007: Margaret Dikovitskaya, “Central Asia in Early Photographs: Russian Colonial Attitudes and Visual Culture,” in: Uyama Tomohiko (ed.), Empire, Islam, and Politics in Central Eurasia, Sapporo 2007, pp. 99–133. Edwards 2009: Elizabeth Edwards, “Photography and the Material Performance of the Past,” in: History and Theory, 48 (4), 2009, pp. 130–150. Edwards 2012: Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, Durham 2012. Edwards / Hart 2004: Elizabeth Edwards / Janice Hart (eds.), Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, London / New York (NY) 2004.

15 We borrow the words of Homi Bhabha (Bhabha 1990, p. 306) which seem evocative even if not related to photographic archives.

Introduction 

 15

Edwards / Hart 2004 / 2012: Elizabeth Edwards / Janice Hart, “Mixed box: the cultural biography of a box of ‘ethnographic’ photographs,” in: Elizabeth Edwards / Janice Hart (eds.), Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, London / New York (NY) 2004, pp. 47–61, now in Italian: “Mixed Box. La biografia culturale di una scatola di fotografie ‘etnografiche,’” in: Costanza Caraffa / Tiziana Serena (eds.), Archivi fotografici. Spazi del sapere, luoghi della ricerca, monographic issue of Ricerche di Storia dell’arte, 106, 2012, pp. 25–36. Edwards  / Lien 2014: Elizabeth Edwards /Sigrid Lien (eds.), Uncertain Images: Museums and the Work of Photographs, London 2014. Garanina 1999: Garanina, Svetlana P., “Delo Kantseliarii Soveta ministrov o pribretenii v kaznu kollektsii fotograficheskikh snimkov dostoprimechatel’nostei Rossii S. M. Prokudina–Gorskogo, 1910–1912 gg.,” in: Rossiiskii arkhiv: istoriia otechestva v svidetel’stvakh i dokumentakh ­ XVII–XX vv. (Moskva: Rossiiskii fond kul’tury et al.), v. 9, 1999, pp. 466–492. Kelsey 2007: Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs & Illustrations for US Surveys. 1850–1890, Berkeley (CA) 2007. Koehler 2013 : Véronique Koehler, Voyage dans l’Ancienne Russie. Les photographies en couleurs de Serguei Mikhailovitch Procoudine-Gorsky, Paris 2013. Meiselas 2008 (1997): Susan Meiselas, Kurdistan: in the Shadow of History, with historical introduction and a new postscript by Martin van Bruinessen, Chicago (IL) 2008 (1st ed. 1997). Pijarski 2011: Krysztof Pijarski (ed.), The Archive as Project: The Poetics and Politics of the (Photo) Archive = Archiwum jako projekt – poetyka i polityka (foto)archiwum, Warsaw 2011. Schwartz 1995 / 2012: Joan M. Schwartz, “‘We make our tools and our tools make us’: Lessons from Photographs for the Practice, Politics, and Poetics of Diplomatics,” in: Archivaria, 40, Fall 1995, pp. 40–74; published in an abridged and revised version as “To speak again with a full distinct voice: Diplomatics, Photographs, and Archives,” in: Costanza Caraffa / Tiziana Serena (eds.), Archivi fotografici. Spazi del sapere, luoghi della ricerca, monographic issue of Ricerche di Storia dell’arte, 106, 2012, pp. 7–24. Schwartz 2000 / 2006: Joan M. Schwartz, “‘Records of Simple Truth and Precision’: Photography, Archives, and the Illusion of Control,” in: Archivaria, 50, Fall 2000, pp. 1–40; reprinted in Francis X. Blouin / William G. Rosenberg (eds.), Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, Ann Arbor (MI) 2006, pp. 61–83. Schwartz / Cook 2002: Joan M. Schwartz / Terry Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” in: Terry Cook / Joan M. Schwartz (eds.), Archives, Records, and Power, monographic issue of Archival Science: International Journal on Recorded Information, 2 (1–2), 2002, pp. 1–19. Schwartz / Ryan 2003: Joan M. Schwartz / James R. Ryan (eds.), Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, London / New York (NY) 2003. Serena 2010: Tiziana Serena, “L’archivio fotografico: possibilità derive potere,” in: Anna Spiazzi /  Luca Majoli / Corinna Giudici (eds.), Gli archivi fotografici delle soprintendenze. Storia e tutela, Crocetta del Montello 2010, pp. 102–125. Serena 2011: Tiziana Serena, “The Words of the Photo Archive,” in: Costanza Caraffa (ed.), Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History, Berlin / Munich 2011, pp. 57–72. Serena 2012: Tiziana Serena, “La profondità della superficie: una prospettiva epistemologica per ‘cose’ come fotografie e archivi fotografici,” in: Costanza Caraffa / Tiziana Serena (eds.), Archivi fotografici. Spazi del sapere, luoghi della ricerca, monographic issue of Ricerche di Storia dell’arte, 106, 2012, pp. 51–67. Steiner / Begozzi 2011: Luisa Steiner /  Mauro Begozzi (eds.), Un libro per Lica. Lica Covo Steiner 1914–2008, Borgomanero 2011. Tagg 2009: John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning, Minneapolis (MN) 2009.

Joan M. Schwartz

Photographic Archives and the Idea of Nation: Images, Imaginings, and Imagined Community* In late June 2011, just days before Canadians from coast to coast to coast celebrated the country’s national “Canada Day” holiday on 1 July, an essay appeared in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper under the heading, “The idea of a Canadian nation is diminishing.”1 In it, Andrew Cohen, founding president of The Historica-Dominion Institute, mused, “[…] one wonders what ‘national’ means today in a country of regions like Canada, the most decentralized in the world.”2 Pointing to the government commitment to a diminished federal presence and stronger regions, he ­lamented, “If the idea of nation­al is diminishing in Canada, it is because we no longer think of ourselves in national terms.”3 What, in fact, does it mean to think “in national terms” and how, as Cohen urged, does one “put the nation back in nationhood”? Equally, we might ask, how did a populace spread over half of the North American continent come to accept the idea of a nation – a mari usque ad mare (“from sea to sea”) – in the first place? In this essay, I address the question through a discussion of images and imaginings, of photographic archives and the idea of nation. The photograph Young Canada (fig. 1) is an apt image to launch this discussion. In 1867, the year that the first British colonies in North America joined to form the Dominion of Canada, pre-eminent Montreal photographer William Notman pub­lished the photograph Young Canada. Posed against a painted studio backdrop, a young boy  – in reality, Notman’s son, William McFarlane Notman  – sits in a snowy land­ scape of Arctic hare fur and salt, hood pulled tight, snowshoes at the ready. The glass negative, waved through a mist of white paint, produced the impression of a raging blizzard. Young Canada exists as a half-plate wet collodion negative and as a series of albumen prints displaying varying snow effects, numbered, arranged in sequence, and carefully preserved in the Notman Photographic Archives at the McCord Museum,

* This essay is a revised version of the evening keynote lecture presented at “Photo-Archives IV: The Photographic Archive and the Idea of Nation,ˮ Florence, Italy, 27 October 2011. The lecture and essay owe much to the support and encouragement of Terry Cook, the thinking of Brian Osborne, Elizabeth Edwards, and Martha Sandweiss, and the editorial patience, persistence, and prowess of Costanza Caraffa and Tiziana Serena. 1 Cohen 2011, p. 1. Canada has three ocean coasts. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid.

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 Joan M. Schwartz

Fig. 1: William Notman: Young Canada, Montreal, Quebec, 1867. Photograph, wet collodion glass negative, 17 × 12 cm. Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum, Montreal, I-24434.

Images, Imaginings, and Imagined Community 

 19

Montreal.4 It is easily dismissed as Victorian kitsch, but this use of photography, to express and mediate engagement with the physical world, is more evocation than record and must be interrogated not for the truth of its facts, but rather as an expres­ sion of ideas. Indeed, as a visual metaphor for the foundational myths of the nascent Canadian nation, William Notman’s Young Canada represents the opportunity to explore the ways in which photographs, interposed between physical reality and viewing subject, have embodied, reflected, and helped to forge, promote, and perpe­ tuate the idea of nation.5 Canada, as a “nation,” presents fertile empirical ground for a broader inquiry into the relationship between photographic archives and the idea of nation. Canada’s history, often described as a struggle over geography, unfolded under the watchful eye of the camera. Indeed, photography, as a way of seeing and knowing, arrived on the world stage at the same time that modern constitutional and territorial ideas about Canada as a nation emerged. Between the political articulation of the Province of Canada in the Act of Union in 1840, and the symbolic declaration of transcontinen­ tal identity in the driving of “The Last Spike” of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885, British possessions in North America struggled not only to overcome vast distances and inhospitable terrain, but also to define their immediate identity, as well as their relationships to Britain, to the Empire, and to the United States. However, Canada’s transformation from outpost of empire to transcontinental nation was not simply a matter of parliamentary reform and railway building. Key to the creation of “Canada” as a nation was a “national imaginary” – a shared sense of Canada as a place. Photo­ graphs, I argue, played an active and important role in that transformation.

Images, Imaginings, and Imagined Community In his classic study of nationalism in Elizabethan England, Richard Helgerson argues that it was Christopher Saxton’s great atlas of England and Wales that helped Britons imagine their nation by “articulating an England that for the first time could be ‘seen’.”6 According to Helgerson, it was through Saxton’s collection of county maps that Britons first took “effective visual and conceptual possession of the physical kingdom in which they lived.”7 Just as Saxton’s atlas helped Elizabethan Britons to imagine the physical extent of the country in which they lived and to generate a sense

4 William Notman, “Young Canada,” Montreal, QC, 1867. Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum, wet collodion glass negative, 17x12 cm, I-24434; albumen paper prints, 14x10 cm, I-24434.1, I-24435.1, I-24436.1, I-24437.1, I-24438.1. 5 This photograph is discussed in the context of “nature, landscape, and environment” in Schwartz 2007, pp. 966–967. 6 Helgerson 1992, p. 139. 7 Ibid., p. 107.

20 

 Joan M. Schwartz

of belonging to a sovereign nation, so, I shall argue, have photographs and photogra­ phic archives served as sources of visual coherence to generate a sense of belonging to a community and to foster the idea of nation. Central to my argument, as well as to my broader interest in a “national imagi­ nary,” is Edward Said’s assertion: Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.8

Said’s comment has stimulated much of my thinking about the role of photographs in the making of early modern Canada. In considering “the idea of nation” as “an ima­ gining,” I also draw upon Benedict Anderson’s notion of an “imagined community.” According to Anderson, a nation is imagined “because the members of even the smal­ lest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”9 Anderson does not specifically address the role of photographs in the construction of imagined communities; however, he does furnish obvious parallels for critical engagement in his examination of the census, the map, and the museum as “institutions of power” which, together, “profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion – the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry.”10 Anderson challenges us to consider: In what ways have photographs functioned in the service of “institutions of power”? How have photographic archives helped the state imagine its dominion and legitimate its history? How are photographs both par­ ticipants in, and products of, the process of constructing, reinforcing, and perpetu­ ating the idea of nation? In unpacking the rhetorical power wielded by photographs in imagining attachments to place, associations with people, and belonging to com­ munity, this examination of photographic archives and the idea of nation contains wider methodological lessons for understanding how photography contributed to the process of European conquest and colonization, sustained and promoted imperial visions, and helped to perpetuate colonial attitudes and assumptions. The questions raised here and explored in the essays in this volume demonstrate the temporal, geo­ graphical, and thematic sweep of this book’s rich theme. In thinking about my own empirical ground, I quickly had to grapple with my own understandings of “photographic archives,” on the one hand, and “the idea of nation,” on the other. Neither is universally understood across countries or discipli­

8 Said 1994, p. 7. 9 Anderson 1991, p. 6. 10 Ibid., p. 168.

Images, Imaginings, and Imagined Community 

 21

nes; both are intimately tied to assumptions about history and memory. Let me ‘parse’ the title of the volume and unpack some assumptions and concerns about the slip­ pery concepts with which we are confronted here, before turning attention to three photographs and a brief discussion of their relationship to the idea of nation.

Photographic Archives The word “archive” now has intellectual caché in the academic world; its currency is tied to the work of Foucault, Derrida, and others who see “the archive” not as “an institution or set of institutions but rather a system enabling and controlling the pro­ duction of knowledge.”11 In information technology, “archive” is commonly used as both verb and noun to refer to data backed up and stored in a form readily accessible by software applications. It is also used as a synonym for “collection” to signify “what is clearly a singular, idiosyncratic, and synthetic gathering of documents.”12 The term “photographic archives” similarly conjures up collections – systematic and concrete, idiosyncratic and illusory. Costanza Caraffa’s landmark volume Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History focuses on one kind of archive: the Photothek, the photo library, the collection of photographic copies of works of art.13 The essays collected here open up the meaning of “photographic archives” to the holdings in national archives or other heritage institutions, to the archives of pho­ tographic studios – the Alinari archives in Florence or the Notman archives in Mon­ treal – to newspaper morgues, to photograph albums, as well as to the contexts of material and metaphorical meaning-making. Here, in considering a photograph as an integral part of a photographic archive or in analysing it in archival terms, I am less concerned with the physical form of the archive than with the literal and figurative contexts that enveloped the photograph and gave it meaning. When I speak of archives, I am not usually talking about a metaphorical “archive,” for example, the “imperial archive” produced by the nineteenth-century desire for comprehensive knowledge.14 Rather, I am thinking of the “real world of archives” – of institutions concerned with the organic nature of records creation and accumu­ lation, and a profession with its own literature and theory. In this essay, I am aware that provenance and original order – the twin pillars of the archival profession – are dedicated to the preservation of authorial intention and the context of records crea­ tion. I am also cognizant that archival practices are based on principles which are the

11 Kelsey 2007, p. 9; the distinction between “the archive” and “the real world of archives” is dis­ cussed in Schwartz 2008. 12 Maher 1998, p. 254. 13 Caraffa 2011. 14 Richards 1993.

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 Joan M. Schwartz

very antithesis of literary or reception theory, which declares the death of the author and allows the text to float free of authorial intention, original meanings, and initial audiences. At the same time, I find it useful to approach the photograph as a docu­ ment in an abstract sense – “created by a will, for a purpose, to convey a message, to an audience”15 – and then to think of the photographic archive as the thick context that surrounds it, reveals its functional origins, maintains its authorial intentions, and points to its target audience, but also traffics in the illusory goal of comprehen­ sive knowledge.

The Idea of Nation The other term that requires clarification is “nation.” Nation is defined in different ways and at different levels. This is especially true in Canada, where, in November 2006, a motion was tabled in Parliament to recognize “the Québécois” as “a nation within a united Canada.” The motion passed, but not without considerable confu­ sion and controversy. One newspaper headline read: “What does nation really mean? Experts perplexed.” Indeed, the contentiousness attached to the idea of nation is never far from the surface in Canada, where there are at least three notions of “nation” in common usage. There is, of course, Canada, the sovereign nation-state, a federation of ten provinces and three territories with common government and clear territorial extent. There are the Québécois, French Canadians who share a common heritage and consider themselves a “distinct society,” who consider Quebec City the Capitale natio­ nale and call the provincial legislature the Assemblée nationale. And there are the “First Nations” – a term that came into common usage in the 1970s to refer to Status and Non-Status “Indian” (indigenous) peoples in Canada. According to Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, there are 615 First Nations communities, many of whom use the term “First Nation” in their name. Of course, there are yet other uses. In the United States, Louis Farrakhan is leader of the Nation of Islam, a mainly African-American religious movement, founded in Detroit in 1930, which teaches black pride and the principles of Islam. And a recent book on a photographic archive of Jewish daily life in pre-Revolutionary Russia is entitled Photographing the Jewish Nation. Its authors point out: In our title we use the word “nation” – implying something more than a collection of separate individuals and something less than a political entity – to suggest the way that [...] [the ethno­ grapher / photographer] sought to promote cultural renewal for a people whose historical origins provided a sense of community.16

15 Schwartz 1995, p. 62. 16 Avrutin et al. 2009, p. 5.

Images, Imaginings, and Imagined Community 

 23

Because “nation” can mean many things and evades strict definition, I employ Anderson’s notion of “imagined community” as a particularly useful way to reconcile the various meanings of “nation.” Imagining, then, is a process that involves, and results in, self-identification with a social community. Group cohesion is based on

Fig. 2: Samuel McLaughlin: Wolfe’s Monument, Plains of Abraham. Quebec City, Canada East [now Quebec], 1858. Photograph, albumen print. Mounting board: 31.7 × 38.9 cm, photograph: 19.7 × 14.4 cm. Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, PA-118084.

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 Joan M. Schwartz

shared traits, which may be linguistic, cultural, ethnic, religious, or historical. Thus “nation” need not constitute a sovereign state with defined territory, physical borders, and a common government. Hitching Anderson’s horse to Said’s wagon allows me to ask: How have “images and imaginings” helped to produce “imagined community” in Canada, where, throughout the nineteenth-century, the modern technology of photography and the modern institution of archives worked as accomplices in the rise of the modern nation state? How, more broadly, have photographs helped to sustain and promote national aspirations, commemorate national events, celebrate national figures, valorize natio­ nal landscapes, and forge national identity? Social historians have studied a wide range of vehicles of commemorative practice  – including paintings, prints, and drawings; novels and poetry; travel guides and textbooks; stories; performance, and song; sports and monuments – and assessed their contributions to master narratives of nation-building and collective understandings of the past. Photographs have, until fairly recently, escaped mention in much of this mainstream historical scholarship, even though photography is not only a form of commemorative practice in its own right, but also a tool for extending the reach of other vehicles of remembrance. Here, I think of monuments erected in the public spaces of quotidian life to celebrate statesmen, churchmen, military men, and other prominent figures. These memorials were photographed (fig. 2), and prints were circulated and collected in albums, furthering the primary function of statues and cenotaphs to commemorate battles, naval engagements, military victories, heroic deaths, as well as political events, religious leaders, and imperial rule. It was, there­ fore, not only the monuments in stone and bronze, but also their inexpensive paper surrogates which contributed to what Jacques Le Goff has called “the cohesiveness of a nation united in a common memory.”17

Nineteenth-Century Expectations and Applications As I have discussed at length elsewhere,18 if most contemporary historians have yet to address fully the place of photography in national identity and collective memory, the commemorative powers of both photographs and archives were not lost on photography’s early critics, proponents, and practitioners. Writing about the photo­ graphy of public celebrations (“les fêtes publiques”) in 1856, Ernest Lacan e­ xclaimed that photography records “the memorable events of our collective life, and every day enriches the archives of history.”19 The same year, in his address to the Manches­

17 Le Goff 1992, p. 89. 18 See Schwartz 2000. 19 Lacan 1979 [1856], p. 200.

Images, Imaginings, and Imagined Community 

 25

ter Photographic Society, Rev. Read called photography, “a handmaid to the Muse of History, in virtue of its power of putting upon record, the actual real state and appearance of persons and places as we know and see them,”20 and a few years later William Lake Price praised photography as a way of “fixing passing events” so that: Posterity, by the agency of Photography, will view the faithful image of our times; the future student, in turning the page of history, may at the same time look on the very skin, into the very eyes, of those, long since mouldered to dust, whose lives and deeds he traces in the text [...]. [E]ach impressive public ceremonial will be registered and delineated; nay, even the very turmoil of the distant battle or siege and their varying aspects will be instantly fixed and transferred, with the actors, to the page of history.21

The same sense of photographic links to future generations was expressed in 1864 in the preamble to the conditions of a prize offered by the Duc de Luynes to the Société française de photographie: “One of the most promising applications of photography is the faithful, irrefutable reproduction of historical or artistic monuments and docu­ ments, so usually destroyed by the passage of time or by revolutions.” Photography was, thus, a tool of preservation that could be “called upon to transmit precious ele­ ments to future generations.”22 This language of generational legacy is also very much part of archival discourse, especially in Canada. In his 1924 report entitled The Canadian Archives and its Activi­ ties, Arthur G. Doughty, Dominion Archivist from 1904 to 1935, famously declared, “Of all national assets archives are the most precious; they are the gift of one generation to another and the extent of our care of them marks the extent of our civilization.”23 Here, Doughty speaks to the centrality of archives in the continuity of collective memory and national identity. His use of the term “national assets” suggests archives are the cultural equivalent of rail lines, telecommunications systems, or the postal service, those infrastructure components that bind the nation together. Photographic archives, too, served as a form of affective glue, bringing visual coherence to the idea of nation through views of symbolically charged landscapes, and through “the truth-telling portraits of our statesmen, our heroes, our philoso­ phers, our poets, and our friends.”24 Photography was promoted as an efficient way of copying and disseminating documents valued as historically important and, thus, served as an instrument of collective memory. In France especially, photographic archives were envisaged as a way to promote knowledge of the nation’s historical, literary, and artistic treasures. To achieve what seems, in retrospect, remarkably akin

20 Read 1856, p. 130. 21 Price 1973 [1868 (1858)], p. 4. 22 Regnault 1864, quoted in Foliot 1990, p. 233. 23 Doughty 1924, p. 5. 24 Fisher 1845, p. vi.

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to current institutional digitization and online access initiatives, Paris photographers Mayer and Pierson proposed that a photographic workshop be set up under the strict supervision of curators in all the depots of the national archives, to copy rare and precious manuscripts, prints, charters, and images bequeathed to posterity by the Middle Ages but lost in the “oubliettes de nos archives nationales” and inaccessible to the public. Such facsimiles, made universally available, would ensure that “none of our historical origins, our old customs, traditions would remain ignored.” This “pho­ tographic palaeography,” they asserted, would make it possible to complete the work begun by such great French historians as Monteil, Thierry, and Michelet and would also make far easier the arduous task of historical research to which scholars devoted their entire lives.25

Forms of Photographic Nation-Building The connection between photographic archives and the idea of nation is clearly mani­ fest in those bodies of photography produced with the intention of creating for pos­ terity a visual record of buildings and monuments fast-disappearing in the wake of progress – for example, the work produced by the five photographers of the Mission Héliographique throughout France in 1851, by Charles Marville in Paris in 1865, by Henry Dixon and Alfred & John Bool in London, and by Thomas Annan in Glasgow. In Parisian Views, Shelley Rice notes the role of archivists in the Second Empire re­fashioning of Paris and the architectural patrimony of the nation. She writes that Haussmann felt strongly that the old streets and buildings, as well as their destruction and reconstruction, should be documented as part of the city’s historic records [...]. For this purpose he hired archi­ vists whose association took the official name of City Council Permanent Subcommittee on His­ toric Works. These archivists, in turn, advised Marville, who became the “photographe de la ville de Paris.”26

Such photographic projects of conscious architectural description and historical pre­ servation reflected, constituted, and confirmed sense of place and reinforced collec­ tive memory through images of spaces deemed emblematic of the nation; photogra­ phic archives were the visual legacy of such efforts. In Canada, it was not urban demolition and renewal, but rather construction pro­ gress and the built environment that best reflected and projected national aspirations.

25 Here, the phrase “oubliettes de nos archives nationales” likens the storage vaults of archives to those dungeons, accessible only through a trap door in the ceiling, in which political prisoners were entombed and forgotten. Mayer / Pierson 1979 [1862], pp. 166–168. 26 Rice 1997, p. 85.

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Fig. 3: Samuel McLaughlin: Parliament Buildings, View of Main Front and Entrance Tower [Ottawa, Canada West, now Ontario], 1863. Photograph, albumen print. Mounting board: 30.7 × 54.4 cm, photograph: 28.2 × 36.9 cm. Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, C-000773.

In the late 1850s and early 1860s, large public works projects were extensively docu­ mented by the leading photographers of their day. In Toronto, the firm of Armstrong, Beere, and Hime photographed the construction of the Provincial University, now the University of Toronto; in Montreal, William Notman produced an extensive photo­ graphic record of the building of the Victoria Bridge which spanned the St Lawrence, gave Canada access to an ice-free port on the Atlantic in winter, and drew praise as the Eighth Wonder of the World when it was opened by the Prince of Wales in 1860; and in Ottawa, newly appointed official government photographer Samuel McLaughlin repeatedly and systematically recorded the Parliament Buildings as the appropriately Gothic structure took shape on the commanding heights overlooking the Ottawa River (fig. 3). These monumental projects and the photographic archives that documented them proclaimed the advancement of education, transportation, and government commensurate with aspirations to nationhood. The Canadian government quickly adopted photography as a means of recording, ordering, and disseminating official information. Beginning in the late 1850s, pho­ tographic archives were created in conjunction with western boundary, geological,

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Fig. 4: Armstrong, Beere, and Hime: King Street East, Toronto, C.W. [Canada West, now Ontario], Winter 1856. Photograph, albumen print. Mounting board: 30.3 × 38.2 cm, photograph: 22.5 × 28.9 cm. Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, PA-186739.

and railway surveys; others were produced to make visible economic growth; still others were produced to achieve political ends, for example a portfolio of twenty-five photographs of streets and buildings (fig. 4) sent to Queen Victoria in 1857 by the City of Toronto in its bid to be named capital of Canada.27 In such photographic archives, the relationship to the idea of nation is clear, for they were produced by officially sanctioned photographers in compliance with formally issued instructions. They were taken and used to help reinforce the idea of nation in the minds of the political elite, captains of industry, and railway barons who had the vision, power, and wealth to promote nation-building projects and in the hearts of a citizenry eager to tie their fortunes to a new land. But what about photographs without such officially sanctioned origins, those photographs that, upon first glance, are seemingly without nationalist objectives? How did they contribute to the idea of an imagined community with shared values

27 See Schwartz 2003a, 2003b.

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 29

and beliefs, shared dreams and shared sorrows? The stories such photographs have to tell are far more elusive. What, for example, does a photograph of a railway disaster, or a photographic copy of an engraving, or a composite of staged sporting scenes have to do with the idea of nation? On their own, their contribution to Canadian nationbuilding is far from obvious. They are among the dirty, documentary, and didactic images that are most often passed over in histories of photography. They yield few secrets through iconographical analysis. To tease out how these images generated imaginings, created imagined communities, and contributed to the idea of nation, they need to be returned to the photographic archive – to the documentary universe of which they were a part, to the circumstances which brought them into being, and to the contexts in which they were invested with and generated meaning – and then carefully unpacked.

Photography, Death, and a Nation United in Grief A faded, torn, and stained salt print attributed to Hamilton photographer Robert Milne shows the site of a train wreck (fig. 5).28 Despite its condition, it presents a newsworthy scene and is valued as one of the earliest examples of photojournalism in Canada. But what does this photograph of a railway disaster have to do with the idea of nation? As a single image with no accompanying identification or context, it is a record of visual facts about the site of a serious accident. However, returned to the “action in which it participated,” it emerges as a catalyst for a communal sense of loss and as a participant in an exercise in affective nation-building. On the evening of Thursday, 12 March 1857, a little more than a mile outside Hamilton [Canada West, now Ontario], the westbound train out of Toronto plunged through a timber swing bridge on the Great Western Railway line and plummeted sixty feet into the Desjardins Canal. It was the worst railway accident in the history of the colony. Reckless journalists speculated upon the instability of bridges along the line, but the mishap was, in fact, caused by a broken front axle that forced the loco­ motive to leave the track and drop onto the timbers of the bridge. The entire structure collapsed under the impact and the whole train broke through the gap. The engine and tender crashed through the frozen canal. The baggage car, striking a corner of the tender, was thrown to one side and fell about thirty feet from the engine. The first passenger car landed on its roof, breaking partly through the ice; the next passenger car fell on its end and remained that way. Doctors were rushed to the scene from as far away as Toronto, and rescuers worked throughout the moonlit night in search of bodies. By noon the next day, the

28 This discussion is drawn from a detailed study of photographs of the Great Western Railway disas­ ter in Schwartz 1987–1988.

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Fig. 5: Robert Milne: Great Western Railway Disaster at the Desjardins Canal [near Hamilton, Canada West, now Ontario], 12 March 1857. Photograph, salt print. Photograph: 25.3 × 33 cm. Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, PA-135158.

death toll was approaching sixty. Among the dead were many prominent citizens – merchants, military men, and clergy. In the aftermath of the accident, the mails were delayed and freight traffic was interrupted. A national day of public mourning was declared. Stores closed, Parliament adjourned, and an inquest was ordered. Photo­ graphy played a key role in both the news coverage and the official investigation of the event. The public was voracious for news of the disaster. A week after the catastrophe, Hamilton’s local newspaper, The Spectator, reported, “The demand for newspapers in this city, since the fatal occurrence of Thursday last, is without precedent in Canada.”29 The run of the paper was increased and extra editions were produced to satisfy the public’s appetite for details of the crash, reports of funerals and interments, and pro­ gress of the inquest. The tragedy also possessed commercial opportunities for pho­

29 [Unknown] 1857 (The Daily Spectator, 18 March 1857, p. 3; The Weekly Spectator, 19 March 1857, p. 1).

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tographers, as visual documentation of the accident scene commanded tremendous popular appeal for nineteenth-century audiences enamoured of railways, bridges, and disasters; views of the accident scene combined all three of these highly saleable subjects. The local newspaper promoted Milne’s photographs of the shattered bridge as “beautiful specimens of art”30 and advised readers, “Mr. Milne will have for sale some most beautiful views of the scene of disaster.”31 In response to the outpouring of grief, a spate of views hit the market in the form of albumen prints and photographically based lithographs, engravings, and illus­ trations in the pictorial press. Circulated widely in these ways, photographs by Milne and others carried the accident scene to distant audiences and contributed to a wider sense of bereavement, helping to turn a local accident into a national tragedy. Posi­ tioned at the dawn of photojournalism in Canada, Milne’s view contributed to an exercise in nation-building in which the vicarious viewing of the disaster scene pro­ duced an imagined community of mourners. Surrounded by the contexts supplied by the photographic archive and viewed in a framework linking images, imaginings, and imagined community, Milne’s photograph emerges as a participant in a process of memorialization which drew grieving Canadians, separated by distances both physi­ cal and social, together as a nation.

Photography, Cultural Refinement, and the Art of Nation-Building It was likely at a monthly conversazione of the Montreal Art Association in 1864 that photographer William Notman approached the Most Reverend Francis Fulford, Lord Bishop of Montreal, about a loan of his copy of an engraving of Annibale Carracci’s The Three Marys. From Fulford’s engraving, Notman produced photographic copies, which were then offered for sale to the public as individual albumen prints; however, and more importantly here, Notman’s The Three Marys appeared as Plate 11 in Pho­ tographic Selections (fig. 6), a book of photographic art reproductions published on subscription by Notman, starting in 1863. Issued monthly, Photographic Selections appeared in instalments, with each fascicle consisting of four plates, each with its own decorative letterpress text written by Montreal art historian Thomas D. King. Notman’s The Three Marys, described in King’s text as “one of the principal attrac­ tions at the Exhibition of Art Treasures, in Manchester (1857),”32 was subsequently bound into book form, along with all the other plates and accompanying texts, a title page, dedication, preface, table of contents, and list of subscribers.

30 [Unknown] 1857 (The Weekly Spectator, 9 April 1857, p. 4). 31 [Unknown] 1857 (The Daily Spectator, 16 March 1857, p. 2; The Weekly Spectator, 19 March 1857, p. 3). 32 Notman 1863, n.p. [text accompanying Plate 11].

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Fig. 6: William Notman: The Three Marys, Plate 11 in Photographic Selections, with letterpress text by Thomas D. King, Montreal 1863. Photograph, albumen print. Mounting board: 31.6 × 41.6 cm, photograph: 23.4 × 27.9 cm. Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum, Montreal, M2013.11.1.31.

Photographic Selections consisted of forty-six photographic copies of paintings or engravings by the Old and Modern Masters, among them Adoration of the Shepherds by Luca Giordano, La Madonna del San Francesco by Correggio, Heart of the Andes by Church, Light of the World by Hunt, The Plough Field by Rosa Bonheur, Hemicycle du Palais des Beaux Art by de la Roche [sic], Mercury and Argus by Turner, School of Athens by Raffaelle [sic], The Stag at Bay by Landseer, and The Supper at Emmaus by Rembrandt; also included were two original photographs “From Nature.”33 The book was very much in keeping with one of the original uses envisaged for photography by early promoters and practitioners of the new medium. For example, not long before the appearance of Photographic Selections, William Lake Price explained that, thanks to photography, The artist and the dilettante have seen and will see transcripts of the distant and scattered mas­ terpieces of Raffaelle and Titian, of Velázquez and Murillo, brought together and united for near comparison in their folios; not as mere diluted translations by the hands of others, but with their own touch, feeling, and power.34

33 Entitled Fort Chambly and Road Scene, Lake of Two Mountains, they were taken by Notman, but listed in the Contents as “From Nature.” 34 Price 1973 [1868 (1858)], p. 3.

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Whereas Notman did not have access to European paintings ‘undiluted’ by the hand of engravers, his bound collection of photographic reproductions still served to make the civilized art world a more accessible place, giving viewers visual access to works of art held in private collections or not immediately available in Canada. Dismissed by photographic historians and often discarded by collectors, Notman’s photogra­ phic copies of paintings and engravings by revered European and emerging Canadian artists had an underlying nationa­listic aim. According to the book’s Preface, Photo­ graphic Selections was published “in order to foster the increasingly growing taste for works of art in Canada, and to meet a demand which cannot otherwise be generally supplied, consequent upon the scarcity in these Provinces of choice original works of art, or even of proof engravings by the old or modern masters.”35 A shrewd businessman, Notman was never one to miss a marketing opportunity. Having secured permission to dedicate his publication “To His Excellency the Right Honourable Viscount Monck, Governor General of British North America,” Notman declared: It is the privilege of those in Your Excellency’s exalted position to patronize and foster Art – a privilege of which the late lamented Prince nearest the throne of the sovereign availed himself with so much zeal and effect. Your Excellency, following so illustrious an example, and esteeming it a duty to promote in this great colony, the culture, – hitherto so much neglected, – which the fine Arts bestow, has been graciously pleased to permit the dedication of this work to you.36

This dedication is telling. Quite apart from any self-serving benefits accruing from such august patronage, Notman makes it clear that the Governor General, following the example of the late Prince Albert, felt it his duty to “patronize and foster Art,” and thereby “the culture […] which the fine Arts bestow.” Positioning himself as an accomplice to Lord Monck’s privileged mission, Notman is not simply selling a com­ modity, he is also performing a public service aimed at nurturing the cultural refine­ ment and elevated taste that a Canadian identity required. Acknowledging that “Art” took many forms and was thought to do many things, Notman’s avowed aim was “to secure copies of the best works of the different masters, and to obtain original views of the most popular places in Canada, in order to make the ‘Selections’, if possible, acceptable to every subscriber.”37 But his purpose was far from egalitarian since not everyone could afford the lavish volume. Notman’s pho­ tographs and King’s texts reached a limited audience of 263 original subscribers, a veritable “who’s who” of Canadian society which included many of the most power­ ful men in Canada at the time: government officials and high-ranking clergy, judges

35 Notman 1863, Preface. 36 Ibid., Dedication. 37 Ibid., Preface.

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and lawyers, prominent military men; members of Parliament, architects, publishers, financiers, doctors, artists, and photographers, among them many art collectors and members of the Art Association of Montreal. For this reason, the constitutive impact of Notman’s Photographic Selections on the public imagination must be assessed, not by the number of original subscribers, but by the influence wielded by those in posi­ tions of leadership, whose cultural tastes, social cohesion, and nationalist aspira­ tions the volume effectively nurtured.

Photography, Sport, and the Performance of Nation Sometime late in 1868, members of various Canadian lacrosse clubs visited William Notman’s Montreal studio, where they posed in uniform, individually or in pairs, against a plain backdrop for a series of sporting scenes depicting the playing posi­ tions of the game. The individual wet collodion negatives were then transformed by

Fig. 7: William Notman: composite frontispiece photographs in W[illiam] G[eorge] Beers, Lacrosse: The National Game of Canada. Montreal: Dawson Brothers, 1869. Photograph, two albumen prints. Each photograph: 14.5 × 8.3 cm, on facing book pages: 16.8 × 10.3 cm. Rare Book Collection, McCord Museum, Montreal, RB-0807.

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Notman’s resident artists into scenes to simulate an outdoor playing field, arranged in groupings of six, and rephotographed to produce two albumen composites. The indi­ vidual photographs were hand-tipped into the front of every copy of a book entitled Lacrosse: the national game of Canada (fig. 7)38 and keyed to chapters dedicated to each of the game’s playing positions; although they offered only stiff, static de­pictions of a fast-paced game that prevailing technology was otherwise unable to record, they became part of a performance of nationhood and a lesson in national identity. The individual who demonstrated goal-keeping for Notman’s composite was the book’s author William George Beers (fig. 8), a Montreal dentist, now considered the “father of modern lacrosse.” The prime mover in organizing and popularizing the game in Canada, Beers was chosen, at the age of seventeen, to represent Montreal as goalkeeper in a match in the presence of the Prince of Wales, heir to the British throne, when he visited Canada in 1860. In Confederation year – 1867 – Beers organized a conference in Kingston in order to create a national body to govern the sport, played by some eighty clubs throughout the newly formed Dominion. There, he founded the National Lacrosse Association and finalized his code of rules for modern lacrosse. Beers book, published in Montreal two years later, explained the various techniques of the game – throwing, dodging, checking – by drawing the reader’s attention to the

Fig. 8: William Notman: Messrs. Beers and Stevenson playing lacrosse, Montreal, Quebec, 1868. Photograph, albumen print. Photograph: 17 × 12 cm. Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum, Montreal, I-35122.1.

38 Beers 1869. In later editions, the original albumen prints were replaced with photo-mechanical reproductions.

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positions assumed by the players in the twelve photographs on the two-page frontis­ piece spread. A “Key to the Photographs” indicated the name of the player, his home club, locality, and game position. Lacrosse: the national game of Canada exemplifies the use of photographs, hand-tipped into books, for the purposes of visual instruction. However, it also demonstrates the way in which national identity was shaped and “performed” by and for the nation. The title and preface make it clear that, beyond its function as a manual, Beers book carried patriotic intentions; its opening lines proclaimed: “The following pages are designed to extend a knowledge of the game of Lacrosse, to systematize its principles and practice, and to perpetuate it as the National game of Canada.”39 Beers, an ardent nationalist, championed the sport as a way to promote fitness and bravery among young men. Calling the game “a peace preparation for war” and proclaiming “its moral influence […] beyond dispute,” Beers claimed that lacrosse “knocks timidity and nervousness out of a young man, training him to temperance, confidence and pluck.”40 Lacrosse, he declared, “has, perhaps done, more than anything else to invoke the sentiment of patriotism among young men in Canada.”41 Notman’s photographs and Beers text were participants in much broader mythmaking and identity-formation efforts to recognize lacrosse as Canada’s national sport expressed in prints, illustrations in the pictorial press, novels, poetry, sheet music covers, and popular song. For example, the place of lacrosse in the public mind was reflected and reinforced by the lyrics of Lacrosse, Our National Game, a popular song published in 1872 and dedicated to His Excellency, Lord Dufferin, Governor General of Canada: “Though Baseball and Cricket, the bat and the wicket, / Have charms, there is no game can claim, boys, / To yield such large measure of profit and pleasure, / As Lacrosse, our own National Game, boys.” Here was a pointed rejection of American and British national sports in favour of lacrosse, “our own national game.” Called a “wonderful [...] lifegiving, joygiving game,” it was a sport full of action and ath­ leticism. Even more importantly, lacrosse was a test of patriotism and a source of na­tion­al pride: “And if muscle and mettle be wanted to battle / For Canada’s national fame, boys; / No sons will be truer, than we will be to her, / Who practice our Na­tional Game, boys.”42 Here, the lyrics of the song echoed the sentiments of Beers, who praised ­lacrosse for its “national and nationalizing influence” and viewed its spread as suggestive of “happy ideas of the patriotism of Young Canada.”43

39 Beers 1869, p. v. 40 Ibid., pp. 49, 51, 50. 41 Ibid., p. 59. 42 Hughes / Sefton 1872. 43 Beers 1869, pp. 59, 58.

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Where Beers reference to the “patriotism of Young Canada” and Notman’s image of Young Canada express overtly nationalist sentiments, Milne’s photograph of the Great Western Railway disaster, Notman’s photographic art reproduction of Carracci’s The Three Marys, and his studio photographs of lacrosse positions exhibit no obvious inherent connection to the idea of nation. Milne’s print is in poor condition and the museum to which it was initially offered as a donation refused to accept it. Far better copies of Carracci’s The Three Marys now exist, and staged action shots command little artistic appeal or scholarly attention on their own. But there is more than meets the eye when the photograph is juxtaposed with text, when the individual image is viewed as part of a series, when the albumen print circulates in a literary context, and when images, series, and texts are lined up and studied in the contexts supplied by the photographic archive. Only then does it become clear that these images, series, and texts played active, although often subtle, roles as contributors to the idea of nation in nineteenth-century Canada.

Photographic Archives and the Idea of Nation In this essay, I have suggested that the idea of nation was fashioned through, and furthered by, photographic images and the imaginings that they embodied and emboldened. To do so, I drew inspiration from Richard Helgerson’s work on Saxton’s atlas of Elizabethan Britain, adopted Edward Said’s argument linking “images and im­aginings” to the “struggle over geography” in western empires from the ­Caribbean to Africa to Australia, and adapted Anderson’s study of the “census, map, and museum” in South-East Asia. This allowed me to craft a conceit for exploring the idea of nation in terms that did not require geographical or temporal specificity and that had the capacity to open up broader lessons about photography, place, and belonging. I also shamelessly blended real and metaphorical notions of “archives / the archive” to sur­ round photographs with the contexts of their creation, circulation, and viewing, in order to return them to the historical circumstances and documentary universe in which they were invested with – and generated – meaning. The ideas put forth here, like the essays in this volume, build on approaches to research on – and in – photographic archives, which focus less on authenticity, aes­ thetics, or genius, and more on materiality, affect, and effect. Such thinking about “photography and experience” encourages us to press beyond visual facts and surface appearance, to discover how photographs have played  – and continue to play  – a role in constructing, legitimizing, and maintaining the idea of nation. To do so, we must shed our impatience to interpret content and style, and become our own experts in the historical contexts of photographic meaning-making. As Sara Stevenson has so aptly observed, to write intelligently about Thomas Annan’s photographs of the streets and closes of Glasgow requires knowledge of the city’s sewage problems, and to comprehend fully the appeal of Hill and Adamson’s portraits of Newhaven fisher­

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folk demands familiarity with the plight of the fishing industry in nineteenth-century Scotland.44 The essays here remind us that photographs are produced and consumed, commissioned and collected in historically situated ways; they also demonstrate that the idea of nation has been reflected in, inflected by, and refracted through the pho­ tographically  – and archivally  – mediated relationship between people and place, a relationship which was new and tentative, exciting and even revolutionary in the nineteenth century, but one which we now take very much for granted. Photographic archives warrant scholarly scrutiny as both active producers and powerful products of the idea of nation. In pursuing the connections between images, imaginings, and imagined community, we are able to move away from the concrete to the abstract, to probe ways in which photographs, archives, and nation came to be mutually constituting and mutually enabling. Michel Frizot has called photographs “working objects in their own time.”45 To understand the work they did, the effects they produced, and their relationship to the idea of nation, they need to be linked, wherever possible, in multiple and complex ways, to the contexts of their creation, circulation, and viewing, as well as to other forms of material evidence. To dis­en­ tangle the relationship between photographic archives and the idea of nation is also to confront the profound effect that photography has had on strategies of seeing, engaging, and understanding the world  – on the processes by which people have come to know the world and situate themselves in it; by which they have pictured landscape, invested it with meaning, and articulated their relationship to it; by which they have become familiar with and drawn inspiration from “the great and the good, heroes, saints, and sages of all lands and all eras.”46 If the “work” that photographs once did to shape the idea of nation is now lost to sight, it can, with imagination and effort, be glimpsed in the photographic archive.

Bibliography Anderson 1991: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed., New York (NY) 1991. Avrutin et al. 2009: Eugene M. Avrutin et al. (eds.), Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions, Hanover / Waltham (MA) 2009. Beers 1869: W[illiam] G[eorge] Beers, Lacrosse: The National Game of Canada, Montreal 1869. Caraffa 2011: Costanza Caraffa (ed.), Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History, Berlin / Munich 2011.

44 This observation was made during a small-group discussion of approaches to nineteenth-century photo-history at the meeting of ORACLE, Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece, 8 November 2014. 45 Frizot 1998, p. 12. 46 Root 1971 [1864], p. 27.

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Cohen 2011: Andrew Cohen, “The idea of a Canadian nation is diminishing,” in: Ottawa Citizen, 28 June 2011. Online at: [17.03.2013] Doughty 1924: Arthur G. Doughty, The Canadian Archives and its Activities, Ottawa 1924. Fisher 1845: George Thomas Fisher Jun., Photogenic Manipulation: Part I. Containing the Theory and Plain Instructions in the Art of Photography, or the Production of Pictures through the Agency of Light: including Calotype, Chrysotype, Cyanotype, Chromatype, Energiatype, Anthotype, and Amphitype, from 2nd London ed., Philadelphia (PA) 1845. Frizot 1998: Michel Frizot (ed.), A New History of Photography, Cologne 1998 [French edition: Paris 1994]. Hughes / Sefton 1872: James L. Hughes / Henry F. Sefton, La Crosse, our national game [sheet music: words by James L. Hughes; music arranged by Henry F. Sefton], Toronto 1872. Online at: [17.03.2013] Jäger 2003: Jens Jäger, “Picturing Nations: Landscape Photography and National Identity in Britain and Germany in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in: Joan M. Schwartz / James R. Ryan (eds.), Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, London 2003, pp. 117–140. Helgerson 1992: Richard Helgerson, “The Land Speaks,” in: Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England, ch. 3, Chicago (IL) 1992, pp. 105–147. Kelsey 2007: Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs & Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850–1890, Berkeley (CA) 2007. Lacan 1979 [1856]: Ernest Lacan, Esquisses Photographiques à propos de l’Exposition Universelle et de la Guerre d’Orient [Paris 1856], reprint, New York (NY) 1979. Le Goff 1992: Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. by Steven Randall and Elizabeth Claman, New York 1992. [French edition: Paris 1988]. Maher 1998: William J. Maher, “Archives, Archivists, and Society,” in: American Archivist, 61 (2) 1998. Mayer / Pierson 1979 [1862]: Léopold-Ernest Mayer / Pierre-Louis Pierson, La photographie considérée comme art et comme industrie: histoire de sa découverte, ses progrès, ses applications, son avenir. [Paris 1862], reprint, New York (NY) 1979. Notman 1863: William Notman / T[homas] D[avies] King, Photographic Selections, Vol. 1, Montreal 1863. Price 1973 [1868 (1858)]: William Lake Price, A Manual of Photographic Manipulation, treating of the practice of the art; and its various applications to Nature, 2nd ed. [London 1868, first published, 1858], reprint, New York (NY) 1973. Regnault 1864 / 1990: Victor Regnault, La Lumière, VIII, 1864, pp. 392–396, quoted in Philippe Foliot, “Louis Vignes and Henry Sauvaire, Photographers on the Expeditions of the Duc de Luynes,” in: History of Photography, 14 (3), 1990, pp. 233–250. Read 1856: Rev. W.J. Read, “On the Applications of Photography” [paper read at the ordinary Meeting of the Manchester Photographic Society 6 March 1856], Photographic Notes. Journal of the Photographic Society of Scotland and of the Manchester Photographic Society, I, 9, 17 August 1856, pp. 127–131. Rice 1997: Shelley Rice, Parisian Views, Cambridge (MA) 1997. Richards 1993: Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire, London 1993. Root 1971 [1864]: Marcus Aurelius Root, The Camera and the Pencil: or the Heliographic Art, its theory and practice in all its various branches: together with its history in the United States and in Europe: being at once a theoretical and a practical treatise, and designed alike, as a text-book and a hand-book: illustrated with fine engravings on steel and on wood [Philadelphia 1864], reprint, Pawlet (VT) 1971.

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Said 1994: Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York (NY) 1994. Schwartz 1987–1988: Joan M. Schwartz, “Documenting Disaster: Photography at the Desjardins Canal, 1857,” in: Archivaria 25 (1987–88), pp. 147–154. Schwartz 1995 / 2012: Joan M. Schwartz, “‘We make our tools and our tools make us’: Lessons from Photographs for the Practice, Politics, and Poetics of Diplomatics,” in: Archivaria, 40, Fall 1995, pp. 40–74; published in an abridged and revised version as “To speak again with a full distinct voice: Diplomatics, Photographs, and Archives,” in: Costanza Caraffa / Tiziana Serena (eds.), Archivi fotografici: Spazi del sapere, luoghi della ricerca, monographic issue of Richerche di Storia dell’Arte, 106, 2012, pp. 7–24. Schwartz 2000 / 2006: Joan M. Schwartz, “‘Records of Simple Truth and Precision’: Photography, Archives, and the Illusion of Control,” in: Archivaria, 50, Fall 2000: pp. 1–40; reprinted in Francis X. Blouin / William G. Rosenberg (eds.), Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, Ann Arbor (MI) 2006, pp. 61–83. Schwartz 2003a: Joan M. Schwartz, “More than ‘competent description of an intractably empty landscape’: a strategy for critical engagement with historical photographs,” in: Historical Geography, 31, 2003, pp. 105–130. Schwartz 2003b: Joan M. Schwartz, “Photographs from the Edge of Empire,” in: Alison Blunt et al. (eds.), Cultural Geography in Practice, London 2003, pp. 154–171. Schwartz 2007: Joan M. Schwartz, “Photographic Reflections: Nature, Landscape, and Environment,” in: Environmental History, 12 (4), 2007, pp. 966–993. Schwartz 2008: Joan M. Schwartz, “Reading Robin Kelsey’s Archive Style Across the Archival Divide,” in: Journal of Archival Organization, 6 (3), 2008, pp. 201–210. Schwartz 2011. Joan M. Schwartz, “The Archival Garden: Photographic Plantings, Interpretive Choices, and Alternative Narratives,” in Terry Cook (ed.), Controlling the Past: Documenting Society and Institutions. Essays in Honor of Helen Willa Samuels, Chicago (IL) 2011, pp. 69–110. [Unknown] 1857: Unknown author, [Newspaper reports on the disaster], in: The Daily Spectator [Hamilton, Canada West, now Ontario], March 16, 1857 and March 18, 1857, also published in: The Weekly Spectator [Hamilton], March 19, 1857 and April 9, 1857.

Photo Archives, Identity, Heritage

Martha A. Sandweiss

Photography, the Archive and the Invention of the American West Photography and the American West, a new medium and a new place, came of age together in the nineteenth century. In 1839, the year Daguerre announced his mar­ velous new photographic invention to the world, much of the land now called the American West lay outside the political boundaries of the United States. Over the coming decades, however, as the United States became a truly continental nation, photographers documented the country’s westward march. In 1846, photographers followed American troops into the war with Mexico that would result in the annexa­ tion of California and the southwest. Beginning in 1848, they recorded the shifting fortunes of California’s gold-seekers. And in the 1850s, they set out across the over­ land trails to record what prospective immigrants would see. They pictured the West’s native peoples and they documented the region’s highest peaks and deepest canyons. In such photographs – encountered in albums and galleries, as illustrations in books and in journals  – most Americans encountered the West for the very first time. In these photographs, they found persuasive evidence of what they had, who they were, and what they could become as a newly expanded nation that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific.1 From the start, the federal government played an important role in this visual documentation of the West. In the pre-photographic era, beginning in the 1820s, the government sponsored the sketch artists who accompanied some of the expeditions exploring the West. Later, during the 1840s and 50s, it underwrote several photogra­ phic expeditions, though these largely proved unsuccessful. But in the 1860s and 70s everything changed. This is the golden age of western photography. Improvements in the wet-plate process made the medium easier to use. A talented cadre of photo­ graphers – field-hardened by work on Civil War battlefields – looked for new chal­ lenges in the far West. And the federal government, after four difficult years devoted to keeping the nation from splitting in half, once again turned its sights westward, intent on knitting the West into the fabric of the nation. It was a complex project. To increase settlement and integrate the region into the nation’s social and economic order, the federal government worked on multiple fronts. It organized ambitious scientific expeditions to gather more detailed know­ ledge about the West’s natural resources. With both financial and military support, it aided in the construction of the transcontinental railroad lines. And to ensure that American settlers could take advantage of the economic opportunities now opening up in the West, it sought to contain the threat posed by the western Indians. The

1 For a fuller explication of some of the ideas explored in this essay, see Sandweiss 2002.

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 Martha A. Sandweiss

western half of the continent may have seemed a terra incognita to some Americans, a blank landscape filled with promise. But to several hundred thousand Native Ameri­ cans, it was a homeland. The western Indians and the Euro-American settlers had incompatible dreams for what the West should be. The government played two key roles in the creation of the photographic image of the American West that emerged between 1865 and 1885, the two decades following the Civil War. First, it acted as a patron, sponsoring the exploring expeditions that fanned out across the West, employing scientists and photographers alike. And second, it served as a collector. The federal government not only underwrote the pro­ duction of the expeditionary images, it also published these images, and provided the archives where these pictures would be stored.2 In this second role, as much as in the first, the national government shaped the ways in which these photographs would be used to convey a very particular argument about the West and its place in national life.3 When federal exploration of the West picked up again after a long hiatus during the Civil War, it changed in scope and ambition. The pre-war exploring expeditions focused on simply finding a way across the continent. The post-war surveys, however, built upon existing geographical knowledge to consider how Americans could exploit the region’s resources. Civilian scientists replaced the gentleman-soldiers of the earlier expeditions, detailed scientific treatises supplanted more romantic travel nar­ ratives, and photographers became as essential for the production of useful know­ ledge as topographers, geologists or naturalists. These photographers functioned as a part of a team and, inevitably, their photographs reflect the larger ambitions of the survey leaders. The pictures document the West’s topography, capture distinctive geographical features, and convey the vast scale of the region. But these same pic­ tures, especially when married to words, also lay out a visual story that affirms and expands the central myth of the West in American thought. They depict the West as an unoccupied place, rich in natural resources and ready to be developed by enter­ prising settlers. And they seem to affirm that it is America’s divine right, its “Manifest Destiny” (to use the phrase of the day), to occupy and claim the land. Four ambitious multi-year survey projects operated in the American West between 1867 and 1879, when the government consolidated the projects under the aegis of the newly created United States Geological Survey. Under the operational umbrella of

2 From early on, survey records and the associated landscape photographs were in the archives of the civilian and military agencies that oversaw the expeditions. After the founding of the National Archives in 1934, these records were moved there. Beginning in 1879, however, Indian photographs became the property of the Bureau of Ethnology, later the Bureau of American Ethnology and now the National Anthropological Archives. For a brief overview of the National Archives, see Glenn 1996. 3 The basic starting points for any discussion of the great surveys are Bartlett 1962 and Goetz­ mann 1966. For general overviews of photography on the great surveys, see Sandweiss 2002 and Naef / Woods / Heyman 1975.

Photography, the Archive and the Invention of the American West 

 45

the War Department, the civilian scientist Clarence King led the United States Geo­ logical Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, and army lieutenant George Montague Wheeler commanded the United States Geographic Surveys West of the One Hundr­ edth Meridian. Working through the Department of the Interior, Ferdinand Hayden led the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, and John Wesley Powell directed the United States Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region. As the similar titles for the surveys suggest, and the multiple commands all but assured, the survey teams not only competed for federal funds, they also competed in the field. For all their differences, however, they ultimately coa­ lesced around the federal government’s central ambitions for the interior West as a place that would be receptive to development, and a home for white Americans. From the start, their work had a little-acknowledged racial dimension that underscored the ways in which the national vision for the West privileged mineral development, tourism and town-building, at the expense of the very different vision of the place held by the nomadic tribes of Indians. The photographers attached to these survey crews – Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, John K. Hillers – now hold a pride of place in the pantheon of America’s great photographers.4 Each, of course, worked with a particu­ lar aesthetic style, and each worked to realize the particular scientific and political agenda of a given survey. Still, as a body of work, the photographs express a coherent and unified point of view. They picture the western landscape as simultaneously aweinspiring in its grandeur and immensity, and as malleable, ready to bend to the iron will and technological prowess of the American people. Collectively, they ignore a central fact: the conquest of the West would involve not just a struggle with a harsh and unforgiving landscape, but a struggle with the peoples who already lived there. As photographs by these men have entered the art market over the past 30 or 40 years, it has become increasingly difficult to move beyond the aesthetic critique of form and style, to get at the meanings these images held in the nineteenth century. To do that, we need to go back to their original context of publication, to the govern­ ment-sponsored books and albums and catalogues though which they first reached an audience. For far too long, American textbooks have imagined the Civil War (1861– 65) and the post-war period known as Reconstruction (1865–77) as stories about the North and South, leaving the story of westward expansion to unfold in its own sepa­ rate chapter. But to understand the great western landscape photographs of the 1860s and 70s, and the contexts in which they appeared, we need to think of them in tandem with these larger national events.

4 An extensive bibliography addresses the work of the survey photographers. On O’Sullivan, see Davis / Aspinwall 2011, Kelsey 2007, Jurovics et al. 2010. On Watkins, see Palmquist 1983, Naef / HultLewis 2011. On Jackson, see Hales 1996. Hillers has received less recent attention, see Fowler 1989.

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 Martha A. Sandweiss

The end of the Civil War stimulated immigration to the interior West and created a more stable environment for the construction of the transcontinental railroad lines that had long been caught up in debates about the expansion of slavery to the western territories. The advent of peace also allowed the federal government to devote greater economic and military resources to the region. The great western surveys thus pushed west during Reconstruction, enabled in many ways by the shifting national priori­ ties in the wake of a bloody Civil War. As a federal project, the central programs of Reconstruction did, indeed, focus on the South, where the government exercised ext­ raordinary powers to ‘reconstruct’ the old slave-holding region, by bringing the rene­ gade states back into the body politic and extending civil rights and citizenship to the newly freed slaves. But as recent scholarship points out, this national consolidation project also played out across the West.5 The southern focus on helping the newly emancipated slaves, the freedmen, achieve economic self-sufficiency and a place at the political table, unfolded alongside the efforts being made in the West to bring the Indians more closely into the American mainstream. But if the freedmen welcomed the chance to own property, have access to schools and churches, and obtain the eco­ nomic independence long-denied to them under slavery, the Indians did not necessa­ rily want the same things. They prized their political independence and the distinc­ tiveness of their languages and cultures. Nonetheless, the federal government sought to end the traditional nomadic practices of many of the tribes, and to push them onto reservations where they would be encouraged to become sedentary farmers, and be schooled in the white man’s ways. Reconstruction was a project of political consolida­ tion, but it represented a push towards economic and cultural consolidation as well. If we examine the western survey photographs against this larger historical back­ drop, we can begin to see not just what they include, but also what they exclude from their vision of the region. The western landscape photographs depict a place without conflict, and full of possibilities. They might offer a glimpse of an observed world, but they also represent an aspirational world, free of struggle, racial conflict or the peoples who might threaten the newly imagined American order of things. To understand the original meanings of these photographs, we need to take them off the museum walls where we find them now. We need to turn away from an art historical focus on style to focus more on historical context, reexamining them in the original government-sponsored albums and archives where they were gathered first. There, almost always, they were accompanied by words. These words directed viewers’ understanding of the images, imposing meaning where none seemed appar­ ent, privileging one interpretation over others, where many seemed possible. History is always dynamic; nineteenth-century photographs, by necessity, static. But words could set those pictures in motion, transforming the still images into rich narratives that looked to the future of the American nation.

5 See West 2003 and also Richardson 2007.

Photography, the Archive and the Invention of the American West 

 47

Consider, for example, a photographic album published by the federal govern­ ment that chronicled the work of the Wheeler Survey of the lands west of the hun­ dredth meridian between 1871 and 1874. The pictures in the album – most made by Timothy O’Sullivan – are affixed to survey mounts, and published with “descriptive legends” that shape the viewer’s understanding of the photographic subject. The first image depicts a snow covered mountain, dotted with dark evergreens, against a fea­ tureless sky (fig. 1). The caption explains that the Bull Run Mountains in Nevada’s mining country hold silver deposits, invisible, of course, to the viewer. It notes that the survey crew had reached the point at which the picture was made with “great difficulty and danger in the deep fields of snow,” still four to five feet deep even in early June. Within the snowy fastness of the mountains, “the inefficient means of transportation” hampered the work of miners who had to settle down and wait for better weather before they could transport their ore.6

Fig. 1: Timothy O’Sullivan: Snow Peaks, Bull Run Mining District, Nevada. Photograph, albumen print, 1871. Original imprinted mount: 41 × 51 cm, photograph: 21 × 28 cm. Plate 1 of the album: War Department, Corps of Engineers, U. S. Army, Explorations in Nevada and Arizona, Expedition of 1871 – Lieut. Geo. M. Wheeler, Com’d’g. Boston Public Library, Print Department.

6 War Department 1874, Descriptive Legend of View No. 1.

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 Martha A. Sandweiss

Fig. 2: Timothy O’Sullivan: Cereus Giganteus, Arizona. Photograph, albumen print, 1871. Original imprinted mount: 41 × 51 cm, photograph: 28 × 21 cm. Plate 12 of the album: War Department, Corps of Engineers, U. S. Army, Explorations in Nevada and Arizona, Expedition of 1871 – Lieut. Geo. M. Wheeler, Com’d’g. Boston Public Library, Print Department.

Photography, the Archive and the Invention of the American West 

 49

Wheeler thus implies that gaining access to the West’s riches might be difficult, but that intrepid Americans could do it. His album makes this point again and again, relying on words to convey what pictures alone could not. Wheeler uses O’Sullivan’s pictures of Black Canon to visualize “the impossibility of easy navigation on this river,” the “perils and fatigues encountered on this journey,” the “arduous and hazardous” labor of his trip. The words limit the viewer’s imagination in one regard, cautioning against a reading of the picture as a picturesque idyll; but they expand it in another, encouraging the viewer to imagine the physical travails of the photographer and his fellow explorers. Such words provide a public meaning for these pictures, making them part of an epic narrative in which heroes struggle against tremendous natural and environmental obstacles to lay the path that American civilization will follow.7 The words in the album likewise make the strange and unfamiliar landscape of the desert southwest a place more familiar, if not quite hospitable, to eastern Ame­ ricans. Hence a saguaro cactus, the cereus gigantus, is introduced as a plant whose fruit supplies an important food source to both Indians and birds (fig. 2). A picture of scenic Apache Lake in the White Mountains of Arizona is offered as evidence that “Arizona, in its entirety, is not the worthless desert that by many it has been sup­ posed to be.” A pastoral landscape of “Cooley’s Park, Sierra Blanca Range, Arizona,” gets deployed as proof that Indians no longer form a barrier to westward expansion (fig. 3). “It is only within the last few years that the whites, except in large bodies, have been able to enter the Sierra Blanca region, on account of the hostile Apaches who were at home there,” the descriptive legend explains. Fear not, it informs readers, the Indians are gone.8 In words and pictures, Wheeler thus lays down a selective memory of the western past, to depict a world safe for white Americans. He erases evidence of the region’s deep human history, to support the American fiction that this is a virgin land. He con­ cerns himself with what has been to better establish what will be. And this is one of the most curious things about these pictures. Photographs, by their very nature, capture a moment in time that is over, beyond all recovery save through memory or the image preserved on a photographic plate. But Wheeler and his fellow survey leaders transformed photography into a dynamic medium that spoke not just to the past, but to the future. Erasing the evidence of a more complicated and contested western past, as Wheeler did, took some doing. But that is also what Ferdinand Hayden did with William Henry Jackson’s photographs of the Yellowstone Country, high in the nor­th­ ern Rocky Mountains. In 1875, operating under the aegis of the federal government, Jackson published a catalogue of some 2,000 views entitled Descriptive Catalogue of the Photographs of the United States Geological Survey of the Territories, for the Years

7 Ibid., Descriptive Legend of View No. 3. 8 Ibid., Descriptive Legend of Views No. 4, 7, 9.

50 

 Martha A. Sandweiss

Fig. 3: Timothy O’Sullivan: Cooley’s Park, Sierra Blanca Range, Arizona. Photograph, albumen print, 1873. Original imprinted mount: 41 × 51 cm, photograph: 24 × 28 cm. Plate 9 of the album: War Department, Corps of Engineers, U. S. Army, Geographical and Geological Explorations and Surveys. West of the 100th Meridian. Expedition of 1873 – Lieut Geo. M. Wheeler, Corps of Engineers, Commanding. Boston Public Library, Print Department.

1869 to 1875, Inclusive. “By no other means,” Jackson wrote, “could the characteristics and wonderful peculiarities of the hitherto almost unknown western half of our conti­ nent be brought so vividly to the attention of the world.”9 In his presentation of the Yellowstone views, Jackson describes the region much as Hayden, the survey’s leader, does – as a wonderland of fantastic geysers and waterfalls, spectacular canyons and dramatic vistas, made comprehensible to readers through anal­ogies to “castles,” “temples,” and other man-made forms (fig. 4). There is more at play here than a simple interest in geologic phenomena. If Wheeler briefly acknow­

9 Department of the Interior 1875, p.  3. The catalogue is text-based, with only a handful of crude woodcut illustrations of western scenes scattered throughout. The descriptive entries for the pho­ tographs are arranged by year and format (e. g., 8 × 10 inch negatives, stereoscopic views) and then carefully numbered for ordering purposes. Some identifying information is little more than a brief description. Other images have up to several paragraphs of descriptive text.

Photography, the Archive and the Invention of the American West 

 51

Fig. 4: William Henry Jackson: Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River. Photograph, albumen print, 1871. Original imprinted mount: 27.6 × 35.2, photograph: 17.4 × 22.3 cm. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

ledges, then quickly dispatches, the Indians in order to argue for the safety of the south­ western landscape, Jackson and Hayden ignore them altogether in order to present Yel­ lowstone as a pristine wilderness that had never felt the shaping hand of man. Hayden and his men were, in fact, not the only people wandering about the Yel­ lowstone region in the early 1870s. Small bands of Shoshone people moved season­ ally throughout the region, gathering food and medicinal plants. The Mountain Crow wintered just north and east of the park boundaries, and viewed the park land as an important piece of their homeland, critical for hunting game.10 In 1871 and 1872, Jackson himself photographed nomadic Indian groups not far from the boundaries established for the Park (fig. 5).11 But in the American future visualized by Hayden and Jackson, there was no room for these people.

10 Spence 1999, pp. 41–70. 11 These Indian photographs were made with his smaller stereoscopic camera and appear in the list of images taken during the 1871–1872 seasons in Department of the Interior 1875, pp. 33, 48. They do not here receive any explication.

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 Martha A. Sandweiss

Fig. 5: William Henry Jackson: Shoshone Village in South Pass. Photograph, albumen print, 1870, 14 × 19 cm. In: Photographs of North American Indians. Album 2, leaf 14, photograph b. Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

As the first widely distributed photographs of Yellowstone, Jackson’s pictures quickly gained authority as documents of the region’s fantastic topography and unique geothermal features. If they were not, as has often been written, the decisive factor in the congressional decision to set Yellowstone aside as a national park in March, 1872, they were nonetheless an important one.12 And they convey one central idea: the Yellowstone area was virgin territory, scarcely seen by man until the moment Jackson set up his wet-plate view camera to record its wonders. Their pictures convey the impression that Jackson and Hayden stood witness to the beginning of a story, that from here history would unfold. That myth would prove useful. If places like Yellowstone had no complicated history of human use or interaction, they were easily appropriated for other ends, including settlement, resource exploitation, and tourism. Without a past, such places could easily have whatever future their chroni­ clers could imagine.

12 The impact of Jackson’s photographs on the congressional debates is discussed in Bossen 1982.

Photography, the Archive and the Invention of the American West 

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But what of the images of Indians that Jackson made? During his first four seasons of work with the Hayden Survey, from 1870 to 1873, Jackson took some two hundred negatives of Indian subjects. At first, he listed them in the back of his catalogues of Yellowstone views. But by 1875, he had eliminated them from those publications alto­ gether. The catalogue of landscape views spoke to the West that could yet be. The Indian pictures told a different story. So he gathered his pictures and some 800 more, by both government-sponsored and private photographers, and in 1877 published his Descriptive Catalogue of Photographs of North American Indians, under the aegis of the federal government.13 This catalogue memorialized a fast-disappearing world, and conveyed a simple message. The Indians would disappear. Whether through assimilation or some illexplained natural decline, it would be no fault of the white Americans. The Indians “are fast passing away or conforming to the habits of civilization,” Jackson wrote, “and there will be no more faithful record of the past than these photographs. To their future historian they will prove invaluable.”14 The catalogue offered a straightforward and familiar narrative of progressive civili­zation, the discarding of old ways in favor of the new. The Lakota peoples living on the Lower Missouri River and in Eastern Dakota, according to the text, were “nearly self-supporting.” The Caddoes, it explained, “now have well-managed farms and are noted for industry and general intelligence.” In dozens of similar tribal his­ tories, Indians surrender to the federal government, nomadic hunters move into log houses, pagans become Christians. Portraits alone could not sustain such a narrative of cultur­al transformation. But wedded to words, the photographs tell the tale of the progression from savagery to civilization.15 While such narratives made broad sweeping generalizations about the histories of the different tribes, shorter narratives explicated individual portraits. These brief biographical sketches appeared both in the published catalogue and on the backs of the portraits given away and sold by the government. Anyone who purchased a portrait could turn it over and be instructed as to its meaning. One could learn who was well-spoken, well-developed, or well-off. One could learn that Little Crow, who “had not only visited Washington, and was supposed to be friendly to the whites, but had promised to have his hair cut and become civilized,” later led a group of Sioux against the whites in the so-called Minnesota massacre of 1862 (fig. 6). Little Crow’s biographical sketch notes that he was killed after fleeing into Canada, and deftly transforms this portrait from one that could serve as a parable for civilizing

13 Jackson 1877. For an example of the earlier iteration of the catalogue with the Indian Catalogue appended to the end of the listing of landscape views, see Department of Interior 1874. 14 Department of the Interior 1875, pp. 3–4. 15 Jackson 1877, pp. 34, 101.

54 

 Martha A. Sandweiss

Fig. 6: [Julian Vannerson]: Little Crow, M’dewakanton. Photograph, albumen print, 1858, 18 × 24 cm. In: Photographs of North American Indians. Album 1, leaf 42, photograph b. Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

progress to one that represents a cautionary tale of deceit and treachery.16 In such individual tales of treachery and assimilation, disaster and progress, would-be buyers of the photographs could read the entire history of the vanishing race. Ultimately, the Indian photographs and those landscape photographs that docu­ mented the government exploration projects of the 1860s and 70s, would end up – not just in separate albums or separate catalogues – but in different federal archives, with the Indian images going to the Bureau of Ethnology, later the Bureau of American Ethnology, and now the National Anthropological Archives at the S ­ mithsonian Insti­ tution in Washington, D.C., and the landscape views remaining largely at the Nation­al Archives, with the other records of the surveying expeditions. In these separate places, they seem to tell separate stories, and it can be hard to see the link between the two bodies of work. But the two stories, one a trajectory of progress, the other a trajectory of decline, were fatefully intertwined, each animating and lending urgency to the other.   The western survey landscape photographs offered a progressive narrative that echoed and expanded the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny. In the American West, they proclaimed, lay the future of the American nation. But this triumphant visual narrative played in counterpart to – and indeed, depended upon – another, more somber story: the narrative of decline represented by the photographs of the West’s native peoples.

16 Jackson 1877, p. 38.

Photography, the Archive and the Invention of the American West 

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The photographer Edward S. Curtis later encapsulated this idea in the opening image of his 20-volume magnum opus, The North American Indian (1907–1930). He called his picture of Navajo horsemen The Vanishing Race, reaffirming the continued popularity and utility of that widespread belief about the disappearance of native cultures. It made the conquest of the West seem inevitable and without human cost. It let Amer­ icans absolve themselves of any moral culpability for the destruction of the vibrant cultural groups that occupied that empty West of the imagination. In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner proposed what has come to be known as the frontier thesis, the idea that American culture acquired its distinctive independent and democratic cast from the experience that settlers had on the fron­ tier, testing themselves and their inherited institutions against the challenge of an unsettled wilderness. “The existence of an area of free land,” Turner wrote, “its con­ tinuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain Amer­ ican development.” On the frontier – a place evoked more through poetic metaphor than geographical precision – settlers shed their old habits, returned to the “simp­ licity of primitive society” and coped with the challenges of the physical landscape by developing a new and distinctively American character: “that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness, that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients, that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends, that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.”17 The West that Euro-Americans encountered in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War was not, of course, an unsettled wilderness at all. But that notion of the West as an unpeopled place had by then been written large in the nation’s imagination. The western survey photographs – produced by government photographers, explicated in government publications, and archived in government repositories  – helped put it there. With photographic captions that minimized the presence of Indian peoples, and emphasized the resources and opportunities available to Euro-Americans, these photographs helped easterners imagine the West as an integral part of the new con­ solidating nation taking shape in the wake of the Civil War. When different govern­ ment archives claimed the western landscapes and the images of western Indians, the connections between the two bodies of work became obscured. But the seeming disappearance of vital Indian cultures is precisely what created the conditions for American political, economic, and cultural hegemony in the West. Photographers made vivid the larger project of Reconstruction in the West. Photographs did the work of the nation.

17 Turner, 1894, pp. 199, 200, 226–227.

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 Martha A. Sandweiss

Bibliography Bartlett 1962: Richard A. Bartlett, Great Surveys of the American West, Norman (OK) 1962. Bossen 1982: Howard Bossen, “A Tall Tale Retold: The Influence of the Photographs of William Henry Jackson on the Passage of the Yellowstone Park Act of 1872,” in: Studies in Visual Communication, 8 (1) Winter 1982, pp. 98–109. Department of the Interior 1874: Department of the Interior. United States Geological Survey of the Territories. Miscellaneous Publication, N. 5. Second edition, Descriptive Catalogue of the Photographs of the United States Geological Survey of the Territories for the Years 1869 to 1873, Inclusive, W. H. Jackson, Photographer, Washington D.C. 1874. Department of the Interior 1875: Department of the Interior. United States Geological Survey of the Territories. Miscellaneous Publication, N. 5. Second edition, Descriptive Catalogue of the Photographs of the United States Geological Survey of the Territories for the Years 1869 to 1875, Inclusive, W. H. Jackson, Photographer, Washington D.C. 1875. Davis / Aspinwall 2011: Keith F. Davis / Jane Aspinwall, Timothy O’Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs, Kansas City (MO) 2011. Fowler 1989: Don D. Fowler, Myself in the Water: The Western Photographs of John K. Hillers, Washington, D.C. 1989. Glenn 1996: James R. Glenn, Guide to the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. Revised and Enlarged, Washington D.C. 1996. Goetzmann 1966: William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West, New York (NY) 1966. Hales 1996: Peter Bacon Hales, William Henry Jackson and the Transformation of the American Landscape, Philadelphia (PA) 1996. Jackson 1877: W. H. Jackson, Descriptive Catalogue of Photographs of North American Indians (Department of the Interior. United States Geological Survey of the Territories. Miscellaneous Publications, No. 9), Washington D.C. 1877. Jurovics et al. 2010: Toby Jurovics et al., Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan, New Haven (CT) 2010. Kelsey 2007: Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U. S. Surveys, 1850–1890, Berkeley (CA) 2007. Naef / Woods / Heyman 1975: Weston Naef / James N. Woods / Therese Thau Heyman, Era of Exploration: The Rise of Landscape Photography in the American West, 1860–1885, Buffalo (NY) 1975. Naef / Hult-Lewis 2011: Weston Naef / Christine Hult-Lewis, Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs, Los Angeles (CA) 2011. Palmquist 1983: Peter E. Palmquist, Carleton E. Watkins: Photographer of the American West, Albuquerque (NM) 1983. Richardson 2007: Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War, New Haven (CT) 2007. Sandweiss 2002: Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West, New Haven (CT) 2002. Spence 1999: Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, New York (NY) 1999. Turner 1894: Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the West in American History,” in: Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893, Washington D.C. 1894, pp. 199–227. War Department 1874: War Department, Corps of Engineers, U. S. Army, Photographs Showing Landscapes, Geological and Other Features, of Portions of the Western Territory of the United

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States. Obtained in Connection with Geographical and Geological Explorations and Surveys West of the 100th Meridian, Seasons of 1871, 1872, 1873, and 1874. First Lieutenant Geo. M. Wheeler, Corps of Engineers, U. S. Army in charge, n.p., c. 1874. West 2003: Elliott West, “Reconstructing Race,” in: Western Historical Quarterly, 34 (1) Spring 2003, pp. 6–26.

Justin Carville

Performing Ethnography / Projecting History: Photography and Irish Cultural Nationalism in Ulster In her much maligned 1977 collection of essays On Photography, which were origi­ nally written for The New York Review of Books, Susan Sontag, in the midst of com­ menting on the aesthetic and moral problems of photography in twentieth-century consumer society, passes a remark on the relationship of photography to history that is equally compelling as it is contestable as a departure point for working towards an understanding of the role of the photographic image in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Irish nationalism.1 In the sweeping, intuitive manner that so exercised critics of On Photography after its publication, Sontag abruptly observes: “people robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.”2 Sontag’s remarks were made in the context of her discussion of the omnipresent camera culture of industrialised society, the rise of post-Second World War consumer tourism and photography’s intervention in everyday cultural experi­ ence as constituting an event in and of itself.3 The broader themes of photography as symbolic of the appearance of participation in the experience of history, and as ameliorating the cultural sense of dislocation with the past, is one worth extrapo­ lating from this wider context in the exploration of photography and nationalism in Ireland. However, Sontag’s association of a compulsion to photograph with societies deprived of access to their own history is more pressing in the endeavour to untangle the threads of colonialism, nationalism and post-colonialism that are woven around the mobilisation of photography to project a unitary sense of national belonging and identity in what we might term, after Eric Hobsbawm, the long nineteenth century of photography and cultural nationalism in Ireland.4 From the mid-1880s to the 1920s, a period of cultural revivalism emerged in Ireland that galvanised a range of interests in Irish cultural life across a number of spheres of social activity, including antiquities, folklore, the Gaelic language, sport and eth­

1 For critiques of On Photography, see especially: Westerbeck 1978 and Lesy 1978. For a more conside­ red response, see: Berger 1991, pp. 52–67. 2 Sontag 1977, p. 10. 3 Ibid., pp. 8–12. 4 Hobsbawm’s conceptualiszation of the long nineteenth century in his trilogy of ‘Age of’ books co­ vers the period from the French revolution of 1789 to the outbreak of WWI the First World War in 1914. For the purposes of this essay, I have extended this period to cover the Easter Rising of 1916 and its consequences for the rupture of cultural nationalism across the entire island of Ireland before partiti­ on in 1922. See: Hobsbawm 1962, Hobsbawm 1975, Hobsbawm 1987, and Hobsbawm 1994.

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nology, in addition to literary and artistic production.5 Although it had a number of precursors in the establishment of the Archaeological Society in 1840 and the Ossia­ nic Society in 1853, it was not until the closing decades of the nineteenth century that the revivalist movement became a powerful force in the alignment of Ireland’s past with cultural nationalism.6 Photography had a peripheral place in the mainstream movements and activities of this revivalist culture and is further complicated in the context of Sontag’s remarks on the relations between photography and the disposses­ sion of the past. Although the revivalist movement borrowed from the iconography of Ireland’s Celtic heritage in the production of its symbols of nationalism and pursued the preservation and documentation of antiquities, arts and crafts, it remained a pre­ dominantly textual, oral and literary movement.7 The foundation of the Gaelic League in 1893 and the W.B. Yeats  – influenced Literary Revival ensured that the oral and the textual forms of cultural production dominated the expressions of nationalism through the prism of Ireland’s history in the modernising movement that John Hut­ chinson identifies as “providing models for communal development.”8 This integra­ tion of Ireland’s past with the popular consciousness of cultural nationalism became closely allied with Catholic identity as oppositional to Britain, even though the revi­ valist movement was most fervently championed by a largely Anglo-Irish, Protestant, urban middle-class.9 The role of photography in the revivalist movement is not so much complicated by this aspect of cultural nationalism’s popular identification with Irish Catholicism as it is by the fact that the most dominant photographers associated with cultural nationalism came from Ulster, in the north of Ireland. A number of prolific photographers associated with the photographic documen­ tation of antiquities and ethnology emerged in the north of Ireland from the 1880s, where they contributed to forging a strong sense of regional Ulster identity within the activities associated with the recovery of Ireland’s history during the period of the Irish and Celtic Revivals. The majority of these photographers were not directly associated with the dominant movements of the Irish Revival per se, yet they con­ tributed to the formation of an extensive photographic archive of Irish antiquities, folk-life, ethnology and material culture. The photographers mobilised the photogra­ phic image to visualise a unitary sense of cultural belonging, alongside their more prominent literary counterparts, who championed Ireland’s oral and literary past as the material expression of Irish nationalism. Francis Joseph Bigger, a Presbyterian barrister from Antrim, utilised photography to document many of the activities of the

5 See McMahon 2008; Foster, 1993. 6 For a contemporaneous account of the foundation of the Ossianic Society which took its name from the legendary poet Oisín, see: [Unknown] 1853, pp. 1–3. 7 For an account of the relationship of Ireland’s Celtic heritage and the revival, see: Sheehy 1980. 8 Hutchinson 1987, p. 46. 9 Ibid., pp. 46–47.

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Gaelic Revival in the north of Ireland from the 1890s to the first two decades after the turn of the century.10 A member of the Royal Society of Irish Antiquaries, Bigger relaunched the Ulster Journal of Archaeology and was a prominent figure in the Belfast Naturalists Field Club, an organisation that brought together many of the photogra­ phers from the north of the country interested in Ireland’s antiquities and historical topographies.11 Bigger, whose interest in the revival of Gaelic culture was orientated toward expressing his nationalist sentiments, organised the 1904 Feis in the Glens of Antrim, designing costumes and organising many of the choreographed performan­ ces of dance and pageantry himself. An exploration of Irish history through dance, song, music and costume, the Feis projected through the spectacle of performance a traditional cultural past that was bound to modern formations of national identity.12 Bigger photographed such events to promote popular interest in national heritage amongst the general public in an example of the “grafting” together of the old and the new in the “formalization and ritualization, characterised by reference to the past,” of modern invented traditions.13

Fig. 1: Alexander Hogg: Harvesting corn with two-horse drawn Repere. Modern black and white print from Lantern slide, c. 1900, 83 × 85 cm. National Museums of Northern Ireland Collection, Ulster Museum, BELLUM.Y12298. 10 Maguire 2000, pp. 52–56. 11 For an account of The Belfast Naturalists Field Club, see: Campbell 1938. 12 I am drawing here on the work of Anderson 1991. 13 Hobsbawm, 1983, pp. 4, 6.

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While Bigger’s photographs relayed the performance of Irish traditions as an expression of cultural nationalism, there were several other photographers whose relationship with the cultural nationalist movement in Ireland was more ambiguous and whose use of photography emphasised the distinctive heritage, antiquities, mate­ rial culture and rural customs of the north and north-eastern regions of Ireland. The most prominent of these photographers were Alexander Hogg (1870–1939), William Alfred Green (1870–1958) and Robert John Welch (1859–1936). All three were commer­ cial photographers based in Belfast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu­ ries’, whom, in the words of W.A. Maguire, were “typical of a certain period in Irish photography and a certain kind of Irish photographer – one with scholarly interests, the enthusiasm of the amateur, and strong links to the Field Club and other societies.”14 The extension of this typicality to a style of photography and of a photographer with academic interests to the entire island of Ireland is an observation that perhaps requi­ res some considered historical analysis. However, the shared interests of all three in photographing the antiquities, material culture and rural customs of Ireland suggests a common sense of purpose in the formation of a vast visual archive that preserved the remnants of the region’s antiquities and rural customs. Their collective endeavour also established a visual inventory of the region’s historical topographies marked by traces of the continued customs fading from popular consciousness, and by a history in the process of being reconnected to the present. Replete with cultural meanings, the photographic inscriptions of these historical topographies contributed to a sense of cultural belonging and affinity to the region within the wider movement of cultural nationalism. It is this tension between regionalism and nationalism in the work of photographers such as Hogg, Green and Welch that is complicated in the context of Sontag’s remarks on the compulsion to photograph amongst those societies disloca­ ted from their history. The pursuit of photographing culturally salient subjects by societies that have experienced a rupture in the connection with their past, corresponds neatly with those post-colonial situations in which photography has been mobilised towards ameliorating a sense of cultural dispossession from an indigenous history.15 The ameliorating effect of producing a visual archive of historical objects and customs is not only rooted in the anticipation of the preservation or rescuing of material objects and cultural forms that are perceived to be disappearing, but also in the sense of a continued connection to a past through the photographic image. The work of Welch, Green and, to a lesser extent, Hogg was certainly motivated toward a salvage para­ digm of photography and was reflective of cultural nationalism’s use of repositories

14 Maguire, 2000, pp. 117–118. 15 The literature in on the area of photography and its social uses in re-connecting with the past in colonial and post-colonial societies is extensive and still growing; see in particular: Aird 2003; Porto 2004; Tsinhnahjinnie 2003 and Wright 2013.

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of the past in the expression of identity and belonging.16 However, their perception of photography’s relations with a history from which they had been ‘dispossessed’ is a more ambiguous question to quantify properly. Ireland’s position as a colony has been subject to fierce historical debate and there is not the space here to cover ade­ quately the nuances at stake within the various disciplines that have addressed them­ selves to the applicability of the designation ‘colonial’ to the Irish context.17 What is worth considering in relation to the place of Welch, Hogg and Green within the revi­ valist activities of cultural nationalism is that their work, like many other revivalist initiatives in the north, was, as Richard Kirkland has observed of the northern revival as a whole, “hopelessly compromised by the very different narrative of partition.”18 This was in contrast to their southern counterparts, for whom a repository of material objects and customs of the past was the ballast “upon which assertions of national cultural autonomy could be guaranteed.”19 In their ambiguous relationship with a cultural nationalism that has become bound up with the narrative of Ireland’s partition in 1922, and Ulster’s establishment as simultaneously both a provincial region of the island of Ireland and a politically autonomous dominion of Britain, Hogg, Green and Welch present an appealing example of an archive that can be read against the established historiography of colo­ nial photography.20 However, following Ann Laura Stoler’s warning against the rush to reading “upper class sources upside down” to reveal the fissures and fragments that uncover hidden histories secreted in the archive, I want to focus on approaching this collective archive along the archival grain.21 Stoler’s criticism of reading archives against the grain is not aimed at the validity of probing the archive for its fractures and inconsistencies in writing the bottom-up histories of the subaltern; rather she asks how can we “brush up against” the archive “without moving along their grain first.”22 The shift “from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject,” she proposes, will allow the archive to be read “for its regularities, for its logic of recall, for its densities and distributions, for its consistencies of misinformation, omission, and mistake – along the archival grain.”23 Following what Stoler describes elsewhere as “the pulse of the archive,” I want to turn to the photographic archives of Hogg, Green and Welch to explore what they might reveal about the role of photography in ameliorating

16 On the salvage paradigm of photography, see: Pinney 1997. 17 On the debates around historical revisionism and colonialism in Ireland, see: Howe 2000 and Cleary 2007, pp. 14–46. 18 Kirkland 2003, p. 64. 19 Ibid. 20 See Ryan 1997 and Hight and Sampson 2002. I explore this aspect of the historiography of photo­ graphy and colonialism in Carville 2014. 21 Stoler 2002, p. 99. See also Stoler 2009. 22 Stoler 2002, p. 100. 23 Ibid., pp. 93, 100.

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anxieties of cultural identity and belonging in the midst of the rise of cultural natio­ nalism during the long nineteenth century.24

Photography, Archives and Ulster Regionalism Welch, Hogg and Green were all contemporaries whose careers as commercial pho­ tographers, amateur antiquarians and natural historians were closely entwined from the 1890s to the 1920s. Hogg, who began his career as a prominent figure in the Ulster Amateur Photographic society, established himself as a commercial photographer in Belfast in 1901, describing himself variously as a “photographic and lantern specia­ list” and later as a “photographic specialist, lanternist and cinematographer.”25 Of the three, Hogg was probably the most commercially successful and the least orientated towards amateur pursuits, and his association with the typical characteristics of Irish photography identified by Maguire during this period are somewhat suspect in com­ parison to his contemporaries.26 The majority of Hogg’s surviving archive at the Ulster Museum relates to his commercial activities of the 1920s and 30s for local businesses and the shipbuilders Workman, Clark and Company, and to his numerous commissi­ ons for Belfast Corporation.27 However, Hogg was reputed for his early photographs of Ulster’s rural life, including traditional agricultural practices, many of which featured in his the lantern slide series that he hired and sold as part of his commercial activi­ ties. Hogg came to prominence as an amateur photographer in the mid-1890s through his use of flashlight photography to document archaeological sites, such as the burial chamber at Newgrange in the Boyne Valley, and limestone caves in Fermanagh, which he described as “rare photographs.”28 Although these photographs are somewhat aty­ pical in relation to Hogg’s broader archive, the historical significance of the locations of these sites suggests a keen awareness of their place within the pursuit of Ireland’s archaeological past as a foundation to an emerging cultural nationalism. In this early stage of Hogg’s career his interests in Irish culture are also evident from the design of the letterhead for his studio in Belfast. Clearly influenced by the Celtic iconography of

24 Stoler 2009, p. 35. 25 Maguire 2000, pp. 101–102. 26 Ibid., pp. 117–118. 27 Ibid., pp. 106. Hogg was commissioned to photograph derelict and condemned housing in 1910 as part of the corporation’s implementation of the Belfast Improvement Order and the Belfast Corpo­ ration Act of 1911. See Maguire 1991. In 1935 he also photographed corporation buildings and public monuments illuminated to mark the Jubilee celebrations for Queen Mary and King George V, activities that symbolised the city’s and Ulster’s loyalty to Britain and the monarchy. On the political backdrop to Jubilee celebrations see Louglin, 2007, pp. 342–343. On Hogg’s 1935 photographs see: Carville 2011, pp. 45–47. 28 Maguire 1991, p. ix.

Performing Ethnography / Projecting History 

 65

Fig. 2: William Alfred Green: Women working up-field pulling a lint wheel over flax. Modern black and white print from dry-plate negative, c. 1900, 20.32 × 25.4 cm. National Museums of Northern Ireland Collection, Ulster Folk & Transport Museum, HOYFM.WAG.1069a.

the revivalist movement, the letterhead included a round tower encased by a sham­ rock, with the lettering utilising the Gaelic script typography popularised during the period’s association of the historical past with cultural nationalism.29 While Hogg’s links with the amateur pursuits whose energies were directed towards the ascendency of cultural nationalism perhaps waned post the Second World War, Welch and Green shared a more closely aligned interest in photographing the antiquities and rural customs through amateur societies and clubs into the 1930s. Green’s family were Quakers from the large town of Newry and before embarking on a career as a photographer he was actively engaged in amateur organisations such as the Belfast Naturalists Field Club, and later in life became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquities.30 His interests were such that he applied for a post at the Muni­ cipal Art Gallery and Museum in 1905, stating that he had “for many years the keen desire to associate himself with Museum Work, and with that object I have devoted

29 Maguire 2000, pp. 102, 119. 30 Anderson 1991, pp. 18–29; Maguire 2000, p. 112.

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all the spare time at my disposal to the study of our local Ethnography, Geology, Conchology, etc., and I have also, through patient practice, acquired a fair workable knowledge of Taxidermy.”31 Green was unsuccessful in his application, but his varied interests in the local ethnography are what led him to a brief career as a commercial photographer from 1910 to the mid-1930s. Green would have come across Welch early in his association with the Belfast Naturalists Field Club and the Irish Field Club Union, which organised excursions for the various natural history and antiquarian societies across the entire island of Ireland. Welch was a de facto official photographer for the two field clubs through his close relationship with Ireland’s most prominent naturalist, Robert Lloyd Praeger, an assistant librarian at the National Library of Ireland who organised a series of annual field trips and surveys that brought together antiquarian and naturalist field clubs from England and across the whole of Ireland.32 Green accompanied Welch on various photographic trips both locally and nationally, and eventually became apprenticed to Welch’s studio before setting up as a commercial photographer in Belfast in 1910. Green advertised himself as a scientific and landscape photographer, and offered his services in the production of hand-coloured views of Irish scenery in a range of formats. Like many commercial photographers working in Ireland during this period, his photographs depicted the local scenery, and rural-life and antiquities in a number of different forms, including post-cards, calendars and booklets for the tourist market and local interest. This diversification of photographic output is common amongst a number of his contemporaries, particularly Welch, and imagery taken for commercial purposes was frequently classified as ethnographic or antiquarian in a number of collections of their photographs; and similarly, photographs taken as part of Field Club excursions could find their way into commercial tourist views. Throughout this work, whether in the form of commercial views or antiquarian imagery for the field clubs, a deep concentration of regional emphasis within Green’s photographic archive is identifiable. In the midst of anxieties about Ulster’s geographic identity within the broader movement of cultural nationalism, this regional emphasis reflects a commit­ ment to develop a highly visible historical appreciation in the popular consciousness of the local topography, antiquities and rural life of Northern Ireland.33 Green’s apprenticeship to Welch was two two-pronged and is likely to have been as heavily influenced by the amateur pursuits of antiquarianism and botany as by com­ mercial photography. Welch’s influence within the Belfast Naturalists Field Club was such that Praeger commented that “his foster-mother in science was the Naturalists’ Field Club” and that his “true contribution to science lay in his infectious enthusiasm,

31 Green quoted: Ibid., p. 113. 32 On the connection between Praeger, Welch and photography in the Field club union, see: Carville 2003, pp. 215–238. For an account of Praeger and natural history in Ireland, see: Lysaght 1998. 33 See Graham 1994, pp. 257–281; Loughlin 2007b.

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Fig. 3: William Alfred Green: Primitive method of Rippling or Bolling Flax, Troome, Co. Antrim. Modern black and white print from dry-plate negative, c. 1900, 20.32 × 25.4 cm. National Museums of Northern Ireland Collection, Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, HOYFM.WAG.1024,

his tireless assistance to the beginner in biological studies, and the magnificent way in which he illustrated by careful photography the natural history and archaeology of Ireland.”34 Welch established the Junior Division of the Belfast Naturalists Field Club in 1911 to encourage interest in the region’s natural history and antiquities amongst younger members.35 His influence in the Belfast Naturalists Field Club and the range of activities with which he pursued in documenting the local history and antiquaries of Ireland, required his obituary to have four separate sections; each was written by a different expert in the respective fields he was associated with, with one dryly com­ menting that his “epitaph should be ‘Ubique’.”36 A member of the Belfast Naturalists Field Club from 1889, Welch served first as Sec­ retary (1908–09) and then as President (1910–12), before being awarded an honorary membership of that organization organisation and of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society in 1921. In addition, he was made a life member of the Royal Irish

34 Praeger et al. 1936, p. 132. 35 Evans  /  Turner 1977, p. 13. 36 Praeger et al. 1936, p. 133.

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Academy in 1905 and served as President of the Conchological Society of Great Britain and Ireland from 1922–23.37 Welch became a central cog in the machinery of the Field Club movement, directing activities along with Praeger, who shepherded groups of naturalists and antiquarians across the Irish countryside with an itinerary and whistle in his hand.38 Through these excursions Welch met with experts in a range of fields, supplying many with copies of his photographs. His photographs were collected by the British Member of Parliament Sir Benjamin Stone, and he provided photographs and lantern slides to a number of clubs, societies and museum collections.39 Much of this interest amongst amateur societies and museums in Welch’s photo­ graphy is likely to have been the result of his photographs coming to the attention of the scientific and political community in Britain, and through the colonial administ­ ration of Ireland. In 1894 Welch, along with Praeger and Bigger, travelled to Galway, ostensibly to undertake field work; although Welch, in fact, had been commissioned to photograph a newly constructed railway line between Galway and Clifden for the Midland Great Railway Company.40 In recognition of his assistance as Chief Secretary for Ireland, Arthur J. Balfour, on the completion of the project, was presented with Welch’s photographs by the people of Galway in a leather   – bound album with an illuminated address executed by the head of the art department at the publishers Marcus Ward, John Vinycomb, a former President of the Belfast Naturalists Field Club and member of both the Royal Society of Antiquaries for Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy.41 From the 1890’s he was also commissioned to take photographs related to the Congested Districts Board established by Balfour to alleviate rural poverty mostly along the counties of the western seaboard as part of a policy to quell political agita­ tion for Home rule.42 Much of Welch’s photographs pictured the modernising policy of the colonial administration of rural affairs and the health and moral effectiveness of forced relocation and housing development.43 His photographs for the Congested Dis­ tricts Board were exhibited at the Viceregal Lodge in Dublin for Queen Victoria’s royal visit in 1900, after which he was awarded a Royal Warrant, which appears in his let­ terhead and advertising throughout the early twentieth century.44 The most significant event that pushed Welch’s imagery of Irish antiquities, natural history and ethnogra­ phy into the wider image culture of amateur societies, scientists and museums was the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s third meeting in Belfast in 1902. Welch contributed photographs of local views and customs to the British Association’s

37 Evans  /  Turner 1977, p. 13; Praeger et al. 1936, p. 132. 38 Collins 1993, p. 127. 39 On Stone’s photography and the Survey movement in Britain, see: Edwards et al. 2007. 40 Collins 1993, pp. 127–128. 41 Ibid., p. 148. 42 See: Breathnach 2005. 43 Carville 2007, pp. 97–113. 44 Evans  /  Turner 1977, p. 7.

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guide for delegates and supplied photographs for its various specialist committees.45 It is likely that through the British Association meeting that he was encouraged to supply photographs to the zoologist-turned-ethnographer Alfred Cort Haddon. Haddon had arrived in Dublin in 1880 to take up the chair of Zoology at the Royal College of Science, and led a number of dredging expeditions along the western seaboard in relation to marine biology, in addition to taking an interest in the physical anthropology of the remote coastal and island areas of the region through the anthropometric laboratory established in the Department of Anatomy at Trinity College Dublin.46 Welch provided Haddon with numerous photographs of ethnographic interest for articles and books, including for his 1898 introduction to ethnology, The Study of Man, in addition to cor­ responding with him regularly to supply lantern slide images for illustrated lectures on Irish ethnology at Cambridge University.47

Fig. 4: Robert John Welch: Turf Slide-Car with straw harnessed Mountain Pony. Platinotype from dry plate negative, 1898, 21.59 × 16.51 cm. National Museums of Northern Ireland Collection, Ulster Museum, BELUM.Y.W.01.54.12.

45 Ibid., p. 13. 46 Quiggin 1942, pp. 56–80; and Carville 2010, pp. 158–175. 47 Haddon 1898.

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If the reach of Welch’s archive was far and wide ranged in its distributions across societies and institutions in both Ireland and England, its focus was concentrated on the local and the regional materialisations of a visible and visualisable history. Both Green’s and Welch’s archives reflect an accelerated concern with the pictorial depic­ tion of cultural forms of local distinctiveness that were at once clearly identifiable amongst the existing community yet perceived to be on the verge of disappearing from the popular consciousness of regional identity. During this period there was not only a turn towards historical interests upon which to build discourses of national culture, but also an emerging sense of a need to claim a regional identity for Ulster in the face of anxieties over nationalist petitioning for Home Rule from the mid-1880s through to 1922, the year when the Irish Free State was eventually established through partition after which Ulster was reconfigured as a new political and geographic state.48 As Alan O’Day has observed, this period of crisis provided “a sense of common destiny among Ulster Protestants who virtually reinvented themselves as a different people, estab­ lished the erection of a ‘national mythology’, while also giving an unexpected geo­ graphical and psychological form to the modern British nation.”49 While there have been attempts by historians to naturalise the partition and establishment of Ulster by tracing back to the pre-historic origins of a race that pre-dated the Gaels, the cultural heritage on which the political Ulster nationalism built its myths frequently served to heighten anxiety of a sense of belonging.50 While the cultural significance of pho­ tography in ameliorating the sense of dispossession of a history bound to specific geographic places should not be over-emphasised, the archives of Welch and Green in particular demonstrate an awareness of the need to document the existence of a living history, in addition to antiquities and material culture, which could visualise a coherent sense of place and belonging. In addition, the importance of compiling, organising and disseminating the photographic record of regional antiquities was clearly identified as an important dimension to forging a distinctive regional identity. In this regard the Belfast Naturalist Field Club played an important role in promoting the rational acquisition, organisation and distribution management of photographic archives. The first committee tasked with systematically organising the documentation of antiquities through coordinating the activities of its members was established by a motion forwarded put forward by Praeger at the Belfast Naturalist Field Club’s 27th annual meeting in 1890.51 Reporting on its progress at the annual meeting the fol­ lowing year, the committee outlined details of the instructions issued to members regarding procedures to be followed in their photographic activities. The work envisa­

48 See Buckland 1973. 49 O’Day 2005, p. 1. 50 Reid 2004, pp. 107–108. Jackson 1992, pp. 164–185. 51 [Unknown] 1890–1891, pp. 231–233.

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ged to organise the photographic work of the club had been pre-empted by one of the committee members the previous year in an address to a meeting of the winter session in 1889. William Swanston, the club’s secretary and a Fellow of the Geological Society, complimented the work of the organisation in popularising science through the pub­ lication of reports and proceedings in the local press, and petitioned for a higher level of engagement with photography by the club’s membership: Photography is a comparatively new art-science, and the more recent introduction of dry plates has so simplified it, and made it easily available for field use, that it has suddenly sprung to prominence and taken a firm hold on the public taste. As one of the popular and fascinating pursuits, archaeology, where truthfulness in every detail is such an essential, is especially a field in which photography can render aid. Our district – which, be it remembered, is all Ireland – is particularly rich in monuments of its early inhabitants – monuments too, with a character and richness almost impossible to delineate with pencil and brush, but for which the camera seems especially designed.52

If Swanston’s remarks reflect an interest in photographic technology as an aid to the scientific work of the club, his main concern was to establish a clear categorisation for Field Club members who combined photography with the diverse disciplinary fields of archaeology, botany and geology. In an exasperated tone he states of the growing band of photographers associated with the club: “At present there is no place for them; they do not fit into any department properly. True the club has a series of photo albums, and offers annually prizes for these; but there is a lack of a system even in this.”53 While Swanston identifies the region as all Ireland, the day day-to to-day activi­ ties of the Belfast Naturalists Field Club were orientated around local subjects. This is particularly reflected in Welch and Green’s photographs of local customs, rural industries and traditional farming practices. Green extensively photographed the tra­ ditional linen production in Ulster’s rural counties which persisted amidst the incre­ ased industrialisation of linen manufacturing in Belfast and large provincial towns. Reflecting back on his interest in what were perceived as archaic techniques of linen manufacture in a talk delivered to the Field Club in 1921 he recounted: Some years ago I happened to be in the Toome district doing some general photography, and saw some people steeping flax. I was sufficiently interested to take a photograph and the friend who was with me told me that the scotching stock was still in use in the locality. To make a long story short, I stayed a fortnight with him and he drove me round the district. I got pictures of several of the old methods used in the county in the manipulation of flax – hand scotching, breaking cloving, hand hackling etc. Curiously enough most of the people engaged in these primitive ope­ rations are since dead, and as they appear to the last to use them, I think they are now obsolete.54

52 Swanston 1883, p. 133. 53 Ibid. 54 Anderson TK 1991, p. 22.

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Fig. 5: Robert John Welch: Old-Irish Low-Back car, Glenshesk, Co. Antrim. Platinotype from dry plate negative, 1899, 21.59 × 16.51 cm. National Museums of Northern Ireland Collection, Ulster Museum, BELUM.Y.W.01.56.29.

Green’s recollections evidence the strong regional interest within the Belfast Natu­ ralists Field Club and the urgency in recording the remnants of the past under threat of being lost, which characterised much of the sentiment of the photographic survey movement in England.55 From the vantage point of hindsight, Green’s practical description of the loss of local linen production is also devoid of the romantic nos­ talgia that saturated similar uses of photography to salvage the culture and heritage on the verge of disappearance that can be associated with the revivalist movement in the south of Ireland. However, his account reveals an understanding of the urgency to document a distinctive regional culture whose visible presence was on the verge of fading into the discourse of folk memory. Welch’s interest in the agricultural material culture of rural Northern Ireland, demonstrates a similar imperative to document the local forms of history rapidly disappearing from view. A particularly distinctive aspect of rural Northern Ireland that pre-occupied Welch was the out-side or slide-car, a primitive form of agricultural

55 Edwards 2012, pp. 163–209.

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transportation that remained in use in isolated rural areas known as the Glens of Antrim. Welch had provided Haddon with photographs of various horse-drawn cars from Ireland, two of which were used to illustrate chapters on the evolution of the cart and the Irish jaunting-car in The Study of Man.56 In a 1926 talk delivered to the Profes­ sional Photographer’s Association, Welch discussed the evolution of the out-side car as part of an illustrated presentation of over 100 slides on “Irish Antiquities.”57 He also published a short paper on the topic in the Irish Naturalists’ Journal , which he illus­ trated with four photographs to demonstrate the evolution of the side side-car in the Glens of Antrim.58 In the paper, Welch makes consistent references to the local com­ merce of the Glens and the distinctive adaptation of the side-car to the environment of the landscape. Slide-cars were used for carting peat Glenshesk Glen and, while Clog­ clog-Wheel wheel carts were used for transporting “linen to and from the bleaching greens in Ulster.”59 Welch’s four photographs, presented to illustrate the evolution of the side-car from a wheel-less slide-car to the spoke-wheeled, fixed-axle cart, all depicted the side-car as a still existing presence in the rural life of the Glens. Empha­ sising a still- living history, the photographs visualised the evolutionary develop­ment of the side-car not as a series of technological changes but as a layering of historical shifts that retained a visible presence in the contemporaneous experience of regional culture. Welch refers to each of the four examples of the evolution of the side-car as still ‘surviving’ in geographically specific areas of the Glens, identifying destinations where the examples of a distinctive regional history, as depicted in the photographs, could be experienced in the present in an example of what Elizabeth Edwards iden­ tifies as photographs serving “not only as a record of how things ‘were’, but of how things ‘are’ – that is, they were a record of the vital present.”60

Conclusion In discussing the use of photography to remedy the sense of dislocation from history experienced by societies, and its significance in forging a sense of communal belon­ ging, Sontag remarks that “As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of a space in which they feel insecure.”61 The archives of Hogg, Green and Welch demonstrate an imperative to mobilise photography to differentiate Ulster or Northern Irish cultural identity from

56 Haddon 1898, p. 210. 57 Praeger et al. 1936, p. 137. 58 Welch 1925, pp. 34–35. 59 Ibid., p. 34. 60 Edwards 2012, p. 165. 61 Sontag 1977, p. 11.

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the rest of the island of Ireland, and indeed from the wider British Isles. The photo­ graphic image was assigned an important role in projecting an ‘imaginative geogra­ phy’ of the region populated with historical topographies that could become imbued with cultural meanings relevant to the forging of a differentiated cultural identity.62 Photography contributed to a desire to lay claim to a distinctive regional culture, one whose history had not disappeared in the romantic mist associated with the revivalist culture in the south of Ireland, but had retained a palpable material presence in the living landscape of the rural towns and villages. In Irish history, the experience of culture rarely implies a communal sense of belonging. More often than not, it designates the clash of beliefs and conflict over history and place. The cultural geographer Brian Graham has argued “that “it is pre­ cisely the absence of an agreed representative landscape, congruent with territory, to which a majority of its inhabitants can subscribe, which underpins the complex uncertainty of Ulster Protestant Identity.”63 This insecurity is in part the result of internal conflicts within Ulster itself about Irish history, and an uneasiness toward its potential use against them in any attempt to state a distinctive regional identity. The archives of the three photographers discussed in this chapter, with their deep concentration on material culture, local customs and rural life, reflect the desire to take possession of a history not so much in danger of disappearing but of being sub­ sumed into the romantic cultural nationalism in the south. While the wider political spectrum in Ulster may be reasonably identified as experiencing anxiety about the lack of a unitary sense of place and a history that could be undisputedly claimed as its own, photography played a vital, if minor, role in projecting a history grounded in the distinctive topography of the region.

Bibliography Aird 2003: Michael Aird, “Growing Up with Aborigines,” in: Christopher Pinney  /  Nicholas Peterson (eds.), Photography’s Other Histories, Durham (NC) 2003, pp. 23–39. Anderson 1991: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed., New York (NY) 1991. Anderson TK 1991: T.K. Anderson, “William Alfred Green FRSAI: the Man and His Photographs,” in: Ulster Local Studies, 13 (2) 1991, pp. 18–29. Berger 1991: John Berger, About Looking, New York (NY) 1991. Breathnach 2005: Ciara Breathnach, The Congested Districts Board of Ireland, 1891–1923: Poverty and Development in the West of Ireland, Dublin 2005. Buckland 1973: Patrick Buckland, Ulster Unionism and the Origins of Northern Ireland 1886 to 1922, Dublin 1973.

62 Schwartz  /  Ryan 2003. 63 Graham 1994, p. 259.

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Campbell 1938: Albert. A. Campbell, The Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club: Its Origins and Progress, Belfast 1938. Carville 2003: Justin Carville, “Photography, Tourism and Natural History: Cultural Identity and the Visualization of the Natural World,” in: Michael Cronin / Barbara O’Connor (eds.), Irish Tourism: Image, Culture and Identity, Clevedon 2003, pp. 215–238. Carville 2007: Justin Carville, “Picturing Poverty: Colonial Photography and the Congested Districts Board,” in: Ciara Breathnach (ed.), Framing the West: Images of Rural Ireland 1891–1920, Dublin 2007, pp. 97–113. Carville 2010: Justin Carville, “Resisting Vision: Photography, Anthropology and the Production of Race in Ireland,” in: Ciara Breathnach / Catherine Lawlor (eds.), Visual, Material and Print Culture in Nineteenth Century Ireland, Dublin 2010, pp. 158–175. Carville 2011: Justin Carville, Photography and Ireland, London 2011. Carville 2014: Justin Carville, “‘A Geographic Fact’: Photography, History and Ireland,” in: Tanya Sheehan (ed.), Photography, History, Difference, Lebanon / New Haven 2014 (forthcoming). Cleary 2007: Joe Cleary, Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland, Dublin 2007. Collins 1993: Timothy Collins, “Praeger in the West: Naturalists and Antiquarians in Connemara and the Islands, 1894–1914,” in: Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 45, 1993, pp. 124–154. Edwards 2012: Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and the Historical Imagination, 1885–1918, Durham (NC) 2012. Edwards et al. 2007: Elizabeth Edwards / Peter James / Martin Barnes, A Record of England: Sir Benjamin Stone & the National Photographic Record Association, 1897–1910, Stockport 2007. Evans / Turner 1977: Emyr Estyn Evans / Brian S. Turner, Ireland’s Eye: The Photographs of Robert John Welch, Belfast 1977. Wilson Foster 1993: John Wilson Foster, Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival: A Changeling Art, Syracuse (NY) 1993. Graham 1994: Brian J. Graham, “No Place of the Mind: Contested Protestant Representations of Ulster,” in: Ecumene, 1 (3), 1994, pp. 257–281. Haddon 1898: Alfred Cort Haddon, The Study of Man: An Introduction to Ethnology, London 1898. Hight / Sampson 2002: Eleanor M. Hight / Gary D. Sampson (eds.), Colonialist Photography: Imag(in) ing Race and Place, London 2002. Hobsbawm 1962: Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848, London 1962. Hobsbawm 1975: Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875, London 1975. Hobsbawm 1983: Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in: Eric Hobsbawm / Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge 1983, pp. 1–14. Hobsbawm 1987: Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914, London 1987. Hobsbawm 1994: Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: 1914–1991, London 1994. Howe 2000: Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture, Oxford 2000. Hutchinson 1987: John Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State, London 1987. Jackson 1992: Alvin Jackson, “Unionist Myths 1912–1985,” in: Past & Present, 136, 1992, pp. 164–185. Kirkland 2003: Richard Kirkland, “Dialogues of Despair: Nationalist Cultural Discourse and the revival in the North of Ireland, 1900–20,” in: Irish University Review, 33 (1), 2003, p. 64–78. Lesy 1978: Michael Lesy “An Unacknowledged Autobiography,” in: Afterimage, 5 (7), 1978, p. 5. Loughlin 2007a: James Loughlin, The British Monarchy and Ireland: 1800 to the Present, Cambridge 2007.

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Loughlin 2007b: James Loughlin, “Creating ‘a Social and Geographic Fact’: Regional Identity and the Ulster Question 1880s–1920s,” in: Past & Present, 195, 2007, pp. 159–196. Lysaght 1998: Sean Lysaght, Robert Lloyd Praeger: The Life of a Naturalist, Dublin 1998. Maguire 1991: William Alexander Maguire, Caught in Time: Photographs of Alex Hogg of Belfast, Belfast 1991. Maguire 2000: William Alexander Maguire, A Century in Focus: Photography and Photographers in the North of Ireland, 1839–1939, Belfast 2000. McMahon 2008: Timothy G. McMahon, Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893–1910, Syracuse (NY) 2008. O’ Day 2005: Alan O’Day, “The Ulster Crisis: A Conundrum,” in: D. George Boyce / Alan O’Day (eds.) The Ulster Crisis, London 2005, pp. 1–26. Pinney 1997: Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs, London 1997. Porto 2004: Nuno Porto, “‘Under the Gaze of the Ancestors’: Photographs and Performance in Colonial Angola,” in: Elizabeth Edwards / Janice Hart (eds.), Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, London 2004, pp. 113–131. Praeger et al. 1936: Robert Lloyd Praeger et al., “Obituary: Robert John Welch, 1859–1936,” in: Irish Naturalists Journal, 6 (6), 1936, pp. 131–140. Quiggin 1942: A. Hingston Quiggin, Haddon the Head-Hunter, Cambridge 1942. Reid 2004: Bryonie Reid, “Labouring Towards a Space to Belong: Place and Identity in Northern Ireland,” in: Irish Geography, 37 (1), 2004, pp. 103–113. Ryan 1997: James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire, London 1997. Schwartz / Ryan 2003: Joan M. Schwartz / James R. Ryan (eds.), Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, London 2003. Sheehy 1980: Jeanne Sheehy, The Discovery of Ireland’s Past: The Celtic Revival, 1830–1930, London 1980. Sontag 1977: Susan Sontag, On Photography, London 1977. Stoler 2002: Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” in: Archival Science, 2, 2002, pp. 87–109. Stoler 2009: Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton (NJ) 2009. Swanston 1883: William Swanston, “Photography as an Aid to the Club Work,” in: Proceedings of the Belfast Naturalists Field Club, S. II, 3 (2), 1883, pp. 132–134. Tsinhnahjinnie 2003: Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, “When a Photograph is Worth a Thousand Words?,” in: Christopher Pinney / Nicholas Peterson (eds.), Photography’s Other Histories, Durham (NC) 2003, pp. 40–52. [Unknown] 1853: Unknown author, “The Ossianic Society,” in: Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society, 2 (1), 1853, pp. 1–3. [Unknown] 1890–1891: Unknown author, Proceedings of the Belfast Naturalists Field Club Annual Meeting, 1890 / 91, 3 (3). Welch 1925: Robert John Welch, “Primitive Transport in Ireland: The Evolution of the Side-Car,” in: The Irish Naturalists Journal, 1, 3, 1925, pp. 34–35. Westerbeck Jr. 1978: Colin L. Westerbeck Jr., “On Sontag,” in: Artforum, 16 (8), 1978, pp. 56–60. Wright 2013: Christopher Wright, The Echo of Things: The Lives of Photographs in the Solomon Islands, Durham 2013.

Ewa Manikowska

Before the Museum: Photography and the Construction of the Canon of Polish Material Culture Introduction This article presents part of research work in progress on photography, surveys and cultural heritage at the time of the First World War and the Polish–Soviet War (1919– 1921), when an independent Polish nation-state was established.1 In this context, I understand the term “Polish lands” in relation to the former territory of the Polish– Lithuanian Commonwealth as of 1772, which, as the result of partitions in the late 18th century, was incorporated into three Empires: the Russian, Austrian and Prus­ sian. Importantly, within these historical boundaries, the Polish diplomatic leaders at the Paris Peace Conference and Polish military chiefs on the battlefield conceived the independent Polish state. Yet the so-called “Polish question” was one of the most complex matters in the re-making of the international order in the aftermath of the global conflict. These lands – between two former powers, Germany and Russia, and forming an important barrier against the further spread of Bolshevism – were key to the future political balance of the world. Moreover, they comprised territories with a complex ethnic and national structure, ones that could not easily be divided accord­ ing to the main principle used at the Paris Peace Conference to determine borders – the right to national self-determination. The Polish imperial claims to the so-called “Eastern Borderlands,” where Poles were often a minority among other ethnic and national groups, were particularly problematic. In fact, only the 1921 Riga Peace Treaty, concluding the Polish–Soviet war, marked the end of these expansionist ambi­ tions and the definition of Poland as a nation-state.2 My main argument in this article is that survey photography played an active and significant role in the complex process of defining Poland, both as a nation, and as an independent state. The recording impulse, which was particularly strong in the dif­ ficult war years, and was pursued through the visualisation of monuments, objects, people, costumes and landscapes, uncovered a Polish historic past – an indispensa­ ble means of national self-definition and a key argument for international recognition.

1 “The photographic survey movement and the visualisation of collective cultural identities in Europe at the turn of the 20th century” – a project founded by the Foundation for Polish Science and carried out in the years 2012–2015 at the Institute of Art, the Polish Academy of Sciences in cooperation with Elizabeth Edwards (De Montfort University, Leicester). 2 Yet it needs to be recognised that this treaty had a profound impact on the process of self-determi­ nation of the Ukrainian and Belarusian nations. See, further, Borzęcki 2008.

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Surveys with such aims were organised by numerous local civic societies active under German, Russian and Austrian rule.3 They had an all-encompassing character: each “Polish” element of the cultural landscape – a small wooden chapel, a barn, a cradle etc. – was significant. In this quest for totality, the societies carried out in particular meticulous searches through private collections, books, and the press for unknown drawn, engraved or photographic images. Moreover, they involved the wider public in the recording project via numerous press appeals. This large body of material was organised into visual survey archives which followed the administrative divisions of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth as of 1772. Accordingly, the local parish church and the familiar landscape were integrated into a wider national narrative bearing a strong political message which blurred the cultural frontiers established by the partitions of the late 18th century. The aim of the surveys was, however, not limited to the complete national visual mapping of the cultural landscape of the contested lands. The images gathered in the archive were afterwards selected, classified and organised into albums, books, and photographic exhibitions, and were popularised through lectures, postcards, and the press. They formed the first visual constructions of Polish cultural heritage. Addressed both inwards – to Polish nationals – and out­ wards – to the international public, in particular to the world of influential scholars and officials dealing with matters of cultural heritage – they had an important role to play in terms of propaganda and politics. In this article I will argue that photography was a potent tool in the creation of authoritative and official visions of a national heritage. I will use one exceptional example – the photographic survey of c. 1916–1918 of the artistic and historic treas­ ures removed from Poland at the time of Tsarist rule and incorporated into the Impe­ rial museum, archive and library collections in St Petersburg and Moscow.4 This was a survey of objects – established, powerful tools of national and state consolidation. Exhibited in museums and at international exhibitions, and in addition widely dis­ seminated through reproductions, they were evidence of national cultural pride and status. I will argue that in the Polish case such iconic constructions were created first visually and only afterwards sanctioned institutionally. Accordingly, the 1916–1918 photographic documentation was the first official definition of the still-valid Polish canon of iconic cultural objects and preceded the display of these objects in public museums.

3 An example is discussed in Manikowska 2011. 4 This article is mainly based on recently found archival material in the State Archive of the Moscow Federation (GARF) font 5115, op. 1–2.

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A Nation Stripped of its Cultural Heritage With the third partition of Poland (1795), which ended the Polish–Lithuanian Common­wealth, the historic and artistic treasures of the state and of the last king of Poland were plundered as trophies by Russia, Austria and Prussia. In the Russian Empire the acquisition of artistic, historic, scientific collections of every kind was a consistent and continuous element of the Tsarist state policy of Russification.5 In par­ ticular, every national uprising or act of disobedience was punished with a regular pillaging of highly symbolic objects and collections. While the Russian Empire had under its control the largest share of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, includ­ ing the former capital, Warsaw, and such important historic and cultural centers as Vilnius or Minsk, as well as several main aristocratic residences, these depredations represented a severe threat to Polish cultural heritage. As a result, the nation was deprived of its main artistic and historic objects and collections, such as the Jagiel­ lonian tapestries (a set of Renaissance Flemish arrases, used in the main ceremonies of the Polish–Lithuanian state), the Załuski Library (the largest Polish collection of its kind and among the first public libraries in Europe), the last Polish king’s library and collections, the archives of the Polish Crown and the Thorwaldsen statue of the na­tion­al hero prince Józef Poniatowski (considered the first Polish public monument), and several important aristocratic collections, as well as those of Polish scientific and cultural institutions. What was left shared the same fate during the war evacuations of the years 1914–1916. For instance, the interiors of the former royal residences in Warsaw were stripped even of door knobs and fireboards. Accordingly, on the eve of independence the Polish nation lacked a symbolic set of historic and artistic objects and collections which could form strong material connections between its glorious past, the present and its future. They were dispersed across the large territories of the Empire, with the most precious integrated in the main Tsarist cultural institutions of St Petersburg and Moscow, such as the Hermitage, the Imperial Public Library, the Kremlin Armoury or the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow. Moreover, they were usually well hidden in inaccessible storage rooms, rarely studied, and their Polish provenance was blurred. In the second half of the 19th century, Polish scholars and aristocrats living in St Petersburg and Moscow launched several inquiries and survey campaigns with the aim of studying Polish artistic and historic objects and collections kept in Imperial institutions; nevertheless, the awareness of the existence of a nati­ onal material historic and artistic past was still very limited and grounded in historic accounts and legends. Paradoxically, such secondhand knowledge was sufficient to create strong feelings of national pride and belonging in the highest ranks of society and to form mythologies of a Polish glorious past around these hidden and neverseen objects.

5 Matelski 2003.

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With the outbreak of the Russian Revolution and the global conflict, and with changes in the Imperial and Soviet policies towards the Polish nation, these treasures became a truly national concern: the protection of the artistic and historic objects kept in the Imperial collections, and those evacuated both by the Russian army and by the numerous war refugees, became one of the priorities of the numerous Polish civic organisations established both to meet all the possible needs of the Polish citi­ zens of the Empire and of the war captives and refugees, and to represent officially the interests of the nation and of the future Polish state before the Imperial and Soviet authorities.6 In the framework of this network of civic associations, the official claims on objects relating to Polish cultural heritage were formulated. Accordingly, it was in revolutionary Moscow and St Petersburg that the Polish cultural and artistic objects became a state affair.

The Survey of the Imperial Museums and Collections at the Time of the Revolution In 1916, as part of the activity of two Moscow-based Polish organisations  – the Monuments Department of the Polish Society for the Relief of War Victims, and the Society of Polish Engineers in Russia – a large-scale survey of Polish artistic and his­ toric objects in Moscow’s museums was launched. The Monuments Department, one among many similar bodies, helped to look after the approximately 800,000 Polish war captives and refugees in the Russian Empire,7 including caring for their evacu­ ated belongings, in particular for precious national artistic and historic objects. The Society of Polish Engineers in Russia  – bringing together a large group of highly qualified Polish technicians, working not only in Moscow but across the whole of the Russian Empire – aimed at preparing an outline for the economic and industrial development of Poland.8 Both associations were conceived as forerunners and advo­ cates of the future Polish state, and several of their initiatives need be seen in this light. This is the case with their joint project – the survey undertaken in the Moscow museums. The Kremlin Armoury and the Rumyantsev Museum formed the main target. First, the printed catalogues of these institutions were scrutinised for objects with Polish links. Secondly, thanks to personal connections with state and museum officials, several members gained access to the storage and exhibition spaces with the aim of searching for Polish objects and collections. From the beginning of 1917, par­ allel surveys were also conducted in St. Petersburg, where in the period between the February and the October Revolutions, Polish scholars were officially admitted to the

6 Manikowska 2010, pp. 55–81. 7 Gatrell 1999, pp. 154–157. 8 Piłatowicz 2003, pp. 35–36.

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main Imperial museums, archives and libraries. Accordingly, within the framework of the activity of the Liquidation Commission – established by the new Soviet govern­ ment to prepare the ground for the dissolution of all kinds of institutional subjection between Poland and the former Empire  – they prepared a list of official claims. In fact, the Polish organisations managed to function very well in the unstable situation prevalent at the time of the Russian Revolution; they exploited every possible chance to get access to the collections, and to secure promises of future restitution. Given the instability of the changing revolutionary political climate, the surveys were perceived in the first place as a gathering of legal evidence to be used in the future. Their results were drawn up into extensive and detailed lists; these included every possible object that could be claimed by the Polish nation. The single entries consisted of inventory numbers, the precise whereabouts, and detailed descriptions of the objects, along with reconstructions of the circumstances of their removal from Poland, with refer­ ences to historical sources and accounts, gained from library and archival research.9 Because of the fear of revolutionary sequestrations, several copies were made of these lists and these were hidden in different places.

Photography as Evidence Photography was an essential tool of the inquiries and the associations successfully applied for permission to take survey pictures. Three cameras were acquired by the Monuments Department and were used to capture not only single objects, but also to make shots which would make it possible to locate at a later time the halls or storage areas of the museums, even by such small details as the crates, and to establish the precise date of the shot (fig. 1). Accordingly, the survey instructions recommended the photographing of objects in the architectural environment of the storage and exhibi­ tion spaces, which could comprise the whole hanging or exhibition arrangements, as well as with people. Such visual evidence turned out to be very important in the official bilateral restitution negotiations undertaken on the basis of the 1921 peace treaty between Poland and Soviet Russia, which required well documented claims not only with proofs of the Polish provenance of the single objects and collections and of their illicit removal, but also of their present existence and whereabouts.10 In fact, the Soviet museum officials repeatedly implied that the objects claimed were destroyed or removed during the revolutionary chaos. Following the outbreak of the Polish– Soviet war, the access of Polish scholars to the Imperial cultural institutions was again severely restricted; photographs formed the only possible undeniable evidence against Soviet claims that the objects no longer existed. Given the awareness of the

9 See, for example, the Kremlin Armoury lists: GARF, font 5115, op. 2, nr. 130. 10 Manikowska 2013.

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Fig. 1: Stefan Plater-Zyberk?: Two Bacciarelli portraits in the Cremlin armory. Photograph, albumen print, c. 1917–1918. Album page: 15 × 20 cm, photograph: 10 × 14.8 cm, in: Marian Morelowski’s Album rewindykacyjny, Biblioteka Narodowa, Warsaw.

importance of such evidence, the Soviet government strived to prevent its use in the negotiations by sequestering the Monuments Department survey archive. Yet such documentation was generally acknowledged by its authors as public property and was safeguarded with care. Accordingly, when possible, several sets of posi­tives were printed, to be kept not only in the Department’s archive, but also in private houses. The sets, which survived the revolutionary turmoil and the following sequestrations, acted as precious evidence in the restitution negotiations. The official proceedings of the bilateral commission of experts recalled only one example of such evidential use of photography. This was in reference to the restitu­ tion claim for the Jagiellonian tapestries. Initially, the Russian experts firmly main­ tained that a large number of pieces from this set had been destroyed during the chaos of the October Revolution. However, the Poles presented a photographic album of the arrases, and proved through careful analysis that the pictures were taken after 1917 in the former Imperial residence of Gatchina. The case of the Jagiellonian tapes­ tries was just one of many restitution debates in which Polish experts made use of pho­tographic evidence. The only three photographic albums which have emerged as a result of this research, and which can be connected to the 1916–1918 survey cam­ paign seem to confirm this assertion. They share the same format: the pictures are the

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Fig. 2: A page from Marian Morelowski’s Album rewindykacyjny with his hand-written annotations, c. 1921–1924, Biblioteka Narodowa, Warsaw.

same size and are presented in the same way, with one or two images glued on one page. Two of the albums show paintings from the Vilnius collections in the Rumy­ antsev Museum,11 while one is dedicated to various precious objects from the former royal collections, residences and treasuries kept in the Kremlin Armoury.12 Thus, they presumably formed part of a larger collection of albums presenting the claims in groups, according to their original and / or present whereabouts, that is following the way in which the claims were discussed at the sessions of the bilateral commission. Their use in the negotiations is confirmed by the Kremlin Armoury album, where each picture has a red, hand-written note with the inventory number and the Russian title (fig. 1, 3). Accordingly, the album was most certainly used to present and identify the objects; it bears numerous hand-written annotations (fig. 2) by Marian Morelowski, the president of the Monuments Department and one of the main Polish members of the bilateral commission of experts.

11 Cracow, Archiwum Państwowe w Krakowie, Alb. 6–7. 12 Warsaw, Biblioteka Narodowa, AFF II 48.

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Photography and the Creation of a Canon of National Culture There is one striking difference between the two Rumyantsev Museum and the Kremlin Armoury albums. This is the disparity both in the experience of the pho­ tographers involved in the survey project and in the quality of the photographic equipment. Among the three photographers mentioned in the project, only one can be shown to have had significant photographic experience.13 This was Stefan PlaterZyberk, an artist who at the time of the survey had been seriously experimenting with photography for around five years. After the war he became a well-known Warsaw photographer, founder of a successful agency, Photo-Plat. The other two were most probably amateurs. From the scant archival sources it can be presumed that the photo­graphic equipment at their disposal was secondhand and not necessarily ideal for survey purposes: it consisted of three cameras owned by the Monuments Depart­ ment (most probably gifts) and Plater’s private camera. The best was certainly the large format camera with high quality Görlitz lenses donated in May 1917 by Count Feliks Wielogłowski.14 Yet, as large format was too expensive and inconvenient for the purpose of salvage documentation, only the lenses were in constant use.15 I would argue that the disparity in the albums was deliberate and reveals an impor­ tant aspect of the surveys. On the one hand, the photographers aimed at documen­ ting and creating evidential images of anything that could possibly become the object of a future claim. For such purposes only basic photographic skills were re­quired, as well as equipment that could cope with the lighting in museum interiors. On the other hand, the surveyors also aimed at producing high quality, artistic pic­tures of a carefully chosen set of objects and collections. Accordingly, the photo­graphic surveys involved a deliberate selection process, one in which a national canon of highly sym­ bolic objects and collections was emerging. The Kremlin Armoury album is both an example of a canonic construction and of evidential documentation. First, the quality of the pictures suggests the work of Plater-Zyberk and the use of the best available photographic equipment. Second, several pictures are shot in a way that makes it possible to identify the interior of the Kremlin. In fact, the album shows objects considered to be among the most pre­ cious in the Armoury: the former decoration of the Royal Castle in Warsaw – Marcello Bacciarelli’s paintings depicting key moments in Poland’s history and his effigies of the Polish kings, and Giacomo Monaldi’s bronze busts of distinguished citizens  – along with royal crowns and insurrection banners (fig. 3) are highly symbolic objects related to the Commonwealth’s political regime, national history, culture and spirit. Such an understanding of these artefacts is reflected in Morelowski’s hand-written

13 GARF, font 5115, op. 2, nr. 129, p. 13. 14 Ibid., p. 18. 15 Ibid., p. 19.

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Fig. 3: Stefan Plater-Zyberk: The royal insignia of the Stanislas Augustus and Alexander I, king of Poland in the Cremlin armory. Photograph, albumen print, c. 1917–1918. Album page: 15 × 20 cm, photograph: 10 × 14.8 cm, in: Marian Morelowski’s Album rewindykacyjny, Biblioteka Narodowa, Warsaw.

annotations in Polish in the album’s margins. They give a wider cultural context to the objects and their iconography, linking them to the glorious Commonwealth past. Moreover, all the objects depicted, excluding the insurrection banners, were formerly the property of the king or the Commonwealth. This was fundamental because accord­ ing to the core principle of the restitution regime under the 1921 Treaty of Riga, the new Polish republic was recognised as the legal successor of the Commonwealth. In addition, one of its resolutions obliged Soviet Russia to restitute to the Polish state the banners taken as war trophies in the 1831 and 1863 insurrections. Thus, in the delib­ e­­rate selection process, clearly expressed in the qualitative difference in the albums, cultural heritage was being inscribed in the public sphere.

The Wawel Heads Survey Campaign: Photography and the Making of Iconic Objects In February 1915, the Grunwald, a large-scale canvas by the historic painter Jan Matejko, which represented one of the glorious moments of national history  – the victory of Poland and Lithuania over the Teutonic Order in the 1410 Battle of Grun­

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Fig. 4: Stefan Plater-Zyberk: Wawel head. Photograph, albumen print, 1918. Photograph: 11.8 × 8.8 cm. Instytut Sztuki PAN. Warsaw.

Fig. 5: Stefan Plater-Zyberk: Wawel head, Photograph, albumen print, 1918. Photograph: 11.8 × 8.8 cm. Instytut Sztuki PAN, Warsaw.

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wald  – was secretly evacuated to Moscow. The artwork was already at that time a well-known national icon shown at numerous international and national exhibitions, and popularised through various reproductions. Furthermore, since 1902 it had been proudly exhibited in the building of the Warsaw Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts.16 Unsurprisingly, its evacuation was well organised: the painting was escorted by the Society’s director and by Adolf Lednicki, a former member of the Duma and one of the most influential Polish political activists in the Empire. The canvas, which because of the fear of confiscation remained rolled up, was hidden in Lednicki’s Moscow house.17 The huge package became particularly problematic with the outbreak of the 1917 Revolution, and the advent of daily confiscations. At that time the joint assembly of the main Polish associations active in Moscow acknowl­ edged that the safe-guarding of the Grunwald was a matter of national concern, and estab­lished a permanent military guard in Lednicki’s house. Accordingly, the canvas survived the war and the revolutionary chaos due to the determination of people who strongly believed in its national power. They did not see the painting, but knew it well from reproductions, which co-created its iconic status. The associations approached in an analogous state-building spirit the treasures hidden in the Imperial collections. This task was, however, different: it required the unveiling and unpacking of objects which had hardly been seen by anyone living before. Importantly, the new political situation brought also unique opportunities for the accomplishment of such a project. For instance, in the short period between the February and the October Revolutions, Polish scholars were officially admitted to the main Imperial museums and libraries of St Petersburg. The first impressions of the symbols of Polish history and culture mark the beginning of the creation of a visual and material national canon of iconic objects. This was clearly expressed by Aleksander Czołowski, the first Polish scholar ever to see and touch the Szczer­ biec, the coronation sword of the Polish kings, which had been removed from the royal treasury in Cracow in 1795 and after various vicissitudes incorporated into the Hermitage’s collection. He starts an unpublished article on the Szczerbiec, a kind of scientific testa­ment written in 1943, with a vivid recollection of this first encounter with the sword, which in just a couple of years would become one of the best known, most reproduced and most discussed objects from the Polish past.18 This immediate iconic construction of the Szczerbiec required, however, an influential account which would not only introduce to the public the knowledge of its existence but also endan­ ger the same feelings – yet another important aspect of the photographic surveys of 1916–1918. I will present one well documented example of such visual ‘unpacking’.

16 On the national significance of the painting, see Murawska-Muthesius 2010. 17 On the Moscow episode of the painting, see GARF, font 5115, op. 2, nr. 50. 18 Cracow, Archiwum Państwowe w Krakowie, 667 / 5.

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Among the many objects stored in the Rumyantsev Museum was a group of 24 three-dimensional wooden human heads from the Renaissance ceiling in the Depu­ ties’ Hall of the Royal Castle in Cracow.19 After the third partition, this building was turned into a barracks by Austrian troops and the ceiling decoration, consisting of 194 heads and 88 rosettes, was removed and dispersed. Several heads were saved by Princess Izabella Czartoryska, an avid collector of national antiquities, and exhib­ ited in her sophisticated collection in the garden pavilions of the family residence in Puławy, in the territories partitioned to Russia. The heads followed the vicissi­ tudes of the Czartoryskis’ properties in Russia. They were sequestered as a part of the post-1831 insurrection repressions and eventually, in 1869, taken to Moscow and placed first in the storage rooms of the Rumyantsev Museum, and afterwards, together with several objects from the Vilnius collections, arranged in a minor exhib­ ition room. Marian Morelowski’s 1918 description of this room clearly reflects the selection process inscribed in the surveys.20 Accordingly, although Morelowski was overwhelmed by the quantity of portraits of important Polish figures, Polish engrav­ ings, fabrics, glass chalices, and mementos of the 1863 insurrection, this did not deflect his attention from the heads. Moreover, they required acrobatic skills from the spectator: even kneeling it was possible to see the nose-holes only, as the heads were placed on the lower shelves of a cabinet with their necks facing towards the spectator. Morelowski firmly believed that they belonged to the architectural space of one of the most symbolic national buildings: “these priceless mementos should be restituted to the Wawel, the symbol of Poland’s Independence.”21 Moreover, as the Deputies’ Hall was designed for the holding of parliamentary assemblies, the heads articula­ ted the ­cultural and ethnical richness of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth past: liberty, tolerance and parliamentarism. Accordingly, the sculptures were recognised by the surveyors as among the most symbolic objects of Polish nationhood kept in the ­Imperial museums. The heads were not unknown at the time of the Revolutionary surveys: they were mentioned several times in the Polish scientific literature, exhibited from the begin­ ning of the 20th century and popularised through photographic reproductions in the 1906 issue of the illustrated Russian cultural journal Zolotoe Runo.22 In spite of this, knowledge of what they actually looked like was very limited because the pre-war at­tempts of Polish scientific circles to gain permission to photograph the artefacts were always rejected by the museum authorities. Accordingly, the visual documenta­ tion of the heads was among the main aims of both associations involved in the 1916– 1918 surveys. After numerous attempts, the museum officials agreed to two kinds of

19 Kuczman 2004. 20 Morelowski 1918. 21 Morelowski 1918, p. 12. 22 Zolotoe Runo 1906 (11–12).

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elaborate documentation: photography with arranged lighting and the creation of three-dimensional gesso copies. The first one was conceived as artistic and taken by Plater-Zyberk with the best equipment available (figs. 4–5).23 Every detail was care­ fully planned, in particular the lighting, which was supposed to suggest the original setting.24 The meaning of such sophisticated visual reconstruction is complex: by simulating the lighting in the Deputies’ Hall, it formulated strong arguments for their restitution, but it was also intended to introduce the heads to the visual public sphere. In this regard, the pictures first appeared in the journal Muzeum Polskie, issued in Kiev in the years 1917–1918 and dedicated expressly to the salvaging and documen­ tation of Polish cultural heritage in Revolutionary Russia.25 The published pictures were glued on separate sheets of thick paper, in order to allow their easy removal and incorporation into visual archives. In addition, an offprint of Morelowski’s article with all the illustrations was published in the same year.26 The set of the 24 heads was, in 1922, among the first objects restituted to Poland. Yet they were not exhibited until five years later. The commission of the State Col­ lections of Art, which was responsible for the distribution of the artistic and historic objects returned from Russia, firmly intended to restore them to their original setting: the Wawel Castle – with the royal treasury and the exhibition of Medieval and Renais­ sance interiors – was conceived of as one of the main national museums of the new state. The heads – a central element in such an exhibition – were placed in the recon­ structed ceiling in 1927. Accordingly, for several years they were popularised in the public visual sphere only through Plater’s pictures. Both the Muzeum Polskie and the offprint were issued in a small number of copies and had a limited circulation, while the project of printing an issue of 240,000 postacrds (10,000 of each separate head) resulted too expensive.27 Yet, already in 1921, on the occasion of the enactment of the Constitution of the Second Polish Republic, the pictures were popularised in a special issue of the popular weekly Tygodnik Ilustrowany (fig. 6).28 Such photographic depictions not only firmly established the heads as official national icons, but also strongly influenced the way in which they are still perceived today. Even though Plater-Zyberk had aimed at reconstructing the impression of their original setting, by presenting each head separately against a black background and skilfully showing, through nuances in the lighting, their sculptural quality, he argua­ bly achieved the contrary effect – detachment. In fact, Plater imposed an iconic vision of the heads as single decontextualised objects and not as elements in an architec­

23 There are two original sets of prints: GARF, font 5115 op. 2, no. 133 and Warsaw, Instytut Sztuki PAN, Zbiory Specjalne, zbiór Towarzystwa Opieki nad Zabytkami Przeszłości. 24 Morelowski 1918, pp. 18–19. 25 Grocholski / Treter 1917–1918. 26 Morelowski 1918. 27 GARF, font 5112, op. 2, nr 42. 28 Tygodnik Ilustrowany, 1921 (13), pp. 190–191.

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Fig. 6: Stefan Plater-Zyberk: The Wawel heads. Photomechanical reproduction, in: “Tygodnik Ilustrowany,” 1921, n. 13, p. 190–191.

tural decoration scheme. This vision was persistently re-enacted in subsequent visu­ alisations of the heads, in particular in those addressed to the public at large. A good example is the series of very popular stamps issued in the years 1980–1992, which form a graphic counterpart to Plater’s depiction. Another example is the minia­ture gesso moulds of the single heads (fig. 7)  – a repetition of the other kind of visual documentation executed at the time of the 1916–1918 survey – which are still one of the most popular national souvenirs today. Sold separately or with a frame resem­ bling a coffer, the heads were also presented as objects in themselves. They are both material, through their tactility and the play of light produced by the deep framing, and immaterial, in their monochrome quality, which ignores the vivid colourfulness of the originals. They are strongly embedded not only in Plater’s depiction, but also in its photographic means of expression.

The Authority of the Photographic Language One of the main aims of Plater’s elaborate survey of the Wawel heads was to outdo the earlier Russian documentation published in Zolotoe Runo. This richly illustrated periodical was one of the most impressive Russian publishing enterprises dedicated

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Fig. 7: Piotr Jamski: A gesso souvenir of a Wawel head (gesso mould, 1970–2014). Digital photograph, 2014. Piotr Jamski courtesy.

to Modernist trends in art, literature and music.29 Accordingly, it was an important mean of bringing Russia into the Western cultural sphere. Its appearance was artistic and modelled on the best Modernist examples (such as the Austrian Ver Sacrum); the titles and texts chosen were bilingual, given in both Russian and French. High quality reproductions of examples of Modernist artworks were certainly a key factor in the expression of such Western aspiration. The illustrations, mainly photo­graphic, formed a large section in each issue; this was published on glossy white paper and separated by thin decorative dividers. The Polish survey accordingly challenged Zolotoe Runo’s authoritative Western language of art reproduction. In his 1918 essay, Morelowski jux­ taposed these two documentations. He praised the spectacular Rembrant­esque light­ ing effects of the Russian pictures, strongly reproaching, however, their lack of inter­ est in the accurate representation of the heads themselves. Accordingly, the Russian artistic pictures lacked the essential documentary quality, while Plater’s cycle was a splendid combination of both – the artistic and the documentary. Such nuances were not just fanciful: they formed a strong argument in the discus­ sion about the adhesion to the principles of Western science, culture and civilisation. National identities also had to be expressed at that time in the language of Western culture – both through artefacts adhering to the Western canon and through the lan­ guage of their description and presentation, modelled on the highest European sci­ entific examples. The journal of the Commission for the Study of Art History, the first

29 Brooker et al. 2013, pp. 1284–1292.

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Polish scientific institution of the kind founded in Cracow in 1873, which aimed at bringing national art into the Western canon, is a good example of this here.30 This luxurious periodical, produced on high quality paper, expressed its zealous aim both through the choice of the objects and monuments presented – focusing on the best examples from the Medieval and Renaissance periods  – and through the means of their presentation. Importantly, the written and the visual tools were equally impor­ tant and equally well elaborated: the first was modelled on the academic examples of expertise and presentation, while the second presented high quality documentary drawings and photographs through expensive reproductive techniques. Accordingly, the 1896 first scientific stylistic and iconographic analysis of the Jagiellonian tapes­ tries series was accompanied by a full page photogravure of one of its main elements, produced from a good quality print and acquired in St Petersburg by one of the Commission’s members.31 Moreover, this was the first reproduction of the series ever to appear in the press, furnishing proof of the existence of the masterpieces up till then known only from written sources. Importantly, such photographic reproductions were used during the Riga Peace Treaty negotiations not only as pure evidence, but also to prove Poland’s rights over such heritage, stemming from cultural superiority in their documentation and description.

Final Remarks In the war and revolutionary years Polish independence claims were also expressed through the projects of founding of a national museum as well as a Polish pavilion at the Venice Biennale.32 Even though in Cracow a municipal national museum with a strong emancipatory message was established as early as 1879, the concept of such an institution was at that time connected with the nation in a constitutional sense. Like­ wise, only sovereign states were installing national pavilions in the Venetian Giardini. A national museum was still at that time an essential element of the self-image of a nation: it was symbolic evidence of its sovereignty.33 In this paper I have argued that the symbolic order reflected through museums in the Polish case was created through

30 Sprawozdania Komisyi do Badania Historii Sztuki w Polsce, Cracow 1877–1915. 31 Ibid., vol. V, pl. V. 32 Treter 1918. 33 The scholarship linking national museums with national and state identity has increased sig­ nificantly recently. See, for example, the outcomes of the projects: National Museums and National Identity, seen from an International and Comparative Perspective, c. 1760–1918 (http://www.huizin­ gainstituut.nl/beheer/wp-content/uploads/National-Museums-and-National-Identity.pdf) and Euro­ pean National Museums: Identity, Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen ( [30.07.2014]); Guha-Thakurta 2004; Garrigan 2012.

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the authoritative language of survey photography, which at a time of war and revolu­ tion was conceived of as a national and public affair. The 1916–1918 photographic surveys formed not only the first but a one-of-a-kind visual construction of a large decontextualised set of the most important objects from a nation’s culture and past. In their emphasis on the documentation of every single object and in the exceptional care they attached to the visualisation of their choices, the Polish surveyors created a coherent and authoritative vision, one which followed the political ambitions of the nation. These photographic constructions not only strongly conditioned the institutional vision of Polish cultural heritage, arranged in the national museum only several years later, but were also even more convincing and had a stronger effect. Accordingly, the materialisation of the 1916–1918 canon of Polish culture in the state museums established in the royal castles of Warsaw and Cracow took years and never in the end attained the initial ambitious project of a Polish combination of the Louvre, the Germanisches National Museum, the Museo del Risorgimento and the Wiener Schatzkammer.34

Bibliography Borzęcki 2008: Jerzy Borzęcki, The Polish-Soviet Peace of 1921 and the Creation of Interwar Europe, New Haven (CT) 2008. Brooker et al. 2013: Peter Brooker et al. (eds.), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 3: Europe 1880–1940, Oxford 2013. Garrigan 2012: Shelley Garrigan, Collecting Mexico: Monuments, Museums and the Creation of National Identity, Minneapolis (MN) 2012. Gatrell 1999: Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia During World War I, Bloomington (IN) 1999. Grocholski / Treter 1917–1918: Ludgar Grocholski / Mieczysław Treter (eds.), Muzeum Polskie poświęcone dziejom i zabytkom sztuki i kultury, 2 vol., Kiev 1917–1918. Guha-Thakurta 2004: Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post-colonial India, New York (NY) 2004. Kuczman 2004: Kazimierz Kuczman, Renesansowe głowy wawelskie, Cracow 2004. Manikowska 2010: Ewa Manikowska, “Wielka wojna i zabytki,” in: Ewa Manikowska / Piotr Jamski (eds.), Polskie dziedzictwo kulturowe u progu niepodległości. Wokół Towarzystwa Opieki nad Zabytkami Przeszłości, Warsaw 2010, pp. 22–91. Manikowska 2011: Ewa Manikowska, “Building the cultural heritage of a nation. The photo-archive of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Monuments at the twilight of the Russian Empire,” in: Costanza Caraffa (ed.), Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History, Berlin / Munich 2011, pp. 279–288. Manikowska 2013: Ewa Manikowska, “National versus Universal? The Restitution Debate between Poland and Soviet Russia after the Riga Peace Treaty (1921),” in Ulrich Grossmann / Petra Krutisch (eds.), The Challenge of the Object / Die Herausforderung des Objekts, Nürnberg 2013, vol. 4, pp. 1360–1364.

34 Treter 1922.

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Matelski 2003: Dariusz Matelski, Losy polskich dóbr kultury w Rosji i ZSRR, Poznań 2003. Piłatowicz 2003: Józef Piłatowicz, Ruch stowarzyszeniowy inżynierów i techników polskich do 1939 r., vol. 1, Warsaw 2003. Morelowski 1918: Marian Morelowski, Głowy wawelskie w Rumiancewskim muzeum w Moskwie, Kiev 1918. Murawska-Muthesius 2010: Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius (ed.), Jan Matejko’s Battle of Grunwald. New Approches, Warsaw 2010. Treter 1918: Mieczysław Treter, “Muzea współczesne Studjum muzeologiczne II. Publiczne zbiory muzealne w Polsce i ich przyszły rozwój,” in: Ludgar Grocholski / Mieczysław Treter (eds.), Muzeum Polskie poświęcone dziejom i zabytkom sztuki i kultury, vol. 2, 1918, pp. 1–70. Treter 1922: Mieczysław Treter, Organizacja zbiorów państwowych Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej. Odbitka z “Wiadomości Archeologicznych,” Warsaw 1922.

Joško Belamarić

Dalmatia in the Visual Narrative. Georg Kowalczyk and Cornelius Gurlitt: An Atlas of Photographs of Dalmatian Monuments Two large photographic atlases with representative selections of motifs from Dalma­ tian art history battled it out in 1910 for the attention of the Austrian and European publics, in a classic publishing-world competition. First in Vienna (Franz Malot) and then in Berlin (Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft), two opulently appointed albums were published, with high-quality printing form and featured 132 plates of folio-format photomechanical reproductions of photographs. The images had been taken in the summer and autumn of the previous year by Georg Kowalczyk, an Austrian art his­ torian and the director of the Historisches Museum in Vienna. They were published with a preface by the already celebrated Cornelius Gurlitt, professor of art history and historical structures at the Technische Universität Dresden.1 The first volume of the Kowalczyk work contained photographs of Split and Salona, and one plate with pictures of pre-Romanesque reliefs from Knin. The second had photographs of monu­ ments from Zadar, Rab, Šibenik, Trogir, Korčula, Dubrovnik and Kotor. At the same time, the well-known Viennese publisher Anton Schroll started publishing a collection of photographs entitled Dalmatiens Architektur und Plastik (alternatively Bau- und Kunstdenkmale in Dalmatien) edited by Ćiril Metod Iveković, an active architect, conservator, archaeologist and restorer (who had lived in Zadar since 1896), and since 1897 had been a corresponding member of the Central Com­ mission für Kunst- und historische Denkmale in Vienna.2 His plan was to create a oneof-a-kind survey of monuments in Dalmatia, in a series of 25 volumes – intended to come out at the rate of one or two a year – each one containing 60 plates, amounting ultimately to as many as 3,000 pictures. This work was published in several versions, first in six albums with photographs, and then in two books with photomechanical reproductions of the photographs, and then at the end in Belgrade in 1928, also in six albums with photographs. Iveković’s photographs were taken – as observed by Abdulah Seferović, leading expert on the history of photography in Dalmatia – with an outstanding understanding of the medium itself and a perhaps still deeper knowl­

1 Kowalczyk 1910b. For his biography see: Schubert 1966, p.  327 f.; [28.05.2014]. Georg Kowalczyk previously published an equally ambi­ tious book: Kowalczyk 1910a. 2 Iveković 1910–1914; Marković 1992; Ćorić 2010, p. 185.

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 Joško Belamarić

Fig. 1: Georg Kowalczyk: Msgr Frane Bulić at his Tusculum in Salona. Photograph in collotype, 1909; 24.5 × 17 cm. Archiv of F. Bulić in the ­Conservation Department of the Ministry of Culture in Split.

edge of the nature of what he was shooting.3 Kowalczyk’s aim, on the other hand, was to make his images look as close to etchings as possible: “with the reduction of the tone, the authenticity of the photograph was diminished; the image was left without the poetic harmony of light and shade.”4 In spite of this, we have before us a coherent collection of images of monuments in excellent hierarchical order, with some genu­ inely classic shots that could be repeated by no camera of today. It was customary at that time for such scholars to dedicate their works to local experts who had not only opened up the closed world of Dalmatian monuments to them but had with their comprehensive erudition often guided them in their con­ clusions. For example, when preparing his work Dalmatia, the Quarnero and Istria,5 T. G. Jackson found two authoritative pilots, the then very young conservator Msgr Frane Bulić, and Josip Alačević.6 Kowalczyk’s atlas of photographs was dedicated to

3 Seferović 2009, pp. 181–200. 4 Ibid., p. 195. 5 Jackson 1887. 6 The first had just, in 1883, been transferred from Zadar to Split, to take up the posts of Headmaster of the Classics High School, Director of the Archaeological Museum, and Conservator for Split and its environs. It seems that Alačević made a bigger impression on Jackson. This may come as surprise to anyone who does not know the intellectual stature of this unfortunately little known Split polymath; he was a judge, historian and archaeologist, a conservator of antiquities for the archives of the Split district (1878–1887), a corresponding member of archaeological institutes in Berlin and Vienna, and, with his relative Mihovil Glavinić, he started the Bulletino di archeologia e storia dalmata (the editorial

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Frane Bulić (the “Schliemann of Salona”), the best-versed guide to the many foreign ­scholars and scholarly missions in Dalmatia.7 The photographic albums of Kowalczyk and Iveković were the summit of a rela­ tively long and very important tradition of albums published by a series of impor­ tant photographers of their time: Baron Raimund Stillfried von Rathenitz, Alois Beer, Emil Stengel, Nikola Andrović & Giuseppe Goldstein, Tomaso Burato, Franz Laforest, Hubert Vaffier, Josef Wlha. They all contain brilliant shots of the Dalmatian architec­ tural heritage. Standing at the beginning of the whole series is a grand album of 24 photographs, mainly reportage in character, depicting the travels of Emperor Franz Joseph I around Dalmatia in 1875; this was published by Nikola Andrović and Giu­ seppe Goldstein, with accompanying text in Croatian, Italian and German. Marking the same event, Tomaso Burato prepared an album of 19 albumen prints of brilliant quality featuring the most important monuments in Zadar. His last album, published in 1894, had as many as 80 photographs of the most important monuments and views in Zadar. The central figure in photography in Dalmatia from 1872 when he moved from Dubrovnik to Zadar until his death in 1910, Burato photographed for, among

Fig. 2: Ćiril Metod Iveković: The Peristyle of Diocletian’s Palace. Photomechanical reproduction of photograph in platinotype. Published in the atlas: Dalmatiens Architektur und Plastik, Vienna 1910–1914, vol. VI–VIII, Pl. 204, 1.

board joined by Bulić from 1884) – which is now today the Vjesnik za arheologiju i povijest dalmatinsku of the Split Archaeological Museum. 7 Bonačić Mandinić 1984, pp. 69–149. Frane Bulić was of equally great help in the field to both Aus­ trian and French researchers at the beginning of the twentieth century. See: Niemann 1910 / 2005; Hébrard / Zeiller 1912.

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 Joško Belamarić

Fig. 3: Georg Kowalczyk: The Peristyle of Diocletian’s Palace. Photomechanical reproduction of photograph in collotype. Published in the atlas: Denkmaeler der Kunst in Dalmatien, Berlin 1910, vol. I, Pl. 23.

others, distinguished Viennese art historians such as Rudolf Eitelberger (1817–1885) and Max Eisler (1881–1937) and as early as 1884 set up his First Institute in Dalmatia for Photo-Mechanical Printing.8 These photographic albums, issued at the end of the nineteenth century in Zadar, Split and Vienna, show us the attempt being made to use the medium of photography to define the cultural identity of Dalmatia, one of the Habsburg prov­ inces that the Viennese metropolis and Europe as a whole were increasingly disco­ vering. But the medium of photography had actually been preceded by relatively numerous albums of lithographs and watercolours, most often with views of the Dalmatian towns and spectacular landscape formations. The most important was one with watercolours by the Viennese plein air painters of the Biedermeier, father and son, Jakob and Rudolf von Alt, created on commission by Archduke Ferdinand (from 1835, Emperor of Austria Ferdinand I), for his “peep box paintings,” which featured three hundred of the most important places in the Austrian domains and in neighbouring countries. In 1840 Jakob and Rudolf von Alt (the latter known as, with justice, “the Viennese Canaletto”) travelled around Dalmatia from Zadar and Šibenik via Trogir and Split as far as Dubrovnik and Kotor, leaving us a series of vistas of outstanding documentary value and beauty. Their watercolours, trans­ posed into chromolithographs, were partially published in the topographic compi­

8 Grčević 1981; Maleković / Tonković 1994; Seferović 2009, pp. 85–139, spec. 114. See also: [12.05.2014]

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Fig. 4: Josef Wlha: Split, the Small Temple (the Baptistery) with architect-conservator Alois Hauser. Photograph, before 1896, albumen print, 22 × 17.5 cm. Conservation Department of the Ministry of Culture in Split.

lation Historische Landschaften aus Oesterreich-Ungarn by the Viennese publisher Heinrich Friedrich Müller, and then in the book of Franz Petter Das Königreich Dal­ matien (Vienna, 1841).9 Nevertheless, the lithographs printed by Austrian Lloyd in Trieste were circulated far more widely. On 20 August 1836, Lloyd brought in a shipping line running from Trieste to Boka Kotorska. From the 1840s, particularly in the 1850s, after the Südbahn (southern railway) between Vienna and Trieste was complete, its ships cruised daily along the Adriatic coast, extending their range as far as Istanbul and Smyrna and, ultimately, further still, thanks to the Suez Canal (completed in 1869). Giuseppe Rieger, a painter from Trieste, produced an incredible new, as it were, Tabula Petin­ geriana, composed in concertina shape and containing 15 lithographs 9700 × 160 mm long, entitled Panorama della costa e delle isole di Dalmazia nei viaggi dei Piroscafi del Lloyd Austriaco (Trieste, Bartolomeo Linassi, 1851).10 This edition was reserved for passengers on the company’s ships. In 1894 an express line for Dalmatia was brought in, and from 1908 luxury cruises around the Mediterranean became available. But most of the travellers at that time did not come from the circles of the aristocracy or upper bourgeoisie; instead they were adventurers, writers, journalists, photographic reporters, hunters and painters.11

9 Schröder / Sternath 2010. 10 Kozličić 1998, pp. 287–356.— The Croatian Hydrographic Institute in Split reprinted Rieger pano­ ramas in the book of Mithad Kozličić in 2003. 11 Pederin 1991, p. 248.

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 Joško Belamarić

Fig. 5: Ćiril Metod Iveković: Benedictine Monastery of St. Cosmas and Damian, island of Pašman. Photomechanical reproduction of photograph in platinotype. Published in the atlas: Dalmatiens Architektur und Plastik, Vienna 1910–1914, vol. IV.-V, Pl. 170c.

The cameras of the visitors were at first directed to the views from the decks of Lloyd’s rapid steamers, and from the terraces of the hotels that started to be put up in “Austrian Nice” or “Austrian Madeira” – or whatever endearing nicknames were used for places on “the Austrian Cote d’Azur” or in “Switzerland on the Adriatic.” But this gradually changed into a genuinely interested analysis of the conditions of life in which the local population lived. During 1891 and 1892 the series of encyclopaedic editions entitled Die Österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild (24 volumes were published between 1887 and 1902), devoted volumes to Dalmatia, with important illus­ trative material prepared by the painters Hugo Charlemont, Baron Eugen Ransonnet, Anton Weber, Paul Ivanowits, Franz Schlegel, Rudolf von Ottenfeld, Vlaho Bukovac and Emil Jakob Schindler. The project was launched by Crown Prince Rudolf with a circle of Hungarian intellectuals, particularly writer and member of the Hungarian parliament Jókai Mór. These editions had the ideological task out of showcasing the strength of the Empire, by promoting the idea of unity in a pluralism of cultures and an ethnographic patchwork indicating the stability and commonality of the state.12 However, the scholarly discovery of the historical heritage of Dalmatia had started much earlier. Rudolf Eitelberger von Edelberg (1817–1885), an influential figure in scholarship and culture of genuinely ecumenical viewpoints, and one of the founders of the Viennese art history school, had written a major work on it in 1859, Die mittel­ alterlichen Kunstdenkmale Dalmatiens, revealing in its title a considerable break with the usual focus on the Greek and Roman underpinning.13 His work was the beginning

12 Kappus 2002a; Kappus 2002b. 13 Eitelberger 1884.

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of a line of attempts (of Franz Wickhoff and Alois Riegl, for example) to interpret the transition from the Classical forms to Germanic, Carolingian and Medieval ones as a series of gradual stylistic accommodations of a single formal substrate.14 It is worth bearing in mind here that the Habsburg ideology was able to legitimate its roots in the ancient Orbis Romanus and in the Early Christian Imperium Christianum precisely via the heritage of Dalmatian municipalism, defined by distinct multicultural heritage. There was a constant effort to define Austrian culture as a supranational amalgam uniting a marked polycentricity.15 In 1853, Eitelberger founded a chair of art history at the University of Vienna, second in the German speaking countries (the first was held by Gustav Friedrich Waagen in 1844 in Berlin); he founded the Österreiches Museum für Kunst und Indust­ rie (which took its cue from the South Kensington Museum, today’s Victoria and Albert Museum), and began the founding of the Central Commission for Artistic and Histori­ cal Monuments - the K. K. Central-Commission zur Erforschung und Erhaltung der Bau­ denkmale.16 As early as 1854, this commission appointed the architect Vicko Andrić, a pupil of Canova, to the post of first honorary conservator for the Split and Zadar dis­ trict; a whole network of regional conservator commissioners was formed soon after.17 Between 1858 and 1860 he published an atlas of medieval monuments of the AustroHungarian Empire, Mittelalterliche Kunstdenkmäler des österreichischen Kaiserstaates, and in 1871 started a series of monographs, Quellenschriften für Kunstgeschichte, dedi­ cated to the publication of primary documents important for art history.18 Kowalczyk’s decision to devote the first volume to Diocletian’s Palace and to the monuments of Split and Salona, is not surprising. From Eitelberger onwards, Habsburg’s views of the future of the whole region revolved around the idea that Split, and not Zadar, the metropolis of Dalmatia up to that time, should become the bastion of the Austrian historical mission (“österreichischer Staatsgedanke”) in that part of the Balkans, which until the 1890s was thought of as “Halb-Asien.” In the percep­ tion of Kulturträger like Eitelberger or Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian Government was supposed to help the Slavs stand up against Italianisation. We should bear in mind, that through the whole of the second half of the nineteenth and in the beginning of the twentieth century, a Kulturkampf was being waged, which was ultimately “won by Dalmatian artists and politicians against Italian and Austrian Modernism, although they did not prevail unreservedly on their own national space,” taking, after the First World War, Dalmatia and Croatia together into the newly-formed Yugoslavia.19

14 Rampley 2009, pp. 446–462, especially 449- 453; Rampley 2011, pp. 54–79; Marchand 2013. 15 Vrandečić 2010, p. 5. 16 Piplović 2004; Ćorić 2010; Rampley 2013, pp. 186–188. 17 Kečkemet 1993. 18 Eitelberger 1884 . 19 Vrandečić 2002, pp. 278–285. See also: Vrandečić 2010, p. 6; Rampley 2013, pp. 212–215.

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Fig. 6: Georg Kowalczyk: The Cathedral of St. Anastasia in Zadar. Photomechanical reproduction of photograph in collotype. Published in the atlas: Denkmaeler der Kunst in Dalmatien, Berlin 1910, vol. II, Pl. 78.

After the Berlin Congress of 1878 in particular, when Bosnia and Herzegovina was made a protectorate of Austro-Hungary, and very much so after its annexation in 1908, it became clear that the Empire could find its purpose only in the Balkans and, as Hermann Bahr concluded in 1909, could “be strong there only with the South Slavs. Our future is in their strength. But our statesmen still do not know what we have become, from being the German eastern empire, the Slavonic western empire. This happened forty three years ago. It is high time that we got used to this.”20 Split was preordained, not only by its multiculturalism, but even more by its posi­ tion at the end of the centuries-old caravan route that led through the heart of Bosnia eastwards, to assume a new geopolitical role.21 Bahr again best explains how Austria viewed Zadar: “Here you see first of all a long white wall. Little by little you see that this long white wall is sup­ posed to represent houses. These are buildings as it were of a neuter gender. You cannot imagine that men or women or people live here. They are built in our public style. We have the German language of our army, and in the same way we have our public, state style. Its charm lies in the impression of paper being produced by stone. At first you think: it must be just a drawing! But marvellously, it is possible to enter this drawing and, if you can stand it, to dwell there…. but it also can happen that at night those houses, when the last ship has left, are taken down and

20 Bahr 1909 / 1996, p. 76 of the first edition. On Bahr, see Daviau 2002; Daviau 2004; Pederin 1976. 21 Marchand 2013, p. 30.

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Fig. 7: Georg Kowalczyk: The Cathedral of St. James in Šibenik. Photomechanical reproduction of photograph in collotype. Published in the atlas: Denkmaeler der Kunst in Dalmatien, Berlin 1910, vol. II, Pl. 93. c­ arefully folded up and put in some storage place, as flats after a performance, when it closes down and the lights go out. This is the famed Zadar waterfront, pride of the Austrian administra­ tion. The purpose of it is to hide the old city of Zadar. In front of the old city, an Austrian wall has been placed. Behind that Austrian wall starts the East, and our age ends. It can be said that this waterfront deserves its fame, for it is the symbol of our administration in Dalmatia. Its essence is in leaving the old land as it is, but in front of it rises some kind of Austrian wall so it is not seen. (…) I have by me a very pretty book: Dalmatia, the Land where East Meets West by Maude M. Holbach. This good old Englishwoman who wrote it, believing piously in our authorities, rolls her eyes coming behind the white wall into the old city of Zadar and crying out “This is no more Europe, no matter what the map may tell you.” And then, when on the marketplace she saw the Morlakes, with their swarthy faces framed in white linen handkerchiefs, with heavy gold rings on grimy hands, and rough sandals on their feet: “At the first glance they seemed to me more like North American Indians than any European race.” Appalled, she still marvelled and could hardly understand it, so alien was that country. 22

And so it is not surprising that the Viennese bureaucracy held to the end to this decla­ ration: “Until he [Bahr] is able to give us some other recipe, many will hold that it is best to rule Dalmatia as a colony into which everything has to be at first brought from outside. Everything: capital, men, incentives and ideas.”23

22 Bahr 1909  /  1996, pp. 33–35 of the first edition. 23 Quotation from one of his critics, ibid., p. 153.

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These were the years in which Dalmatia was the centre of attention of many different European experts and this focus gave rise to a number of editions which have retained their importance to this day. Interesting to us is a series of architects, archaeologists and art historians who came from the British Isles, beginning with Sir George Wheeler (1675) and Robert Adam (1745). Particularly important was the work of the well-known Victorian architect and restorer Thomas Graham Jackson, who in three three-week autumn campaigns, in 1882, 1884 and 1885, cruised the whole Croatian coastline, and encased his observations in the three heavy volumes of Dalmatia, the Quarnero and Istria, printed in Oxford in 1887.24 Dalmatia, of course, even after his time continued to be described by each Western author as a personal discovery, something that has remained true to the present day. Jackson himself had several important resources for his work. One of his competitors, a historian and politician in the Gladstonian line, Edward Augustus Freeman, had published a well received book called Sketches from the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice (London, 1881), which was preceded by his equally important The Ottoman Power in Europe (London, 1877), which Jackson used equally as a source. Among slightly earlier books on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, we might mention – more important for the author’s occasional bizarre experiences than for its original schol­ arly achievements  – the Rev. John Mason Neale’s Notes, Ecclesiological and Pictur­ esque, on Dalmatia, Croatia, Istria, Styria, with a Visit to Montenegro (London 1861) – as well as the influential work Highlands and Islands of the Adriatic (London, 1849) by Sir Andrew Archibald Paton. Finally, just a year before this, a particularly important book came out in two volumes: this was Dalmatia and Montenegro (London, 1848), by the famed English Egyptologist and polymath Sir John Gardner Wilkinson. His archives, stored in the Department of Special Collections and Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, include a large number of valuable, unpublished drawings, sketches and notes, from his journey through this region in 1844. However, of key importance for Jackson’s book, that is, for the breadth and concentration of his research interests, was Rudolf Eitelberger’s already mentioned study of Dalmatian medieval art, Die mittelalterlichen Kunstdenkmale Dalmatiens; the second edition had been published in 1884. In his writing, Jackson relied closely, sometimes in fact too closely, on Eitelberger’s ideas, but also produced far-reaching insights of his own. In the same year that Kowalczyk’s and Iveković’s albums were being brought out, Georg Niemann published in Vienna (Alfred Hölder), his genuinely monumental monograph abut Diocletian’s Palace, in which he summed up his several years of research that he had spent in Split on behalf of the K.K. Österreichisches Archäologi­ sches Institut. Niemann, one of the most important figures in Austrian archaeology, died in 1912. From 1873, he had taught perspective and the history of architectural

24 Belamarić 2006b.

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Fig. 8: Georg Kowalczyk: Trogir, the Communal loggia. Photomechanical reproduction of photograph in collotype. Published in the atlas: Denkmaeler der Kunst in Dalmatien, Berlin 1910, vol. II, Pl. 106.

styles at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he was Rektor from 1903 to 1905.25 He got to know Split in 1873 on the way to Samothrace, where excavations run by Alexander Conze had just started. Otto Benndorf and Alois Hauser took part in these alongside Niemann. Independently of each other all of them were also part of the con­ servation projects in Diocletian’s Palace, particularly the restoration of the imperial mausoleum and the bell tower. Niemann then took part in Benndorf’s archaeologi­ cal investigations in Olympia, Caria and Lycia in Asia Minor (1881–82), and worked with Count Karl Lanckoroński in Pisidia and Pamphylia (1884–1885). In 1889–90, he researched Tropaeum Trajani (Adamclisi) in Romania together with Benndorf, and in 1882 explored the cathedral in Aquileia with Lanckoroński. From 1893 he was a per­ manent member of the great Austrian research expedition to Ephesus. Finally, imme­ diately after his work in Split, he took over the business of publishing the research of Teodor Wiegand into the Temple of Apollo in Didyma. Death overtook him just after he had taken on the job of excavating in Xanthos.26 At the time when Niemann was already half way through the work in Split, Jacques Zeiller, professor of ancient history, and architect, archaeologist and (soon to be) urban designer Ernest Hébrard, at that time pensionnaire architecte de la Villa

25 Schachel 1978, p. 121; Borchhardt 1988, p. 80. 26 The Institute of Art History in Split organised an international symposium (16 and 17 November, 2012) to mark the centenary of Niemann’s death (2012) and the publication of Ernest Hébrard’s book about Diocletian’s Palace.

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Fig. 9: Ćiril Metod Iveković: The Franciscan monastery of Our Lady of Mercy in Hvar. Photomechanical reproduction of photograph in platinotype. Published in the atlas: Dalmatiens Architektur und Plastik, Vienna 1910–1914, vol. VI–VIII, Pl. 293, 3.

Médicis à Rome, also arrived to study Diocletian’s Palace. Immediately after pub­ lishing a book about the palace in Split (Paris: Massin 1912), Hébrard was, together with the Norwegian-American sculptor and philanthropist Hendrik Christian Ander­ sen, to design projects for the World Centre of Communications, imagined as an utopian garden-city, the peace-making centre of an ideal state.27 But Hébrard was to remain much better known, in particular, for his urban plan for the renovation of Salonika (after the great fire of 1917), where he investigated the Mausoleum of Gale­ rius as well, and for his plans for urban restructuring in Casablanca, Morocco.28 From 1921 he was the main urban designer of French Indochina (Hanoi, Saigon, Phnom Penh). It is curious to see the echoes of his studies of Diocletian’s Palace, just as it is instructive to analyse the lesson of Diocletian in the English designs of Robert Adam, more than a century earlier. Hébrard’s monograph, published in 1912  – with important contributions by Jacques Zeiller, the Byzantologist Charles Diehl and the Egyptologist Gustave Jéquier – complements Niemann’s.29 The aim of the latter was primarily to provide architectural drawings that were as accurate and detailed as possible. But Hébrard’s reconstruc­ tion of the original appearance of the palace has remained authoritative to this day. In the long series of students of Diocletian’s Palace, these two deserve particular atten­ tion, for their publications laid the foundations for genuine scholarly research into its architectural forms as part of the general development of building. Their books led to a number of competent reviews and new articles – including a prompt notice by Gurlitt. They are still today the essential basis for any serious work on the palace. They

27 Gresleri / Matteoni 1982. 28 Yerolympos 2007. 29 Hébrard / Zeiller 1912.

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prompt­ed the crucial texts of Alois Riegl, Max Dvořák, of Frane Bulić and Josef Strzy­ gowski, which remain relevant today to the theory of the discipline of conservation.30 In the same years – for it was not just Split and Diocletian’s Palace that were at the centre of scholarly interest – Dagobert Frey published his major contribution to the study of Šibenik Cathedral, Der Dom von Sebenico und Sein Baumeister Giorgio Orsini (1913). Hans Folnesics would also write about this very important monument in his analysis of the Renaissance in Dalmatia, Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Architectur und Plastik des XV. Jahrhunderts in Dalmatien (Vienna, 1914), but from an entirely opposite scholarly direction.31 And important contributions on individual monuments of older art in Dalmatia were made by the founders of contemporary Italian art history Adolfo Venturi and Pietro Toesca, to mention just the most impor­ tant from the opposite shores of the Adriatic.32 To a large extent, in line with Secession sensibility, in parallel with the study of the Dalmatian Roman period, and of medieval and Renaissance (but not yet of later) monuments, the indigenous aesthetic originality of vernacular artefacts began to be discovered and celebrated; primarily, the vast richness of popular attire. In the very important but today almost entirely neglected book Dalmatien und seine Volkskunst which the Kunstverlag of Anton Schroll published in Vienna in 1910 – at the same time as the album of Ćiril Iveković which featured photographs of Dalmatian art – Natalie Bruck-Auffenberg provided a whole panorama of visual speech on dozens of local variants of Dalmatian attire.33 Official blessing was given to the concept of Dalmatian folk art in the early twen­ tieth century as part of Habsburg cultural policy. The work of Bruck-Auffenberg, crowned with the book mentioned above, was enabled by the patronage of Arch­ duchess Maria Josepha, indicating the awakened interest in Viennese cultural circles close to the court in the visual popular art of Dalmatia, in its commercialisation for economic and tourist purposes, and in the exploitation of its values in the definition of the national identity, as confirmation of the area’s liberation from Italian cultural domination.34 But this was just one of the signals of a new perspective of the whole space which was from then on viewed as an integrated whole of all the units of Dal­

30 Bulić / Karaman 1929; Ćorić / Špikić 2011. 31 Marković 2010, pp. 43–59. 32 Especially: Venturi et al. 1917. 33 Bruck-Auffenberg 1912. We might add, completely incidentally, that Schroll, among so many other editions that indicated the long-range cultural mission of this publisher (who also printed impor­ tant art history and conservation journals) published in 1916 a no less monumental or less signifi­ cant album by Hans Folnesics and Leo Planiscig. A few years earlier the book Der Dom von Parenzo ­(Vienna, 1902) had been published, with 53 plates of outstanding photographs by Joseph Wlha, court photographer and corresponding member of the Viennese Central Commission für Kunst- und histo­ rische Denkmale. 34 Vojnović-Traživuk 2003.

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matia, its islands, coast and hinterland, and not according to the clichéd view that had prevailed until then of an opposition between the allegedly Slavonic inland and the Latin coastline. The development of the historical image of this area, finally, was on the right road during the Austrian administration, in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Dalmatia had its golden minutes: literally every foot of land, was beatified with human labour, and efforts were made to drain and reclaim the malarial areas around the abandoned old salt pans, the unregulated brooks and the mouths of the rivers. Whatever people might think today: the 104-year period of Austrian rule was char­ acterised by the cumulative strengthening of the economy and culture of Dalmatia. Croatia, together with the whole east Adriatic coast, was in the Habsburg Common­ wealth; before the outbreak of the First World War, the intention was to transform it into a confederation, which would have anticipated today’s European Union, if perhaps a little more elegantly. A reflection of this development is preserved in all the island ports, the roads, and the cadastre, as in the huge majority of what are only apparently modest monuments to the art of living. The smallest areas of red soil in the karstic depressions were culti­ vated. Cultivable land on a slope was made horizontal, and erosion by rain was pre­ vented by the building of retaining walls; we can find networks of such little terraced fields across the whole of Dalmatia, and today they are often revealed only by fires in the wild maquis and pine woods.

Fig. 10: Ćiril Metod Iveković: Palazzo del Provveditore in Hvar (before it was reconstructed as a hotel). Photomechanical reproduction of photograph in platinotype. Published in the atlas: Dalmatiens Architektur und Plastik, Vienna 1910–1914, vol. VI–VIII, Pl. 294, 2.

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Fig. 11: Ćiril Metod Iveković: KorČula, the entrance to the city and Renaissance town hall. Photo­ mechanical reproduction of photograph in platinotype. Published in the atlas: Dalmatiens Architektur und Plastik, Vienna 1910–1914, vol. VI–VIII, Pl. 299.

Evocative introductory paragraphs by Cornelius Gurlitt in the photographic book of 1910 tell us something about this landscape. The inverse perspective from which he approached Dalmatia was quite unusual – he approached it by the railway, which alone disturbs the silence of the rugged waste that extends into the hinterland of the coastal cities, where “there is neither blade of grass nor insect,” and descending into the slender fertile flysch of the Austrian Riviera, he was amazed by the extent of the vineyards. From this area came a million and a half hectolitres of wine, almost a third of the whole production of the Empire, and from a space of just 12,800 square kilome­ tres, 1.1% of the area of the Empire as a whole. Amazingly, in this book there is not a single vista or a picture of the Dalmatian landscape, which is as a whole a humanised and cultural landscape. We might perhaps find the reasons in the sentences of the foreword written by Kowalczyk

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himself, in which he speaks of problems of a local nature that prevented him from pro­ viding “some of those miraculous images that nature offers to the view of the visitor.” We recall here the case of Hermann Bahr who, in the same year that Kowalczyk was undertaking his photographic campaign, had his camera confiscated in Kotor with all the pictures that he had taken so far. But there is no need to list everything that the book does not have (for example, Hvar, Vis, Ston, the interior of Dalmatia) or wonder about the choice of motifs (they are much more coherent in Iveković). Occasionally Kowalczyk does not quite cope; for example, of all the possible topics in Kotor, for one of just three photographs from the town he selected the recently modelled lateral portal of the Cathedral of St Tryphon. But many of his full shots and selection of angles remain irreplaceably valuable. As a matter of course, every writer addressed Dalmatia as terra incognita to the world of science and art. It made their admiration of its authentic values all the

Fig. 12: Georg Kowalczyk: The interior of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Korčula. Photomechanical reproduction of photograph in collotype. Published in the atlas: Denk­ maeler der Kunst in Dalmatien, Berlin 1910, vol. II, Pl. 112.

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Fig. 13: Ćiril Metod Iveković: Dubrovnik, panoramic view. Photomechanical reproduction of photograph in platinotype. Published in the atlas: Dalmatiens Architektur und Plastik, Vienna 1910–1914, vol. VI–VIII, Pl. 247, 1.

greater. This was also the attitude of Cornelius Gurlitt in the introduction of this book, which mentions none of his bibliographic debts. However, several original proposals that he made in this text today deserve our full attention, especially those concerning Diocletian’s Palace. Reprinting 23 plates from Robert Adam’s major work Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalato in Dalmatia (1764), Gurlitt showed the extent to which views of the Palace had changed in the meantime, offering at the same time a kind of juxtaposition of graphic and photographic media. Gurlitt (1850–1938) could be called the ‘inventor’ of Baroque architecture: he rediscovered its dignity at the time of the glorification of Renaissance forms. He had just the right sensibility to understand that there was no need to search in the palace of Split – as all interpreters up till then – for a monumental example of the decadence of Roman art. Gurlitt rather focused on its indications of a new life, rich and expressive, an entirely new spirit of form. He personally insisted on the “Syrian ferment,” which is seen in the approach adopted in its design. Particularly interesting was his hypoth­ esis, rapidly disputed, that Diocletian’s mausoleum was originally a Mithraeum, an idea that Gurlitt first put forward in his Geschichte der Kunst.35 There is still occasio­ nal discussion of the claim that the palace should be seen as Diocletian’s attempt to found a new centre for the Empire, at the crossroads of the Rhine, the Danube and Syria, the most important Roman strongholds. Gurlitt’s commentaries concerning

35 Gurlitt 1902, p. 332.

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Fig. 14: Georg Kowalczyk: Rector’s Palace in Dubrovnik. Photomechanical reproduction of photograph in collotype. Published in the atlas: Denkmaeler der Kunst in Dalmatien, Berlin 1910, vol. II, Pl. 119.

monuments reproduced in the second part of the book (covering Zadar, Rab, Šibenik, Trogir, Korčula, Dubrovnik and Kotor) are today mostly outdated because of the vast number of new facts that have come to light from archives, restorations and archaeo­ logical campaigns, and from the many studies made by Croatian and Italian scholars, in addition to many others from all parts of the world. Gurlitt, in fact, was very familiar with the monumental heritage of the Balkan. He wrote of Diocletian’s Palace as early as 1902. He was the main adjudicator in the important architectural competition for the redevelopment of the Kaptol, the space around the Cathedral in Zagreb in 1908. Also on the jury were Ćiril Iveković, F. Bulić and architecture professor Karl König; when the competition was over, Gurlitt gave a lecture entitled Founding Cities (printed as a separate booklet in Zagreb, where he had previously published it). 36 At the beginning of 1910 he was on a jury (with Josef Strzy­ gowski and Max Förster, a colleague from the Dresden Technische Universität)37 in a competition for a preliminary design for the Karađorđević Mausoleum in the Church of St George in Topola, Serbia. He played an important role in the attempts of Austrian and domestic architects, mainly pupils of Wagner, to create from the indigenous forms of Ottoman architecture a “Bosnian style” using modern forms – “villas for Bosnia.” (It is pity there were no similar attempts in Dalmatia.) Gurlitt brought those who atten­

36 Jurić 2005. 37 On Strzygowski, and his opposite Rudolf Eitelberger, see: Marchand 2013, pp.  21–58. See also: Strzygowski 1911.

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ded his Dresden lectures to Sarajevo and explained to them that “architecture had to grow spiritually from bottom to top, and not from outside to inside. Architecture has to develop from the soul of the people, from the people’s feeling for architecture, and not from the alien customs of distant lands.”38 He taught a number of the architects who formed Croatian Modernism. He returned many times to Diocletian’s Palace, to the dome of the mausoleum, the problem of the coexistence of old and new in the Split historic centre.39 At the time of the publication of the Gurlitt-Kowalczyk album, Dalmatia, with Split and Dubrovnik in particular, was a fashionable tourist destination. A group of Austrian architects and engineers visited the province three times in the space of few years. The most distinguished Viennese art historians and archaeologists came to Split and Dubrovnik as if in a relay. The Frenchmen Édouard Maury, Charles Diehl and Émile Bertaux wrote some of the most evocative pages about Split. Maury stated, for example, “If it were necessary in Europe to find the most suitable stage to awaken for a friend a feeling of history, I would bring him to Split without hesitation.“40 Anatole France, George Bernard Shaw and Charles Diehl testified here to the neglect­ed but still magical land of sun and beauty, as Dalmatia was described in 1908 in The Land where East Meets West by English writer Maude M. Holbach (mentioned above). Hermann Bahr, one of the founders of Viennese Modernism, ascribes in his famed Dalmatinische Reise (1909) the recovery of his physical and mental health to his stays in Dalmatia: “I decided not to die; I cannot put it any other way. The physicians called it a miracle… I am a real heliotrope. I have to turn to face the Sun. As much as the sun shines, so much strength do I gain. This brings me back again every year to the land of the sun, to Dalmatia. It is a kind of pilgrimage, to recover in the light and warmth from anxiety and sadness. Dalmatia is not just a country of the Sun, a fairytale land, a magical land – “Sonnenland, Märchenland, Zauberland” – but also, in addition, a province of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Almost no foreigners go there, and those foreigners who do go have no knowledge of the language and do not converse with the people. In other provinces Austria sometimes thinks it has to play to foreigners a bit of Europe. But there it can show itself undistorted. There it is naked, as if in paradise.”41

The huge Adriatic Exhibition opened in Vienna in 1913 and the tourism conference at which plans were forged for the building of hotels in Dalmatia probably marked the apogee (and end) of serious sustained attempts among Viennese circles  – particu­ larly around Archduke Ferdinand Max (future emperor of Mexico, Maximilian), Arch­ dukes Rudolf and Franz Ferdinand, and Ludwig Salvator – to turn Istria and Dalmatia

38 Vancaš 1928 (according to Krzović 2004). 39 Gurlitt 1909; Gurlitt 1920; Gurlitt 1924. See also: Ćorić 2012. 40 Maury 1896, pp. 64–65. 41 Bahr 1909 / 1996, p. 5 of the first edition.

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into one of the most important tourist countries in Europe.42 In that time, there was already in Vienna mention of restaurants in the style of Dalmatian taverns. The journal Adria recommended Germans not to travel on the French and Italian Rivieras, for they would be leaving their money in the hands of the foe.43 In fact, this recommendation was to be repeated from the time it was first uttered by Augustin Trogher, physician to Ferdinand Max, who accompanied the archduke on his Mediter­ ranean cruises. In 1855 he published a travelogue entitled Briefe während einer Reise durch Istrien, Dalmatien, Albanien, Süd-Italien, Spanien, Portugal, Madeira und einem Theile der Westküste Afrikas in which he extolled the climate in Dalmatia, placing it above that of the South of France.44 It is incredible to read prophecies like this one from the early twentieth century, from the time when the outlines of a serious tourist industry in Dalmatia were already looming: “today’s Dalmatia will be impossible as soon as people get to know of it” (H. Bahr). It is consoling, though, to see that the great major­ity of the motifs that took the eye of Kowalczyk with his camera still have their own unblemished beauty. Indeed, almost all these monuments have in the last hundred years been properly restored and thanks to the records in the archives have acquired convincing art historical interpretations, often new attributions – however the whole spiritual and historical context in which they are located have changed.

Fig. 15: Ćiril Metod Iveković: Ruins of the amphitheater in Salona near Split. Photomechanical reproduction of photograph in platinotype. Published in the atlas: Dalmatiens Architektur und Plastik, Vienna 1910–1914, vol. VI–VIII, Pl. 239.

42 Rapp / Rapp-Wimberger 2013. 43 Pederin 2004, pp. 395–424. 44 Republished by British Library (Historical Print Editions), London 2010; Baskar 2010.

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They represent a distinctive contribution of an exceptionally complex cultural milieu to the universal history of European civilisation. And the albums of photography created by Georg Kowalcyzk and Cornelius Gurlitt more than a century ago offer con­ crete – and not merely evocative – testimony to this setting.

Bibliography Bahr 1909 / 1996: Hermann Bahr, Dalmatinische Reise, Berlin 1909 (Italian translation: Viaggio in Dalmazia, Trieste 1996). Belamarić 2006a: Joško Belamarić, Freud u Splitu. Neomaurska kuća na splitskoj Obali, Split / Zagreb 2006. Belamarić 2006b: Joško Belamarić, “Uz nekoliko Jacksonovih crteža i akvarela dalmatinskih spomenika,” in: Sir T. G. Jackson. Hrvatski motivi na crtežima i akvarelima 1882.–1885, Exhibition Catalogue (Dubrovnik, 2006), Dubrovnik / Split 2006, pp. 29–40. Baskar 2010: Bojan Baskar, „Southbound, to the Austrian Riviera: The Habsburg Patronage of Tourism in the Eastern Adriatic,“ in: Anthropological Notebooks, XVI / 1, 2010, pp. 9–22. Bonačić Mandinić 1984: Maja Bonačić Mandinić, “Nacrt za kronologiju života i rada don Frane Bulića,” in: Emilio Marin (ed.), Don Frane Bulić, Exhibition Catalogue (Arheološki muzej u Splitu, 1984), Split 1984, pp. 69–149. Borchhardt 1988: Jürgen Borchhardt, “Georg(e) Niemann 1841–1912,” in: Reinhard Lullies, Wolfgang Schiering (eds.), Archäologenbildnisse. Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassischen Archäologen deutscher Sprache, Mainz 1988, p. 80. Bruck-Auffenberg 1912: Natalie Bruck-Auffenberg, Dalmatien und seine Volkskunst, Vienna 1912. Brückler 2009: Theodor Brückler, Thronfolger Franz Ferdinand als Denkmalpfleger, Vienna 2009. Bulić / Karaman 1929: Frane Bulić / Ljubo Karaman, Kaiser Diokletians Palast in Split, Zagreb 1929. Ćorić 2010: Franko Ćorić, Carsko i kraljevsko Središnje povjerenstvo za proučavanje i održavanje starinskih građevina u hrvatskim zemljama – Ustroj, zakonodavstvo i djelovanje 1850.–1918, Doctoral dissertation, Zagreb 2010. Ćorić 2012: Franko Ćorić, „Max Dvořák: Restauratorska pitanja – Split,” in: Kulturna baština, 38, 2012, pp. 141–162. Ćorić / Špikić 2011: Franko Ćorić / Marko Špikić, „Izvješće Aloisa Riegla o Dioklecijan ovoj palači iz 1903. godine,” in: Prilozi povijesti umjetnosti u Dalmaciji, 42, 2011, pp. 387–416. Daviau 2002: Donald G. Daviau, „Hermann Bahr: The Catalyst of Modernity in the Arts in Austria during the fin de siècle,” in: id., Understanding Hermann Bahr, St. Ingbert 2002, pp. 95–126. Daviau 2004: Donald G. Daviau, “Hermann Bahr: An Extraordinary Example of Transnational Networking, with Special Reference to Central Europe,” 2004, at: [12.05.2014]. Eitelberger 1884: Rudolf von Eitelberger, Mittelalterliche Kunstdenkmale Dalmatiens in Arbe [Rab], Zara [Zadar], Nona [Nin], Sebenico [Sibenik], Trau [Trogir], Spalato [Split] und Ragusa [Dubrovnik], Vienna 1884. Grčević 1981: Nada Grčević, Fotografija devetnaestog stoljeća u Hrvatskoj, Zagreb 1981. Gresleri / Matteoni 1982: Giuliano Gresleri / Dario Matteoni, La città’ mondiale. Andersen, Hébrard, Otlet, Le Corbusier, Venezia 1982. Gurlitt 1902: Cornelius Gurlitt, Geschichte der Kunst, I, Stuttgart 1902. Gurlitt 1909: Cornelius Gurlitt, “Der Kaiserpalast in Spalato. Ein Warnruf,” in: Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt, 168, 1. Morgenblatt, 19.06.1909, p. 1; printed also in: Agramer Tagblatt, 173, 31.07.1909, p. 17.

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Gurlitt 1920: Cornelius Gurlitt, “Die Freilegung des Domes in Spalato,” in: Stadtbaukunst aus alter und neuer Zeit, 1920, pp. 293f. Gurlitt 1924: Cornelius Gurlitt, “Vom Diokletianspalast in Spalato,” in: Deutsche Bauzeitung, 58 (25 / 26), 1924, p. 126. Hébrard / Zeiller 1912: Ernest Hébrard / Jacques Zeiller, Spalato, le Palais de Dioclétien, Paris 1912. Iveković 1910–1914: Ćiril Metod Iveković, Dalmatiens Architektur und Plastik, Vienna 1910–1914. Jackson 1887: Thomas Graham Jackson, Dalmatia, the Quarnero and Istria, 3 vols., Oxford 1887. Jurić 2005: Zlatko Jurić, „Viktor Kovačić – prolog u regulaciju Kaptola,” in: Prostor, 13, 2005, pp. 23–39. Jurić / Ćorić 2009: Zlatko Jurić / Franko Ćorić, „Kulturno promicanje Dalmacije. Prijedlozi konzervatora Maxa Dvořáka i Josepha W. Kubitscheka 1909. godine,” in: Prostor, 17-2, 2009, pp. 225–242. Kappus 2002a: Elke-Nicole Kappus, „Putovanje u živu prošlost. Etnografski pogled na Istru,” in: Istra: različiti pogledi, Exhibition Catalogue (Pazin, Etnografski muzej Istre, 2002), Pazin 2002, pp. 37–52. Kappus 2002b: Elke-Nicole Kappus. “Imperial ideologies of peoplehood in Habsburg – an alternative approach to peoples and nations in Istria,” in: Annales, 12 / 2, 2002, pp. 321–330. Kečkemet 1993: Duško Kečkemet, Vicko Andrić arhitekt i konzervator, Split 1993. Kozličić 1998: Mithad Kozličić, „Giuseppe Rieger ed i suoi panorami della Dalmazia,” in: Atti del Centro di ricerche storiche di Rovigno, 28, 1998, pp. 287–356. Kowalczyk 1910a: Georg Kowalczyk, Dekorative Skulptur: Figur, Ornament, Architekturplastik aus den Hauptepochen der Kunst, Berlin 1910. Kowalczyk 1910b Georg Kowalczyk (ed.), Denkmäler der Kunst in Dalmatien, with the introduction of Cornelius Gurlitt, 2 vols., Vienna / Berlin 1910 Krzović 2004: Ibrahim Krzović, Arhitektura Secesije u Bosni i Hercegovini, Sarajevo 2004. Maleković / Tonković 1994: Vladimir Maleković / Marija Tonković (eds.), Fotografija u Hrvatskoj 1848–1951, Exhibition Catalogue (Zagreb, Muzej za umjetnost i obrt, 1994), Zagreb 1994. Marchand 1994: Suzanne Marchand, „The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The Case of Josef Strzygowski,“ in: History and Theory, 33 (4), 1994, pp. 106–130. Marchand 2013: Suzanne Marchand, „The View from the Land: Austrian Art Historians and the Interpretation of Croatian Art,” in: Alina Payne (ed.), Dalmatia and Mediterranean. Portable archaeology and the poetics of influence, Leiden / Boston (MA) 2013, pp. 21–58. Marković 1992: Slavica Marković, Ćiril Metod Iveković. Arhitekt i konzervator, Zagreb 1992. Maury 1896: Édouard Maury, Aux portes de l'Orient: la lagune de Venise, Istrie et Dalmatie, Herzégovine et Bosnie, Montenegro, la côte turque, Corfou, Paris 1896. Niemann 1910 / 2005: George Niemann, Der Palast Diokletians in Spalato. Im Auftrag des K.K. Ministeriums für Kultus und Unterricht aufgenommen und beschrieben von George Niemann, Vienna 1910 (Croatian translation with reprinted drawings and photos: Dioklecijanova palača u Splitu, Split 2005). Pederin 1976: Ivan Pederin, „Österreichs Weg an die Adria. Das Bild Dalmatiens in der Reiseliteratur bis zu Hermann Bahr,” in: Österreich in Geschichte und Literatur, 20, 1976, pp. 33–48. Pederin 1989: Ivan Pederin, Njemački putopisi po Dalmaciji, Split 1989. Pederin 1991: Ivan Pederin, Jadranska Hrvatska u austrijskim i njemačkim putopisima, Zagreb 1991. Pederin 2004: Ivan Pederin, „Dalmacija u djelu ‚Die Österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild,’” in: Radovi Zavoda za povijesne znanosti HAZU u Zadru, 46, 2004, pp. 395–424. Piplović 2004: Stanko Piplović, “Središnje povjerenstvo za spomenike u Beču i graditeljsko nasljeđe Dalmacije,” in: Godišnjak zaštite spomenika kulture Hrvatske, 28, 2004, pp. 7–34. Rampley 2009: Matthew Rampley, „Art History and the Politics of Empire: Rethinking the Vienna School,” in: The Art Bulletin, 91 (4), 2009, pp. 446–462.

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Rampley 2011: Matthew Rampley, “The Idea of a Scientific Discipline: Rudolf von Eitelberger and the Emergence of Art History in Vienna, 1847–1873,” in: Art History, 34 (1), 2011, pp. 54–79. Rampley 2013: Matthew Rampley, The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847–1918, University Park (PA) 2013. Rapp / Rapp-Wimberger 2013: Christian Rapp / Nadia Rapp-Wimberger (eds.), Österreichische Riviera. Wien entdeckt das Meer, Exhibition Catalogue (Wien Museum, 2013–2014), Vienna 2013. Schröder / Sternath 2010: Klaus Albrecht Schröder / Maria Luise Sternath (eds.), Jakob und Rudolf von Alt. Im Auftrag des Kaisers, Exhibition Catalogue (Vienna, Albertina, 2010), Vienna 2010. Schachel 1978: Roland Schachel, “Niemann, Georg(e),” in: Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon 1815–1950, vol. 7, Vienna 1978, p. 121.Schubert 1966: Otto Schubert, „Gurlitt, Cornelius Gustav,” in: Neue Deutsche Biographie, 7, 1966, pp. 327–328. Seferović 2009: Abdulah Seferović, Photographia Iadertina, Zagreb 2009. Sondhaus 1994: Lawrence Sondhaus, The Naval Policy Of Austria-Hungary, 1867–1918: Navalism, Industrial and Development, and the Politics of Dualism, West Lafayette (IN) 1994. Strzygowski 1911: Josef Strzygowski, “Orientalische Kunst in Dalmatien,” in: Eduard Brückner (ed.), Dalmatien und das österreische Küstenland, Vienna 1911. [Unknown] 1892: Unknown author, Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild – Dalmatien, Vienna 1892. Vancaš 1928: Josip Vancaš, “Bosansko narodno graditeljstvo,” in: Tehnički list, Zagreb, 31.12.1928. Venturi et al. 1917: Adolfo Venturi / Ettore Pais / Pompeo Molmenti, La Dalmazia monumentale, Milan 1917. Vojnović-Traživuk 2003: Branka Vojnović-Traživuk, „Narodna umjetnost u Splitu,” in: Etnološka tribina, 26, 2003, pp. 23–34. Vrandečić 2002: Josip Vrandečić, Autonomistički pokret u austrijskoj Dalmaciji, 1861–1914, Zagreb 2002. Vrandečić 2010: Josip Vrandečić, „Dalmatinski Kulturkampf ili ‚sukob kultura,’” in: Prva dalmatinska umjetnička izložba, Split 1908, Exhibition Catalogue (Split, Galerija umjetnina, 2010), Split 2010, pp. 3–9. Yerolimpos 2007: Alexandra Yerolympos, Thessaloniki before and after Ernest Hébrard, Thessaloniki 2007, at [12.05.2014].

Roberto Mancini

Monumenta Historiae Patriae: Marubi’s Photographic Documentation (1858–1970) and the Birth of the Albanian Nation *

Landing Places and Settlements During the tumultuous months which followed the 1848 revolutions, after Italy’s politi­cal structure had been thrown into turmoil and then reordered under the domi­ nion of Radetsky’s Austria, many patriots chose exile. Among the fugi­tives were a very young man from Piacenza – Pietro Marubbi – accused of an attempted shooting in his city, and his wife, Maria.1 The couple travelled for some months before landing first at Corfu, and afterwards at Vlorë,2 but without obtaining asylum. When the couple finally arrived at Shkodër, in northern Albania, during spring 1850, they found a city with peculiar distinctive social and political features: the environment was econom­i­ cally lively, thanks especially to the activity of the port, located between the great lake of the same name and the navigable Buna River.3 As an administrative site of sanjak, it was one of the most populous centres in the entire vilayet (district) of Monastir, with 37,500 abodes and 135,000 inhabitants.4 It still benefited from a 1757–1796 secessio­ nist experiment linked to the Eyalet of the Bushatlliu family – in particular with bey Mehmet Bushatlliu and his grandson Kara Mahmud Bushattliu called “The Black” – which ended negatively because of the short-sighted policy of the Austrian Emperor, Joseph II.5 Among the cosmopolitan population of Shkodër, there was also a small community of Italians, a legacy of the ancient dominion of the Serenissima, though it included some who had settled more recently along the commercial routes of the East. The city chemist was a Venetian called Marco who lived in a wide house with a large courtyard and garden; the English vice-consul had an Italian name, as did the

* The author wishes to thank Dr Laura Sieni for the revision of the English text of this paper. 1 Cheyne 1990. 2 In this essay, Pietro’s name is sometimes spelled Marubbi and some other times Marubi, according to the archive documents referred to. Pietro’s date of birth is still uncertain. He was probably born in 1830 (and not in 1834, as is often stated): Prenushi 1928, p. 3; Marubbi 1985; Kadaré 1996, pp. 11–20; ­Kadaré 2011; Osmani 2006, pp. 9–18. There has been little research yet into the Marubi’s correspon­ dence and their international connections. 3 Mlika 2006. 4 The statistics collected officially by the Ottoman government show that Shkodër was significantly larger than other cities in this area: Berat had 12,000 inhabitants, Janina 102,531, and Preveza 26,000. [Unknown] 1877, pp. 139–143. 5 In the same way the similar circumstances of Alì of Tepeleni and Janina had come to an end in the same way. Biagini 2005, pp. 22–26.

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local dragoman, Pazzini,6 and also the Gazzetta di Venezia had a local news corres­ pondent. Pietro, a draftsman with some understanding of architecture, and Maria, an obstetrician,7 fitted in well and became part of the city’s small yet lively intellectual community. But the domestic situation was not peaceful in the four vilayet (“districts”) into which the area had been divided under Ottoman government: secessionist rebellions smouldered, while the image that the entire sanjak projected abroad was contradictory. Travellers that had ventured there had given conventional and superficial judgements of it. Ugo Foscolo’s friend, John Hobhouse, for example, described Albanians as one of the people most “blood thirsty,” “eager,” and “against any habit to active industry of the East.”8 To the eyes of the sharpest western governments, instead, the ‘Albanians’ appeared to be a people in transition, perpetually balancing between East and West, who should be relieved of the yoke of Turkish rule and included among the ‘civilised’ nations. This was the idea that most Italians had9 as they looked over towards the far shores of the Adriatic Sea. The idea of redemption included the Slavic peoples from Poland, Montenegro, Bulgaria and all the other Danubian–Balkan nations – from the Magyars to the Romanian  – all of them subjected to the autocracy of the Augsburg and of the Czar. Pietro Marubbi, the young Garibaldian militant, was definitely aware of the initiatives which sprang up in favour of the Slavic peoples, after 1848 in partic­ ular; one, for example, was supported by the Dalmatian Nicolò Tommaseo and his newspaper, Fratellanza dei Popoli, and by opinions authoritatively expressed on the subject by Carlo Cattaneo, Girolamo De Rada and, on several occasions, by Giuseppe Mazzini himself.10 And he most certainly knew that in 1849 in Turin a society for the Italian–Slavic alliance, the Società per l’allenza italo slava, had been founded with the aim to “procure fraternal love among the Slavs and the Italians for the independence and prosperity of both nations.”11 The Marubis had been in Shkodër for three years when the international situation worsened because of the Crimean War (1853–1856) and later because of the Montenegro issue; following the deliberations of the Congress of Paris, the country asked for independence on the pattern of the Danubian prince­ doms. Montenegro’s subsequent direct and indirect wars against its Turkish rulers

6 Destani / Elsie 2008 [1851], p. 64 et passim. 7 Pietro contributed to the design of the Cathedral and the Orthodox Church in Shkodёr. Unfortu­ nately, there are no drawings left and among the sculptures, the only one left seems to be a plaster figure  – owned by the family  – representing the poet and musician Ole Seta, which dates back to about 1870. Prenushi 1928, p. 14. 8 Hobhouse 1813, pp. 139–140, p. 145. 9 Isabella 2009, p. 96. 10 Malev 1995, pp. 329–383. 11 This was the name given to this association that acted in favour of the Slavic people. In Milan the “League for the freedom and brotherhood of the people of the Slavic–Hellenic peninsula” was estab­ lished in 1876. Dogo 2004; Pacor 1968, p. 12.

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ended in its defeat, coming to an end with the convention which took place in Shkodër in August 1862. From this perspective, given the strains created by the need to apply the principle of equilibrium and the real tendency of the European powers to use their political weight, Albania at that time was where the opposing interests of Austria and Italy clashed, which was raising on the international political scenario, particularly so because it involved the ancient Austrian–Russian–Ottoman rivalry in the Balkans. It was for this reason that between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the purpose of all Italian interventions was to defend the integrity of the Albanian territory. Emphasis­ ing the tradition of contiguity of the different cultures and of commercial trade, Italy factually supported activities aimed at achieving a process of national unity.12 Whatever the travellers said, the commercial bourgeoisie of the Albanian towns on the coast were not narrow-minded and short of information, but open to innova­ tion and seduced by European products and ideas. When Pietro decided to open a photographic studio, maybe because he was looking for a stable occupation, there were no objections, except from the roughest part of the population, which consid­ ered photography – of which they obviously knew nothing – a form of magic practice. Marubi’s choice was appropriate, most of all from an economic point of view. Pho­ tography was a new art and Pietro’s timing – whose enterprise affair run along with that of the most important European photographers at that time – was definitely one of the reasons for his success in the Balkans. But he was also very prudent, dis­playing on his studio door a sign saying Dritëshkronja, which means “writings of light,” relat­ ing photography to a form of writing (Shkronja) so as to conform to the aniconic ten­ dency of the most important religious culture of the country, Islam. From the very beginning he knew how to give clear political aim to his activity. In this, he was probably helped by what had happened in Italy, where photography had been placed on a continuum with the painting of Risorgimento battles, and had pro­ vided highly valuable evidence during the wars of independence.13 Stefano Lecchi, for example, used the calotype to document the places where the violent battles for the capture of Rome had taken place, for which he became famous in Europe.14 In 1849, another photographer, Giacomo Caneva, photographed the location of the siege, while Luigi Sacchi, the founder of the Cosmorama Pittorico of Milan, had pho­ tographed some episodes of the Second War of Independence and, together with his friend Pompeo Pozzi, painter and photographer, had gone to Palermo to document the barri­cades and the Bourbonnais bombings in 1860. And, if it is almost superflu­ ous to remember Alessandro Pavia from Genoa, and his famous album of portraits of

12 Biagini 2005, p. 39. 13 Vitali 1979. 14 Critelli 2001, p. 25. See also the article of Isotta Poggi in this volume.

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the Garibaldians, it is interesting to remember the story of another defector patriot, who became quite a good photographer, Carlo Neopolo Bettini from Bologna.15 However, it was still possible to find photographic documents of the most impor­ tant political–military events taking place in the Russian–Danubian area. Carol Popp de Szathmari, a Hungarian painter and photographer who lived in Romania, photographed the Russian occupation of the Romanian princedoms and, from 1853, the effects of the Crimean war between Russians and Turks. In mid-November 1855, Léon-Eugène Méhèdin, together with the painters Jean-Charles Langlois, Jean-Bap­ tiste Henry Durand-Brager and Lassimonne, was dispatched by Napoleon III to the Crimea to document the war, lithographs of which had been published in the Times of London. The sandjak was in the middle of the military and diplomatic dispute, therefore Marubi had the chance to sell his photographs to several foreign magazines, including the Illustrated London News. The images bore witness to the great patriotic vitality of the time and contributed towards popularising the political leaders who were trying to carry the country towards independence. In this context, in 1858, a photograph was produced that has come to be consid­ ered the most popular Albanian photographic portrait: it shows the national hero, the leader Hamzё Kazazi, who distinguished himself in the Shkodër revolt in 1835. Accord­ ing to popular belief, this portrait was the first Albanian photograph ever taken. It was followed by a depiction of a representative of the Arberёsh community, Leonardo De Martino,16 evidencing the close relationships with Italy and indicating that the Alba­ nian nationalisation – according to the point of view of an Italian – had passed through the re-evaluation of the ancient fifteenth-century Albanian diaspora.17 The story was greatly mythologised, and became one of the assets in the construction of the country’s memory and identity, together with military experiences dating back to the League of Prizren (1858–1881) and the revolt of Mirditё (1876–1877). Marubi photographed all the characters involved in these events: Hodo Sokoli, commander of the Albanians in the League, who had fought to defend Hoti and Grudё, and representatives of the insur­ gents of Hoti, such as Çun Mula, Smajl Marky, Ndok Palokё Kraja, Smail Martini and his daughter (Tringe Smajl Martini Ivezaj), who fought in male clothing and would ­ eroines.18 As he documented become one of the most unusual of ‘romantic’ Albanian h the exceptional political events, Marubi also paid attention to social phenomena, people’s assemblies and demonstrations in support of national independence, depict­

15 Liva 2011, pp. 20–26. 16 In the volume The harp of an Italo-Albanian, Leonardo De Martino (1830–1923), a Franciscan mis­ sionary in Albania born in Greci (Avellino), pays special attention to famous characters of his age who had the destiny of the Balkans at heart. 17 Anthropological studies about Albanian communities in Sicily, Calabria, and Molise, have contrib­ uted to making the public aware of these matters. 18 On the Romantic heroines fighting in male clothes, a European stereotype, see Mancini 1999 pp. 155–175.

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Fig. 1: Pjetër Marubi: Mirdita region, Demonstration for National independence. Photograph, albumen silver print from wet plate collodion process, c. 1890, 30 × 40 cm. Fototeka Kombëtare ‘Marubi’.

ing it as a request that is raised from the bottom up and has legitimated itself through a collective ordinance (fig. 1). These pictures show the park of the people in Shkodёr (1875), that of Tivar (1877), and that of the square where on 16 June 1878 a great assem­ bly took place against the decision of the Congress of Berlin that would lead to the dismemberment of the Albanian territory in favour of Montenegro.

Pjetёr, Mati, Kel and Gegё In the mid-1870s, Pietro took a young man called Mati Kodheli (1862–1881) on as an ap­­prentice. Kodheli, who started working in the studio as an assistant, was the eldest brother of a Shkodër family, originating from Zadrimё. As the young man was very enthusiastic he was sent to the Benque e Sebastianutti photographic studio in Trieste,19 a city with many active artists, such as Giuseppe Wultz.20 Unfortunately,

19 These famous artists had received several international awards, and in 1873 Gugliemo Sebastia­ nutti had been appointed “Imperial Photographer”: Morgan 2010, p. 68. 20 Zennaro 1981.

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Mati died of tuberculosis when he was only 19 and we have only two of his works – a photograph from 1880 of his friend, the artist Kolё Idromeno, and one taken some years before, in 1878, showing the Shkodër musical band, which Mati himself be­longed to (fig. 2). Pietro, in revealing the secrets of his studio to a young Albanian, was ­becoming increasingly rooted in Albanian society and culture; this process culmi­ nated in the Albanisation of his name to Pjetёr,21 and the adoption of Mati’s brother, Kel Kodheli, who was 15 years old. Kel was also directed towards photography. At this time, the studio was expanded, and provided with more appropriate light sources and a range of decorative backgrounds. And, as new photographic techniques and tools were emerging, Kel – who had by then become a Marubi – was encouraged by Pietro to go to the same studio in Trieste, which was now – after the death of Sebastianutti – headed by Francesco Benque alone. There he learnt the technique of retouching, studied framing, and acquired a marked taste for portraying city settings – factories,

Fig. 2: Pjetër Marubi: Fratern’s music band, directed by Master Giovanni Canale. Photograph, albumen silver print from wet plate collodion process, 1878, 30 × 40 cm. Fototeka Kombëtare ‘Marubi’.

21 The correction of the name seems earlier; maybe it was due to the Albanian ­pronunciation, pushing it from Marubbi to Marubi.

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Fig. 3: Pjetër Marubi: Bebeziq with his daughter. Photograph, dry bromide gelatin, c. 1900, 30 × 40 cm. Fototeka Kombëtare ‘Marubi’.

arsenals, ports – that he would put into practice after he returned to his home city. After this experience he produced the famous plates of the bazaar shops, and the artisans and merchants, the same people who, if they could afford to pay for it, would take pleasure in going to the Marubi studio to pose for a portrait (fig. 3).22 After Pjetёr’s death in 1903, Kel inherited the studio – he continued to produce images under the “Foto Marubi” brand – and his father’s entire archive. It was a sign of a formal, significant continuity. The studio’s public was numerous, given what had been produced and archived in those years; an entire section of Shkodër society posed in front of the Marubi lens. Neither the political and social context, nor the ideological stance of the Marubi (or Khdeli–Marubi) family had changed: they remai­ ned strictly linked to patriotic ideals. Close friends with the important intellectual Luigi Gurakuqui, Kel was destined to live through probably the most crucial days of Albania’s modern history:23 the riots of 1909–1911 and the so-called “Balkan Wars” of 1912–1913. But, in particular he witnessed the enthusiasm surrounding the procla­ mation of independence on 28 November 1912 by Ismail Quemali, president of the National Albanian Congress, gathered in Vlorё, and the gloomy days when it became clear that Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece wished to dismember the ancient Ottoman vilayet. A flag embroidered by his sister Bernardina Kodheli was waved from

22 Edward Lear documented the Shkodёr elite’s love of portraits. See Destani / Elsie 2008 [1851], p. 72. 23 Lipi 1977; Dammacco 1988. Kel led the society Një tubë djelmoshash shkodranë, and founded the organisation Vllaznia, which was established in his house.

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the castle of Rozafat (the Venetian castle in Shkodёr) on the day on which indepen­ dence was declared, another indication of the atmosphere of fervent patriotism in the Kel family. He pursued with increased determination his commitment to endow the rising nation with iconographic documentation that would standardise and typify the variegated population, and define the features of its identity, so that his plates would foreshadow the new Albanian society. Albania, determined to distinguish itself with pride, defined itself not as “Slavic” but as “Latin,” thus making a definite pro-West choice. That ideal would also be embodied by the hero of Kruja, Giergj Kastrioti Skën­ derbeu, who did not hesitate to serve the Pope against the ‘infidels.’ One of his heirs, who lived in glamourous Paris, was called back to his country to speak to the people, but they showed little enthusiasm for this man whose bourgeois life style clashed with their ideas about his warrior ancestor.24 Albania, though a small country, was at the centre of international attention. Many people were attracted by the places described in the newspapers and started visiting them, although most of them knew neither the language nor the culture and did not understand the importance of the events they experienced. The frivolous tone of the traveller and painter Mary Edith Durham is emblematic. In the middle of these often tragic events full of sufferance, she wrote in her diary, “Oh, the charms of Shkodёr, for the colours of its landscape, for its life and its art!”25 Later she went to the Marubi studio to be portrayed in the costume of a country girl. At this time, however, Albanian society was shaken by activism and a general enthusiasm that emphasised the push towards modernisation. Partly this push ­involved the importa­ tion of models that brought Albanian society more into line with general European norms, yet without cutting off the past. Symbolic of this was Marubi’s attitude: fas­ cinated by innovation, he updated his equipment and in 1922–1923 started photogra­ phing in colour.26 He always remained faithful to his civic task, however, and continued to provide visual accounts of all the events happening in his country, as a real photojournalist would do. His archives contain images of the Democratic Movement (1920–1924), up to the events related to Ahmed bey Zogu, the former minister and ruler of the Mati region, who had become King of Albania following a coup d’etat in 1925 and remained in power till 1939.27 Kel had six children, two boys and four girls. They all worked in the photogra­ phy studio. The second, Rrok, for example, was in charge of retouching, while his

24 Biagini 2005, p. 81. 25 Durham 1923 [1920], p. 37, and cf. pp. 114 and 125. François de Poqueville was more alert, noticing how Shkodёr people were “full of enthusiasm for their homeland,” in: Poqueville 1813, p. 26. 26  This novelty was invented by the Lumière brothers, with whom Marubi corres­ponded. 27 There is the album of Ahmed Zog’s 1938 wedding, and also that of Princess Sanije with Prince Mehmed Abid Efendi, Prince of Turkey in 1936. He was interested in popular education; this subject was documented in the pictures of the Italian Institute of Arts and Crafts.

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daughters kept the register of the images. Only Gegë, the firstborn, was destined to continue the business as a photographer and so was sent to Paris, where he attended the cinematographic school of the Lumière brothers. He ran the business together with his father, who died in 1940, and specialised in particular in the production of portraits, which yielded the majority of the profits. However, following the tradition of the Marubi Studio, particular attention was paid to what was happening in the country and in the elite intellectual and bourgeois circles with their refined manners and international culture (fig. 4), which gave the biggest Albanian cities a modern, slightly glamorous atmosphere, as we can see from the portraits of Kolë Shiroka, the singer Tefta Tashko Koço, the pianist Lola Gjoka, Millosh Gjergj Nicolla (Migjeni), and Alexandër Xhuvani. However, Gegë showed his technical skills in his pictures of landscapes, as can be seen in his photographs of Shkodër, Tirana and Durrës taken between 1936 and 1938, for which he used infrared filters.28

Fig. 4: Pjetër Marubi: Hajdar Pasha, diplomatic group in Shkodra. Photograph, dry bromide gelatin, 1890–1912, 30 × 40 cm. Fototeka Kombëtare ‘Marubi’. 28 In 1936 at the Bari Fair he was awarded the Certificate of Honour, while in Thessaloniki he ­received the Golden Medal in 1938. In 1937, he held an exhibition on the materials Lumière-Chromium with bright, contrasting colours.

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Totem and Taboo We can say about Albania, what has been said about Italy: that the unification of the country launched the age of national photography.29 In Albania, however, photogra­ phy represented something more. It was the peroration of an equivalence between progress and the identity principle that was rooted in history. In the Marubi images, the patriots always wear either Western clothes or traditional costumes, representing the reconciliation of a modernity settling in the past – a necessary condition for the creation of the nation itself.30 The Marubis were the most important interpreters of this peculiar cultural climate, one characterised by both openness towards the West and a strict attachment to traditions, together with the safeguarding of the interests of the old social oligarchies. The Marubis crystallised the condition of Albania, defining hierarchies, roles, and features, according to the requests of the local elite. Although the Albanian nationalist movement can be dated from the foundation of the League of Prizren in 1858, three years after the Marubis arrived in Albania, it was from the beginning of the century that people had talked about a “Renaissance” or “awak­ ening” – Rilindja – an idea inflected through Albanian culture. It could not have been otherwise: Albania did not even have a national language – it was Naum Veqilarxhiu, at that time exiled in Romania, who was the first person to publish an Albanian alpha­ bet, one that he himself had invented. This alphabet should have facilitated writing in the national language.31 However, it was a foreigner, a member of a dominant culture, Johann Georg von Hahn, the Austrian consul in Janina, who published a grammar of Albanian in 1854.32 This action founded Albanology, the study of the language as a discipline  – just as, six years earlier, Ernest Rénan’s Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques had inaugurated Orientalism. Marubi’s images are the figural element in this new discipline: their relevance depended also on the fact that their ʻlanguage of imagesʼ was exclusive in a context where oral tradition was dominant. Their only equivalent was the religious iconography of Byzantine origin. This question shifts our attention towards another key issue, that of the visual arts and their role in Albanian society between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. On this subject we should point out that Marubi’s success (also economical) depended on the great flexibility of the Islamic population, which had a Becktashi background – unlike other Islamic trends, they showed no particular aversion to images (fig.  5).33

29 Bollati 1979, p. 3. 30 Starobinski 1983 / 1989. 31 Up until the linguistic congress in Monastir, the Albanian language was written in five different alphabets: Latin, Greek, Arabic, Persian, and the so-called “Istanbul Alphabet,” which was created by Sami Frashёri in 1879. For a general survey on the theme of language and nation, see Banti 2011, p. 215. 32 Said 2001 [1978], pp. 167–168; Hahn 1854; Stavrianos 2000. 33 Drishti / Çika 2004.

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Fig. 5: Pjetër Marubi: A Muslim woman in Shkodra, Photograph, dry bromide gelatin, c. 1903, 30 × 40 cm. Fototeka Kombëtare ‘Marubi’.

Unfortunately, on this issue, there has been a notable lack of clarity. One recent writer states: “La domination ottomane, longue de cinq siècles, fut un véritable obstacle au développement de la culture et de l’art albanais.”34 Many others have repeated that it was the Ottomans who had “estranged the Balkan area countries from the Euro­ pean cultural process,”35 but this ignores the fact that Albanian art had found ways of expression through carving, goldsmithing, embroidery, and through the works of the gunsmiths. Unfortunately the negative view of Albania36 – as a poor, dirty, primitive and dangerous country – was reinforced by the vast majority of the accounts of the Balkan travellers, whose opinions were biased by anti-Ottoman preju­dices.37 Edward Lear, traveller and illustrator of the Albanian lands, is a good example: “And considering the hopeless character of Skódra  – vendette, nasconderie, sospetti, incendie [in Italian in the text] – the extreme of revolutionary and despotic Turk against Christian, Latin opposed to Greek. No place seems more fully fraught with the evils of life.”38

34 Koqali 1974, pp. nn. 35 Zevi 1985, p. XI. 36 Müller 1844, pp. 48–49. Critical analysis: Spencer 1837, p. 141; Hahn 1854, p. 95; Hecquard 1858, p. 21; Wingfield 1859, p. 155; Strangford 1864, p. 178; Hugonnet 1886, p. 283; Glück p. 11; Durham 1904, p. 107; Trevor 1911, p. 350; Peacock 1914, p. 52; Conway 1917, p. 180. 37 Mancini 2013, p.  32. On the western ‘readings’ on Albania, the remarks of De Simonis 2013, pp. 102–181. An anthology of writings – not very debated and not very accurate from the historical point of view in Jezernik 2010. 38 Destani /Elsie 2008 [1851], p. 73.

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And another traveller wrote that the Turkish people of Shkodёr “are maybe the most picturesque and the dirtiest on earth.”39 An Italian doctor, in a scholarly mood, wrote: “We therefore found in Albania – as in an historical recalling the past age – that feudal life that the barbaric invasions impressed in our country, in Italy, with Odoacer’s, Theodoric’s and Alboin’s hordes.”40 On the other hand it was the Albanians them­ selves who projected those ideas and make them their own, sharing and re-launching them. In 1879, the Shkodёr writer and diplomat Pasco Vasa traced an ideal typical profile of the Albanian character which coincided with what the “foreigners” were saying. Vasa wrote that the people were “heroic to fear, intelligent, tireless, happy with little, with no excessive ambitions and no dis­ honest desires, are united with love of their rocks, a love that cannot be erased. They are rich in chivalric feelings, stubborn in their passions, respectful of the rules of hospitality and of the given word, have gone through the centuries without changing and have remained Pelasgians, warriors, men of honour and poor.”41

Thanks to the “freedom” that had been established in Albania, there slowly started to emerge, in particular among the city elites, new lifestyles, new intellectuals and new artists, among them Spiro Xega, Kolë Idromeno, Ndoc Martini, and later Simon Rrota, Vanjush Mio, Andrea Kushi, and Zef Kolombi, who made concrete those ideals of Rilindja which, in the meantime, the Marubi were documenting through images, ­bringing great prestige to the glorious past of the nation and to its incipient modernity. However, the strong need to abandon the past ended up by recalling it, con­ tinuously bringing discussions back to the Middle Ages, which appeared as an age in which great ideals of independence had flourished. One should consider that the ‘mark’ of the Middle Ages was perceived in a different way in comparison with other Western countries. In fact, in the Albanian timeframe the age of independence was called Rilindja, which means “Renaissance,” and it began when the Medieval period came to an end, in the eighteenth century. Therefore, the Middle Ages were close in time, and still had a very strong influence on Albanians. The so called “­Albanian Middle Ages” differ greatly from the Italian ones, partly because there were no human­ ists to see them in a negative light. On the other side of the Adriatic, the lack of ‘sophis­ tication’ of the people appeared to form the core of a determined energy which was essential to change. In Albania during the Middle Ages, an ‘iron population’ had been able to build, through war and blood, its own future. In the collective mind of the Alba­ nian people, the Middle Ages were connected to the glorious actions of the eponym leader and real founder of modern Albania, a man whose feats had all been accom­

39 Trevor 1911, p. 351. 40 Stevani 2007, p. 47. 41 Vasa 2003, pp. 50–51.

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Fig. 6: Kel Marubi: Ernesto Kjolenda, group of young politicians. Photograph, dry bromide gelatin, 1913. Photograph: 30 × 40 cm. Fototeka Kombëtare ‘Marubi’. In this scene young intellectuals – identified by the books and the newspapers in their hands – are sitting around a geographical map in front of the portrait of Pater Patriae Sanderbeg.

plished during the greatest anti-Turkish conflict – the Christian Scanderbeg, the hero of the Battle of Krujё (1450–1478). Kruj was a sort of Roncesvalles of the Balkans and was still able to influence minds. The conflict of the Kastriota had also generated a peculiar ecumenical epos, one without confessional connotations, which was a very significant fact, if we consider that the vast majority of the population was Islamic. But maybe this was due to the fact that in one of the first descriptions of this event, the farsighted Catholic priest Marin Barleti had nationalised  – more than Christianised – Scanderbeg with his Historia de vita et gestis Scanderbegi, Epirotarum principis.42 As a consequence, Scanderbeg has always been perceived as an impartial hero; his long-horned helmet also definitely contributed to the establishment of the myth. In fact, if in the West it was considered a legacy of the royal symbolism of the kings of Epirus, or as a quotation of a Koran passage concerning Megalexandros, in Albania, he was called the man with the two horns. In his land, one with few schol­

42 Barletii 1508–1510.

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Fig. 7: Pjetër Marubi: Ndoc Deda and Kin Matia from Zadrima during the period of battles for independ­ence. Photograph, albumen silver print from wet plate collodion process, c. 1899–1903. Photograph: 30 × 40 cm. Fototeka Kombëtare ‘Marubi’.

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ars, he was considered a sign of the entrenchment of the society of mountain men and shepherds. On the other hand, as is well-known, the Turkish sultans wore wolf leather, and it is likely that Scanderbeg, who was a former janissary, wore a totemic animal symbol.43 Also because of these symbolic features, he was considered the lord of all Albanians, and afterwards the lord of Albania, the head of the militia, somewhat like Achilles, Leonidas, Epaminondas, Harold or the Cid and Bajardo. When the two stories – Histori e Skënderbeu (1898) by Naim Frashëri and Historia e Skënderbeut, kryezotit të arbërisë (1921) by Fan Nolj44 – which cemented the hero’s place in national history, were published, Pietro Marubi had been in Albania for quite a long time, and he used his art in the service of the national myth, printing a carte de visite with the image of the hero. Heroes and warlords of the new Albanian nation, the blood shed in battles and emotions played an extraordinary role in the birth of the nation. As we know, Byron wore the clothes of the Albanian people – crooked scimitars studded with lapis lazuli, and showy hats. This was the complex subject that the Marubis – all of them, Pjetёr, Mati, Kel, and Gegё – recount for us today. Theirs was an intellectual operation carried on with such coherence that the passage from one to another goes un­noticed. It can be described as a successful reconciliation between localism and nation, between trib­ alism and a new nation. The Albanian Middle Ages seemed so close that they could be spotted in individuals’ bodies and in their sumptuary attitudes. The propulsive energy of the tribal model that gave its sovereignty to the national over-entity, provided that its founding values were integrated into it, was an asset to the past of Albania, just as it is to the country’s future. Tribalism has long been considered an imperfection, a burden of the past, but we should not be so sure. If the nation is a community of kinship, a “community of progeny,” the insistence on kinship groups (groups of rela­ tives) that constitute the Albanian people can be considered an element favouring national growth.45 As we read in the Code of the Mountains of Dukajin, also known as Kanun, the family is composed of next-of-kin relationships: several families unite to form a brotherhood, several brotherhoods a stock, several stocks a fis, and several fis a flag, and all together – with the same origin, the same blood, the same language and customs – form a great family called a nation.46 There is another aspect too: the holistic unanimity that supports the idea of nation also finds in Albania an application of the idea of a motherland in arms (figs. 6, 7).

43 Pfaffenbichler 2008, pp. 150–159. 44 Frashëri 2000 [1898]; Noli 2004 [1921]. 45 Banti 2011, pp. 215–217. 46 Kanun is the code of customary laws, transmitted orally in Albania for at least five centuries. The first collection dates back to the middle of the XV century. Traditionally, its origin has been attributed to Alessandro Dukajini, prince of the homonymous region of Northern Albania. The Kanun remains oral heritage till when Costantino Gjeçov, father of the Franciscan province of Shkodёr started the systematic collection and from 1912 started to edit its publication. Withaker 1968, p. 264.

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Who knows how much of the ideology of the people in arms of Garibaldian origins, echoed in the mind of Pjetër Marubi while he took pictures of the warriors. Therefore, the people portrayed in traditional costumes by the Marubis, were not a holographic representation. In fact, the sumptuary reality did not need an intervention with too many tailoring inventions.47 Edward Lear, who was travelling in Albania at the time, gives us a vivid account of the clothes he saw people wearing: [In Akhridha,] the first town I had seen in Northern Albania, the novelty of the costumes is striking; for, rich as is the clothing of all these people, the tribes of Ghegheria (a district com­ prising all the territory north of the river Apsus, generally termed Illyrian Albania, and of which Skòdra may be said to be the capital, and Akhridha the most western limit) surpass all their neighbours in gorgeousness of raiment, by adding to their ordinary vestments a long surtout of purple, crimson, or scarlet, trimmed with fur, or bordered with gold thread, or braiding. Their jackets and waistcoats are usually black, and their whole outer man contrasts strongly with that of their white neighbours of Bérat, or many-hued brethren of Epirus.48

But there is something more. Re-launching this iconography through their photo­ graphs, the Marubis succeeded in giving the Westerners an expected image, one that did not contradict what other artists had proposed. We can, of course, point to the fighters, the duellists, or the dancers appearing in the works of painters such as Ale­ xandre Gabriel Decamps, about 1835, or the Albanians painted by Eugène Dela­croix. These works had different sources of inspiration: Decamps had visited only nor­th­ ern Greece; Delacroix had been inspired by Byron’s Childe Harold and by Edward Dodwell’s travel descriptions from the beginning of the century.49 The case of one of the first landscape painters who painted in Albania, Joseph Cartwright, with his famous Selection of the costumes from Albania and Greece (1822),50 differs greatly from Dupré’s publication of Voyage a Athènes et a Constantinople ou collection de portraits, de vues et de costumes grecs et ottomans, peints sur les lieux, d’après nature, litho­ graphiès et coloriés51 three years later. However, the idea of Albania in the Western mind was raised especially in the fabrics, traditional costumes and handicrafts coll­ ected by the artists and travellers, such as Jules-Robert Auguste, that we find pho­ tographed  – with an eye for business  – by the Marubis.52 The works of Jean Léon Gérôme53 as well are contemporary with those of Pjetёr Marubi. The Italians too had long ago formed an image of Albania, as can be seen in the writings and paintings of, for example, Filippo Delpino, who stayed in the Balkans

47 Dupré 2009 [1825]. 48 Destani / Elsie 2008 [1851], pp. 29–30. 49 Dodwell 1982. 50 Cartwright 1822. 51 Dupré 2009 [1825]. 52 Rosenthal 1982, pp. 9–13. 53 Ackerman 2000.

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Fig. 8: Pjetër Marubi: Gjergj Fishta (on the left) with some friends. Photograph, albumen silver print from wet plate collodion process, c. 1890–1915. Photograph: 30 × 40 cm. Fototeka Kombëtare ‘Marubi’. Fishta was an intellectual and religious man who strongly supported the Albanian national cause.

for a long time, where he portrayed people of various nationalities in their traditional costumes.54 At the end of the century, the Marubis’ pictures were used as documents by journalists and draftsmen visiting Albania. So did Augusto Bonamore, who was in the area on the brink of the Prizren League and who published his engravings, in particular on “the Eastern War,” and the editor Treves, who owes a strong tribute to Marubi’s pictures – one close to plagiarism.55 Those images, marking the Turkish aspect of the Albanian situation and, at the same time, the representation of the life of a country on its way to Westernisation, would define a trend and reassure Western countries about the limits of the desires of the Albanian people. At the same time, they reassured the Albanians themselves, because they showed that the transforma­ tion in which they were involved was happening definitively and not too rapidly. The Marubis allowed the Albanians to think of themselves as part of the comple­ xity of history. It was a history that the new nation would tell to itself and about itself. For this reason, the Marubis’ images of religious life of the country are em­blematic, partly for the socio-cultural sensitivity that the Marubis had developed. In fact, the religious question had taken a peculiar declination. Catholicism had been used as

54 Three Albanians, Albanian soldiers, Albanian hunters. Delpino 1827. 55 For the images by Augusto Bonamore, see: La Guerra d’Oriente. Cronaca illustrata, n. 5 (May 1877), p. 36; n. 12 (June 1877), p. 96; n. 70 (December 1877), p. 56. On Bonamore, cf. Pennazzi 1879. The same magazine also published drawings by Teodoro Valerio, showing people from Albania and ­Montenegro. On his activity, see: Perrot 1875.

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an antidote to the Hellenisation introduced by the Byzantine observance, while the adhesion to Islamism was perceived as an anti-Slavic cultural defence. As the reli­ gious question was a mere local issue, it never had doctrinarian implications. As a matter of fact, the Catholic patriot Pasha Vaso (also known as Wasa Pasha, Vaso Pashë Shkodrani, 1825–1892) intervened strongly against possible religious divisions on the grounds that they could neutralise efforts made to obtain national independ­ ence. The statement that has been ascribed to him is “The Albanian religion is the Albanian cause,” which was the slogan of the secessionist struggle that the Marubis themselves made their own (fig. 8).56

Monumenta Historiae Patriae In 1970, Gegё donated the archive, spanning four generations, to the state. It includes 150,000 negatives on glass and celluloid in sizes from 30 × 40 cm to 60 × 90 cm.57 Today, all these images have been put in order and it is clear from them that they show essentially the same subject: they describe the origins of a nation, the account of a collective memory, recomposing history and myth, but also relentlessly confus­ ing the history and myth of Albania. If history begins with  – as Michel de Certeau wrote – “setting apart” and “gathering,” with “transforming [things and people] into documents,”58 than there is no doubt that the ʻbrightʼ images of the Marubis were useful for this purpose. They were the beginning of Albania’s national history.

Bibliography Aruffo 1999: Alessandro Aruffo, L’inferno dei Balcani: da fine Ottocento alla guerra del Kosovo, Rome 1999. Banti 2011: Alberto Mario Banti, s.v. Nazione, in: Atlante culturale del Risorgimento. Lessico del linguaggio politico dal Settecento all’Unità, Rome / Bari 2011, pp. 209–230. Barletii 1508–1510: Marini Barletii [Marino Barlezio, Marin Barleti], Historia de vita et gestis Scanderbegi, Epirotarum principis, Rome 1508–1510. Biagini 2005: Antonello Biagini, Storia dell’Albania contemporanea, Milan 2005.

56 The slogan is taken from the line of a poem: O moj Shqypni, e mjera Shqypni (“O Albania, poor Albania”) 1878. See Aruffo 1999, pp. 20–22. 57 Besides this archive, one should think of that of another family of photographers, the Pici, whose most important member was Shan Pici (1904–1976), who also trained at the Marubi studio, when he was quite young. Moreover, there are 50,000 negatives by Dedë Jakova (1917–1973), whose activity co­ vers the period between 1932 and 1959. The last acquisition (250,000 negatives) is that of the photog­ rapher Angjelin Nenshati (1929–). The first cameras used in Albania for the 30 × 40 cm format, were produced in France and Germany with boxes for negatives of 26 × 31 cm and 21 × 27 cm; and after a camera of the 18 × 24 cm and 13 × 18 cm, all of them mounted on a tripod. 58 Certeau 1974, I, p. 20.

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Bollati 1979: Giulio Bollati, “Fotografia e storia,” in Fotografia dell’Ottocento, Milan / Florence 1979, pp. 1–40. Cartwright 1822: Joseph Cartwright, Selection of the costumes from Albania and Greece, London 1822. Certeau 1974: Michel de Certeau, “L’opération historique,” in: Jacques Le Goff / Pierre Nora (eds.), Faire l’histoire, Paris 1974, pp. 25–50. Cheyne / Crisafulli Jones 1990: Joseph Cheyne / Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones (eds.), L’esilio Romantico. Forme di un conflitto, Bari 1990. Cheyne et al. 2000: Joseph Cheyne et al., Monographie Révisée: Catalogue Raisonné Mis à Jour, Courbevoie (Paris) 2000. Conway 1917: Agnes Ethel Conway, A ride through the Balkans, London 1917. Critelli 2001: Maria Pia Critelli, Stefano Lecchi un fotografo e la Repubblica Romana del 1849, Rome 2001. Dammacco 1988: Gaetano Dammacco (ed.), L’ omicidio politico di Luigi Gurakuqi / Vrasja politike e Luigj Gurakuqit, Bari 1988. De Simonis 2013: Paolo De Simonis, “‘Interessante e misterioso paese sul quale si dicono tante meraviglie ed esagerazioni’. Luoghi e costruzioni comuni nelle memorie dei viaggiatori, sacerdoti, militari,” in: Palaver, n.s., 2, 2013, pp. 101–182. Delpino 1827: Filippo Delpino, Vestiario ed usi della corte, milizia e costumi turchi, Turin 1827. Destani / Elsie 2008 [1851]: Bejtullah Destani / Robert Elsie (eds.), Edward Lear in Albania: Journal of a Landscape Painter in the Balkans [London 1851], London / New York (NY) 2008. Dodwell 1982: Edward Dodwell, Klassische Stätten und Landshaften in Griechland: Impressionen von einer Reise um 1800, Dortmund 1982. Dogo 2004: Marco Dogo, “Movimenti risorgimentali in Europa sud-orientale: appunti di lavoro per una propsettiva comparata,” in: Contributi italiani al IX Congresso Internazionale dell’Association Internationale d’Études du Sud-Est Européen, Tirana 2004, pp. 80–96. Drishti / Çika 2004: Ylli Drishti / Leon Çika (eds.), Ikona te Beratit. Koleksioni i Muzeut Kombëtar Onufri. Berat. Shekulli XIV–XX, Tirana 2004. Dupré 2009 [1825]: Louis Dupré, Voyage à Athène et à Constantinople ou collection de portraits, de vues et de costumes grecs et ottomans, peints sur les lieux, d’àprès nature, lithographiès et coloriés, [Paris 1825], Paris 2009. Durham 1904: Mary Edith Durham, Through the Land of the Serb, London 1904. Durham 1923 [1920]: Mary Edith Durham, Venti anni di groviglio balcanico, trans. by Stefania Pelli-Bossi, [London 1920] Florence 1923. Fochessati et al. 2009: Matteo Fochessati / Rubens Shima / Sandra Solimano (eds.), Arte in Albania prima e dopo il 1990. Exhibition Catalogue (Genoa, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea – Villa Croce 2009 / 2010), Milan 2009. Frashëri 2000 [1898]: Naim Frashëri, Histori e Skënderbeut, ed. by Ali Xhiku, Tirana 1898, reprint, Tirana / Albas 2000. Glück 1892: Leonard Glück, Albanien und Macedonien; eine Reiseskizze, Wuerzburg 1892. Hahn 1854: Johann Georg von Hahn, Albanesishe Studien, I, Jena 1854. Hecquard 1858: Hyacinthe Hecquard, Histoire et Description de la Haute Albanie ou Guegarie, Paris 1858. Hobhouse 1813: John Cam Hobhouse, A Journey through Albania and Other Provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia to Constantinople during the Years 1809 and 1810, London 1813. Hugonnet 1886: Léon Hugonnet, La Turquie inconnue, Paris 1886. Illia 1993: Frano Illia, Kanuni i Skanderbegut, Milot 1993. Isabella 2009: Maurizio Isabella, Risorgimento in esilio. L’internazionale liberale e l’età delle rivoluzioni, Bari / Rome 2009.

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Jezernik 2010: Božidar Jezernik, Europa selvaggia. I Balcani nello sguardo dei viaggiatori occidentali, Turin 2010. Kadaré 1996: Ismail Kadaré, “I Marubi: ‘scritti di luce’,” in: Albania. Volto dei balcani. Scritti di luce dei fotografi Marubi. Exhibition Catalogue (Turin 1996), Turin 1996. Kadaré 2011: Ismail Kadaré, “Les Marubi aèdes de la photographie,” in: L. Chauvin / C. Raby (eds.), Marubi, une dynastie de photographes albanais, Paris 2011, pp. 5–14. Koqali 1974: Andon Koqali, Art Albanais in L’art Albanais a travers les siècles. Exhibition Catalogue (Paris, Petit Palais, 1974 / 1975), Paris 1974. Lane 1922: Rose Wilder Lane, The Peaks of Shala, London 1922. Lipi 1977: Rafael Lipi (ed.), Pashko Vasa e Luigj Gurakuqi, Shkodër 1977. Liva 2011: Walter Liva, “I fotografi nell’epopea risorgimentale,” in: Fotografia e Risorgimento in Italia. Tesori dei grandi musei italiani. Exhibition Catalogue (Pordenone, Sale Espositive della Provincia, 2011), Pordenone 2011. Malev 1995: Tatjana Krizman Malev, “Mazzini e il processo d’integrazione nazionale dei popoli jugoslavi,” in: Giuliana Limiti (ed.), Il mazzinianesimo nel mondo, vol. I, Pise 1995, pp. 329–383. Mancini 1999: Roberto Mancini, “Virtuous Women, Female Warriors. Models of Heroines in France and Italy between the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in: Italian History & Culture, 5, 1999, pp. 155–175. Mancini 2004: Roberto Mancini, “L’Albania degli italiani. Mito, propaganda, demagogia dalla fine dell’Ottocento al fascismo,” in: Portolano Adriatico. Rivista di storia e cultura balcanica, I (1), 2004, pp. 41–59. Mancini 2005: Roberto Mancini, “Volkgeist e technē dai Balcani da le Corbusier a oggi,” in: Portolano Adriatico. Rivista di storia e cultura balcanica, II (2), 2005, pp. 5–12. Mancini 2013: Roberto Mancini, Infedeli. Esperienze e forme del nemico nell’Europa moderna, Florence 2013. Marubi 1985: s.v. Marubi, in: Fjalori Enciklopedik Shqiptar, vol. VIII, Tirana 1985, pp. 378–379. Mlika 2006: Ndriçim Mlika, Scutari. Paesaggi, tradizioni, storia. Skodër. Paisazhe, tradita, histori, ed. by Roberto Mancini, Florence 2006. Morgan 2010: Claudia Morgan (ed.), Due fiorini soltanto. Sebastianutti e Benque fotografi a Trieste, Trieste 2010. Müller 1844: Joseph Müller, Albanien, Rumelien und die österreischisch-montenegrische Gränze, Prague 1844. Noli 2004 [1921]: Fan Stilian Noli, Gjergj Kastrioti Skënderbeu (1405–1468). Historia e Skënderbeut, kryezotit të arbërisë, Tirana 2004. Osmani 2006: Semiha Osmani, Marubi. Shqipëria – Albania 1858–1950, Tirana 2006. Pacor 1968: Mario Pacor, Italia e Balcani dal Risorgimento alla Resistenza, Milan 1968. Peacock 1914: Wadham Peacock, Albania, the foundling state of Europe, London 1914. Pennazzi 1879: Luigi Pennazzi, La Grecia Moderna, Milan 1879. Perrot 1875: Georges Perrot, Gli slavi meridionali: Bosnia, Erzegovina, Croazia, slovenia, confini militari: ricordi di un viaggio. Con una carta geografica e 54 disegni dal vero di Teodoro Valerio, Milan 1875. Pfaffenbichler 2008: Matthias Pfaffenbichler, “Helm und Schwert des Georg Kastriota, genannt Skanderbeg,” in: Jahrbuch des Kunstihistorischen Museums Wien, 10, 2008, pp. 150–159. Pizzo 2004: Marco Pizzo (ed.), L’Album dei Mille di Alessandro Pavia, Rome 2004. Poqueville 1813: François Ch. de Poqueville, Travels in the Morea, Albania, and other parts of the Ottoman Empire, London 1813. Prenushi 1928: Nikollë Prenushi, “Osjia e Faltores,” in: Jeta e Re, 1, 1928, p. 3. Puccini 1996: Sandra Puccini, “Le immagini delle razze balcaniche nell’antropologia italiana tra le due guerre,” in: La Ricerca Folklorica, 34, 1996.

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Raby 2011: Christiane Raby, “Photographie shkodrane et photographie ottomane,” in: Loȉc Chauvin / Christiane Raby (eds.), Marubi, une dynastie de photograhes albanais, Paris 2011, pp. 15–30. Rosenthal 1982: Donald A. Rosenthal, “Ingres, Géricault and ‘Monsieur Auguste’,” in: The Burlington Magazine, 124, 1982, pp. 9–13. Said 2001 [1978]: Edward Wadie Said, Orientalismo. L’immagine europea dell’Oriente [New York (NY) 1978], Milan 2001. Spencer 1837: Edmund Spencer, Travels in European Turkey in 1850, London 1837. Starobinski 1983 / 1989: Jean Starobinski, “Le mot civilisation” (1983), in: Jean Starobinski, Le remède dans le mal. Critique et légitimation de l’artyifice a l’âge del Lumières, Paris 1989, pp. 11–59. Stavrianos 2000: Lefton Stavros Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453, New York (NY) 2000. Stevani 2007: Rodolfo Stevani, Fra le genti d’Albania. Usi, costumi e tradizioni, in: Patrizia Resta (ed.), Fra le genti d’Albania. Usi, costumi e tradizioni, Cagliari 2007. Strangford 1864: Emily Anne Strangford, The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic in 1863 with a Visit to Montenegro, London 1864. Todorova 1997: Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, New York (NY) / Oxford 1997. Trevor 1911: Roy Trevor, My Balkan Tour, New York (NY) 1911. [Unknown] 1877: “La statistica della Turchia,” in: La guerra d’Oriente, 18, (June) 1877, pp. 139–143. Vasa 2003: Pasco Vasa, E vërteta për Shqipërinë dhe shqiptarët, Tirana 2003. Vitali 1979: Lamberto Vitali, Il Risorgimento nella fotografia, Turin 1979. Wingfield 1859: William Frederick Wingfield, A tour in Dalmatia, Albania, and Montenegro, London 1859. Whitaker 1969: Ian Whitaker, Tribal Structures and National Politics in Albania 1910–1950, London 1968. Zennaro 1981: Licia Zennaro (ed.), I Wulz. Tre generazioni di fotografi a trieste dal 1868 al 1981. Exhibition Catalogue (Trieste 1981), Trieste 1981. Zevi 1985: Fausto Zevi, “Introduzione,” in: L’Arte albanese nei secoli. Exhibition Catalogue (Rome, Museo Nazionale Preistorico-Etnografico Luigi Pigorini, Rome 1985), Rome 1985.

Bernhard Jussen

Toward an Iconology of Medieval Studies: Approaches to Visual Narratives in Modern Scholarship Beyond Methodological Control: Pictorial Narratives in Historical Scholarship Picturing History It goes without saying that historical scholarship delineates its objects of study not only through the medium of the text, but also through that of the image.1 Since the beginnings of the discipline, historians have used images as well as words in their works. This very simple observation, however, if taken only a little further, leads to an epistemological and methodological lacuna that is deeply rooted in the sanctioned procedures of the discipline: although scholarly history is grounded in a very long discussion of theory and methodology, this discussion was, and remains even today, a logocentric one. The methodological and epistemological critique of aca­demic texts is an established practice regulated by an elaborate set of rules. However, there is hardly any critique of pictorial narratives in historical scholarship, although these narratives have been omnipresent in the illustrations of historical reference books, textbooks, and surveys since the beginning of modern historical scholarship in the nineteenth century. To be sure, the iconographic gaze, developed almost a century ago, has also seeped to a limited extent into the discussions of his­ torians thanks to a number of bridges to the groundbreaking works of Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky,2 but historians have not turned this gaze onto themselves. The methodological adequacy of pictorial narratives in historical scholarship was not and is not an issue. Given that powerful illustrations appear in historical reference books and textbooks, in compan­ion volumes to major historical exhibitions, and in numerous other publications, an epistemology of historical scholarship should

1 A German version of this article (Jussen 2013b) has been published in Locher / Markantonatos 2013; the volume of Locher and Markantonatos for the first time focuses on “Reinhart Koselleck and Politi­cal Iconology,” on his interest in the visual side of Historical Semantics; for this English text, some pas­ sages are taken from Jussen 2013a and Jussen 2014; I am grateful to Tom Lampert for the translation. 2 In this context reference is generally made to the investigations by Percy Ernst Schramm and Ernst Kantorowicz. It should also be noted that while historical semantics in the sense of Reinhart Kosel­ leck and Quentin Skinner did develop as text-oriented scholarship, from the beginning it worked exhaustive­ly on the transference to pictorial material; on Koselleck, see Locher–Markantonatos 2013; for contemporary reviews and prospects, see Steinmetz 2007.

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focus not only on the textual d ­ iscourses of the discipline’s history, but just as inten­ sively on the pictorial discourses. It must engage in iconography, the iconography of its own disciplinary history. It is clear that an iconography of historical scholarship is not only a scholarly issue, but also a political one, since historical scholarship – no one contests this – is a political science. Historical narratives are basic elements of political argumenta­ tion and historians are for this reason securely and broadly anchored institutionally. They are extensively and permanently institutionalised in university history depart­ ments, as well as in research institutions, schools, and museums, and are spread over a broad spectrum of media. It is specifically the pictorial reservoir of historical reference books and textbooks that is disseminated in many non-scholarly media, and quite a number of these media function essentially through images. It is thus especially negligent to leave the pictorial dimension of historical scholarship largely unchecked theoretically and methodologically. The pictorial customs of historical scholarship, precisely because they are not taken seriously, are structures of inertia, perpetuations of problematic legacies. The fact that historians have not yet taken an interest in the iconography of their own discipline is, in the first place, a symptom of precisely what an inves­ tigation of the visual side of historical narratives promises to uncover: that there is something intellectually unregulated in works of historical scholarship on the margins of a text production that itself follows relatively well-regulated discipli­ nary rules. This unregulated dimension of pictorial argumentation is particularly interesting since we often observe in the picturing of history books less the choice of an individual author than that of an institutional apparatus. Whatever individual authors might write, they perpetuate in the illustrations of their texts institution­ alised, self-understood, and to a certain extent automatically recallable refer­ences to historical themes, scenes, and monuments, and thereby continue pictorial customs and collective aesthetics. The reservoirs of these automatically recallable references are stored not only in the heads of individuals, but also, and especially, in institutions – slide libraries, publishing house archives, stock photography agen­ cies, libraries, editorial offices, etc. We should begin with these institutions in our attempt to understand the pictorial reservoirs that historians use and at the same time shape. The collective illustration reservoirs for historical narratives direct our attention toward emergent phenomena of scholarly culture, toward disciplinary transformations, the actual movers of which are often institutional apparatuses rather than individual researchers.

Pictorial Cycles The collective pictorial knowledge of a society is produced not through paintings, monuments or other historical artifacts, but rather through the wide dissemination

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of reproductions and illustrations of these objects.3 The visual repertoires of his­ torical thought can therefore be identified only through research into reproductions ­published on a mass scale and their material conditions, that is, the production systems and modes of dissemination, as well as the material culture and the cultural technologies for dealing with this widely disseminated material. We currently know very little about which themes of academic historical dis­ course have been selected as worthy of depiction at different times in the discipline’s history, which of them have led short and contingent lives as variants, and how the reservoirs have been transformed. We can hardly say whether and how major upheav­ als (in Germany, for instance, in 1871 or 1918–1919, 1933, 1945 or 1989) were reflected in the images used in historical narratives of, for instance, the Middle Ages or claims of national origin, or when a particular image was included in the reservoir of repeat­ edly used illustrations and when another disappeared. If, for example, we were to survey the illustrations of medieval history in Germany after 1945, would we find that certain medieval illustrations were regarded as encum­ bered and were thus eliminated? If so, how were they replaced? And what was the relation between the diligence given to textual revision and that to pictorial revision? The example of Charlemagne examined below suggests that in the Federal Republic of Germany the scholarly pictorial repertoire of the Middle Ages survived the post1945 upheaval relatively unscathed. Technological and epistemic upheavals appear to have been at least as incisive as political ones, for instance, the fact that between 1900 and 1930 the ostentatiously fictive illustrating style (following the model of history painting) lost its plausibility in favour of illustrations indebted to the estab­ lishment of photography, which relied on a completely new model of pictorial authen­ tification; or that the introduction of coloured prints was delayed in various media; or that the mass dissemination of illustrations, for example, in recent schoolbooks, may have had a de-canonising effect. Pictorial programmes in historical reference books and textbooks, their reflections in a plethora of diffusion media (for instance, in schoolbooks or in ephemeral media such as collectible picture cards, which were very influential in the past century prior to the advent of the television era around 1970) are subject to continuous movements of canonisation and de-canonisation. It is almost impossible to determine how these pictorial cycles functioned without exten­ sive preliminary labour, for it cannot be done without quantifying observations. This, however, requires the establishment of comprehensive corpora. In short, the plea of this article aims first of all at disciplinary introspection, that is, at the question of how historians authenticate their conceptions of history through the medium of images. This, however, is not only an epistemological interest with respect to the historian’s intellectual tools; it is also a sociological interest relevant for what is called ‘the history of social knowledge’ in modern societies. Such an endeav­

3 On this see Jussen 2013a.

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our can show what the massively disseminated pictorial repertoire of interpreting the past looked like in, for instance, Wilhelmine Germany or the Third Reich, how it was differentiated in East and West Germany after 1945, and what the reservoirs of repeatedly depicted historical material looked like during the same periods in France, Spain, Greece, Italy, or Poland. Suppositions even for the most obvious questions are risky at the moment. If we want to understand the images in an Italian national history, a storia d’Italia or only a storia del medio evo, we have to understand how, since the unification movement and the founding of an Italian state in the nineteenth century, Italian historians have dealt with the fact that the territory of contemporary Italy was governed from the eighth to the thirteen century by rulers who came from the territories of contemporary Germany. How were these centuries of ‘foreign rule’ condensed pictorially? A cursory review indicates that the intersection between the pictorial repertoires of Italian and German medieval scholars is very limited, even where the two superficially address the same issues. Alternatively, how do Spanish historians deal with a multi-ethnic, multi-religious past during the Middle Ages? What is deemed worthy of images? How do historians argue in the medium of images when there are hardly any artifacts available, as for instance in Poland prior to 1000 CE? Hungary claims two completely contrary pro­ genitors – Saint Stephen for Latin-Roman Hungary and Grand Prince Árpád, ruler of the steppe, for the Eastern identity. At the Heroes’ Square in Budapest the two have been brought together, but in academic historical works there must have been fluctu­ ations. The list of such examples could be continued at will and would make it evident that the deployment of images in scholarly history is largely unregulated. Wherever pictorial scholarly culture is investigated we find sedimented interpretive habits  – often long absent from texts – the awareness of which would, not least, facilitate poli­ tical communication in Europe. In the example I turn to below it becomes clear that an iconographic perspective on one’s own discipline can be successful only through a comparison of different scholarly cultures. The visual interpretations of Charlemagne in French and German scholarship provide a clear, instructive example of this.

An Example: Charlemagne and Karl der Große With the Experience of a Life in Research Collective pictorial knowledge can, of course, only be investigated through cir­ cumstantial evidence, through the cultural and time-specific range of available images that could be called the ‘pictorial horizon.’ Research into a culture’s pic­ torial horizon requires extensive preliminary work, specifically the development of a comprehensive corpus. Such preliminary work as a rule exceeds the scope of individual investigation and was also not performed in past. Let us turn now to a specific example. Which images of Charlemagne were in circulation at a particular

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time, for instance around 1900, in particular countries, for example in Germany and in France? In what quantity did they circulate and in which media? These are the kind of questions that those scholars especially who sought to analyse cultures and sites of memory (Erinnerungskulturen and Erinnerungsorte, lieux de mémoire) should have posed in past decades. The chapter “Charlemagne  – Karl der Große,” published in the reference work Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (“German sites of memory”) includes two illustrations (fig.  1):4 the first is a reproduction of a fresco conceived by Alfred Rethel for the Aachen Rathaus around 1853, in which Emperor Otto III opens Charlemagne’s tomb; the second is Albrecht Dürer’s painting of an elderly Charlemagne in imperial regalia (1511–13). How did the author of this article, an acknowledged expert in the epoch, arrive at these two illustrations? Are these two images truly representative, if we wish to grasp the French Charlemagne and the German Karl der Große as distinctive parts of the respective national collective historical knowledge – the figure of Charlemagne

Fig. 1: Etienne François and Winfried Schulze (eds.), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (“German sites of memory”) (Munich 2001), vol. 1, pp. 45 and 47. The two illustrations appear in the article entitled “Charlemagne – Karl der Große” (written by Joachim Ehlers).

4 François / Schulze 2001, vol. 1, pp. 45 and 47.

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as a French and a German “site of memory”? Are these particular scenes, or even these two images created by Rethel and Dürer, really part of the col­lective pictorial knowledge in the two countries? And when exactly did these pictorial creations come to belong to the pictorial horizon of the German or French population, and when did they disappear? Why are they no longer present today, and in which societies did they circulate? Only in Germany? Or also in France, Austria, or the Netherlands? What basis did the author of this article of 2001 use when he selected precisely these two images as “sites of memory” not only for the German Karl der Große, but also for the French Charlemagne? Given the state of scholarly discussion at the time he was able to base his decision on nothing other than his own intuition, saturat­ed with the experience of a life of research. There was no other way. More reliable state­ ments are only possible on the basis of comprehensive corpora, in which the picto­ rial material of historical reference books and textbooks, as well as their state-driven derivatives (schoolbooks) and market-driven derivatives (collectible picture albums, Épinal prints, German card games on historical subjects, etc.), have been collected and organised in a comprehensively diachronic manner. There has in the meantime been significant progress in assembling such corpora,5 so that it is now relatively easy to show that for many decades Dürer’s painting was in fact used to illustrate the chapter on Charlemagne in German history books. Rethel’s fresco of Otto  III opening Charlemagne’s tomb, in contrast, was by no means part of a general stock of knowledge in Germany; it rarely appeared as an illustration (fig. 3).6 Neither image was relevant for the French Charlemagne; both were so obviously German that they played no role in France.

The Fictional Style What images have French historians used to illustrate their chapters on Charlemagne and the Carolingians? A schoolbook by Antoine Bonifacio and Louis Mérieult, pub­ lished by Hachette in 1952 and with new editions up to 1973 for the cours élémentaire, contains no photographic documentation at all and almost no documenting illustra­

5 Widely-disseminated illustrated national histories of several European cultures are being collected at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt. In addition, a corpus for the pictorial programmes of school­ books for history classes needs to be established. Furthermore, the most important ephemera in Ger­ many – approximately 2,500 collectible picture albums with several hundred thousand images – have been collected at the Goethe-University and are available for viewing. 6 Figure 3 contains a chart with the themes of Charlemagne illustrations in German and French his­ tory books; data is provided in the percentage of a theme relative to the entire stock of Charlemagne images; the basis is currently c. 100 German and c. 40 French illustrated national histories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the national-historical corpora are still being compiled, the tendencies are already quite visible.

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tions, using instead a rich variety of illustrations in the manner of history paintings. On a double page spread, we find the French pictorial universe on the theme of Char­ lemagne (fig. 2): the death of Roland at Roncevaux Pass, an elderly Charlemagne with pupils at the palace school, and the imperial coronation in Rome. The illustrations were drawn by Albert Brenet, a well-known member of the administrative apparatus at the time. In 1936 Brenet had been admitted as an “official navy painter” (Peintre Officiel de la Marine, an office which had existed since 1830); a few years after his excursion into schoolbook publishing he was also named an “official painter of the land army” (Peintre Officiel de l’Armée de terre).7 In France the Roland who died in the battle with the Saracens because he wanted to warn his lord and master Charlemagne is the personification of the feudal norma­ tive universe: he incarnates courage and loyalty to God and king. Despite the fact that the story of Roland actually arose much later, in the twelfth century, Roland

Fig. 2: Antoine Bonifacio and Louis Mérieult, Histoire de France: Images et récits, cours élémentaire (1952, with fifteen editions up to 1973).

7 Bonifacio / Mérieult 1952; on Albert Brenet, see Favre / Baron 2003.

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belonged to the standard illustrations of Charlemagne in French national histories. In Germany this story of Charlemagne’s loyal servant Roland has hardly ever been a pictorial theme of the Carolingian era; only rarely – in publications of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – does one encounter in German works Charlemagne’s dying paladin Roland. Among the more than 500 illustrations in Adolf Bär’s and Paul Quensel’s Bildersaal deutscher Geschichte (“Picture hall of German history”) (1890, with numerous editions until 1905 and reprints up to the present) there is an illus­ tration of Roland in the thick of battle. The original painting by Louis Guesnet came from France, the photographic reproduction of it was from a Paris stock photography agency, and the engraving was done by a German graphic artist.8 In general, however, Roland was not included in the stock of images of the Carolingian era in German history books, but rather represented late medieval urban freedom. The Roland of German history books does not die in the Pyrenees Mountains and never held a bugle in his hands; he stands as a colossal giant before a town hall in northern Germany.9 The chart of pictorial themes relating to Charlemagne in French and German national histories and schoolbooks (fig. 3) – which at the moment is still preliminary and has not yet been differentiated chronologically – indicates that Roland’s feudal

Fig. 3: Chart with the themes of Charlemagne illustrations in German and French history books; data provided in the percentage of the total stock of images relating to Charlemagne.

8 Bär–Quensel 1890 (1902, 1905; five reprints since 1984 by four different publishers); the illustration of Roland is on page 43. 9 For a more detailed analysis of the different uses of Roland in Germany and France, see Jussen 2011.

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loyalty was the most widespread Charlemagne theme in France, whereas it appeared only very rarely in Germany. The great bronze statue showing Charlemagne mounted on a horse and led by his paladins Roland and Oliver, which has stood on the Île de la Cité in front of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris since the end of the nineteenth century, embodies the undisputed leitmotif of French Charlemagne iconography. The chart also shows that the two other scenes depicted in Bonifacio and Mérieult (fig. 2), an elderly Charlemagne in the palace school and the imperial coronation, also be­longed to the core stock of French images of Charlemagne. The fact that the chart also indi­cates a considerable presence of the equestrian statuette of Charlemagne in the Louvre and portrait coinage of Charlemagne shows the necessity of chronological differentiations. The predominance of these latter two objects, especially the coins, began only with the decline of fictional illustrations in the manner of history paint­ ings that can be observed in history books between 1900 and 1930. The chart also indicates which themes have been completely absent in France, including the two that appeared in the article “Charlemagne – Karl der Große” in Deutsche Erinnerungs­ orte (fig. 1): the Dürer portrait and the opening of Charlemagne’s tomb by Otto III. The second canonic motif in France – an elderly Charlemagne with pupils in the palace school (Charlemagne et les écoliers) – was also hardly used by German histo­ rians. French scholars projected the secularist impulse of the French Third Repub­lic back onto the origins of the French educational system: Charlemagne himself looks after the young pupils who are taught in his palace. In Germany this pictorial motif was largely absent, and when it was imported into a German national history, it was

Fig. 4: Charlemagne in the school: Richard Du Moulin-Eckart, Vom alten Germanien zum neuen Reich (“From Old Germania to the New Reich”) (1926); Johannes Scherr, Germania (1906); and Karl Neumann Strela, Deutschlands Helden in Krieg und Frieden (“Germany’s heroes in war and peace”) (1898, first edition 1892–1894).

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usually reinterpreted. In Richard Du Moulin-Eckart’s Vom alten Germanien zum neuen Reich: Zwei Jahrhunderte deutscher Geschichte (“From Old Germania to the New Reich: two millennia of German history”), published in 1926 (only one edition), text and illustration moved this motif to precisely where the French did not want to have it, namely in a monastery (fig. 4).10 This interpretation appeared in similar fashion – but with far wider dissemination than in Moulin-Eckart’s book – in an illustration in Johannes Scherr’s Germania: Zwei Jahrtausende deutschen Lebens (“Germania: two millennia of German life”), which was published in nine editions between c. 1876 and 1906 (fig. 4).11 German illustrators and authors usually depicted Carolingian schools as monastic institutions. In only a single national history within the comprehensive corpus of this study, in Deutschlands Helden in Krieg und Frieden: Deutsche Geschichte von ihren Ursprüngen bis zu Friedrich Wilhelm I (“German heroes in war and peace: German history from the beginnings to Frederick William I”) by Karl Neumann-Strela (first published in 1892, with a new edition in 1898), does an illustrator depict the emperor to a certain extent in the French style:12 Charlemagne visits a palace school (in any case, a building without any identifiably religious architecture), in which a person without tonsure, thus a lay person, is depicted as the teacher. However, this was not really a pictorial theme in Germany.

Fig. 5: The imperial coronation in the tradition of Alfred Rethel: Adolf Streckfuss, Das Deutsche Volk: Deutsche Geschichte in Wort und Bild (“The German people: German history in word and image”) (1862); Wilhelm Zimmermann, Illustrierte Geschichte des Deutschen Volkes (“Illustrated history of the German people”) (1873); Theodor Ebner, Illustrierte Geschichte Deutschlands (“Illustrated German history”) (here the second edition (1890), originally published in 1887; three subsequent editions were published up to 1906). 10 Moulin-Eckart 1926, p. 75. 11 Scherr 1876, p. 77. 12 Neumann-Strela 1898, first edition 1892 / 94, p. 60.

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No less instructive is the third illustration from the French schoolbook of 1952 (fig. 2), the imperial coronation. At first glance it might seem as if the imperial coro­ nation was a transcultural motif with little room for manoeuvre for nationally specific encodings. It is striking that the imperial coronation was depicted in French books much more frequently than in German books. On closer inspection it becomes clear that illustrations of this key scene were used in markedly different ways. In Germany the scene reflected a centre of political conflict, whereas in France it was less politi­ cally charged. In German historical depictions, the imperial coronation of Charle­ magne was consistently a political statement, a reflection of the Kulturkampf. Grosso modo two pictorial narratives competed in Germany. One variant narra­ ted the imperial coronation as the papal blindsiding of a Charlemagne sunk defence­ less in prayer. An early example of this is Alfred Rethel’s fresco in Aachen (produced between 1850 and 1860), which depicted the act as a veritable coronation ambush (reproduced in Ebner fig. 5). The pope cleverly surprises the ruler from behind with the imperial crown at precisely the moment when Charlemagne, kneeling before Christ on the cross, takes off his headpiece. An overwhelmed Charlemagne can only turn with an angry expression from the cross to the pope. Rethel’s fresco was repeatedly adopted and his pictorial idea became to a certain degree canonic. The version in Adolf Streckfuss’ Das deutsche Volk: Deutsche Geschichte in Wort und Bild (“The German people: German history in word and image”) (1862) may suffice as an example here (fig. 5).13 The illustrator Ludwig Löffler depicted an extremely alarmed Charlemagne who, startled from a kneeling prayer, stares completely unheroically at the impending imperial coronation. Wilhelm Zimmermann’s Illustrierte Geschichte des Deutschen Volkes (“Illustrated history of the German people”) (1873) offered a variation of Rethel’s interpretation reduced to the protagonists (fig. 5).14 In contrast to this narrative of the papal ambush on a Charlemagne who had long been imperial and did not need the pope at all stands the depiction of the imperial coronation as a prearranged and staged hierarchical ritual with Charlemagne kneel­ ing before the pope, as the scene was still portrayed in the French schoolbook of 1952 (fig. 2). In Germany an interpretation such as the one by Julius Schnorr von Carols­ feld from the early nineteenth century, which depicted a Charlemagne devoted to the pope, appears to have been acceptable here and there up to the 1860s, for instance in the frontispiece of Karl Heinrich Ludwig Pölitz’s Weltgeschichte für gebildete Leser und Studierende (“World history for educated readers and students”) (1820) (fig. 6). In the second half of the nineteenth century, German illustrators (fig. 7) pre­ ferred – when this version was used at all – Friedrich Kaulbach’s monumental pain­ ting of 1861 for the Maximilianeum in Munich. The advantage of Kaulbach’s version was that Charlemagne had grown so large that kneeling proudly and upright (and

13 Streckfuss 1862, p. 68. 14 Zimmermann 1873, p. 418.

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Fig. 6: Pölitz, Weltgeschichte, vol. 1, 1820.

armed) he is almost as tall as the standing pope crowning him. Kaulbach’s pictorial idea for the theme of the staged imperial coronation harmonised a papal-friendly, Catholic interpretation and the exigencies of the pictorial representation of a great German. As long as German national histories argued with history paintings, they took sides with one pictorial version of the coronation or the other. These traces of the Kulturkampf remained animated and widespread into the 1920s in German depictions of the imperial coronation of Charlemagne. Apart from the political issues discussed thus far, illustrations of Charlemagne’s coronation also point to a technical transformation that had a fundamental impact on the pictorial reservoirs used for history books. The series of illustrations in fig. 5 – variants of the coronation ambush – ends with the second edition of Ernst Theodor Ebner’s Illustrierte Geschichte Deutschlands (“Illustrated German history”) (1890, first edition 1887, fifth edition 1906). Ebner used a number of photographic reproductions

Fig. 7: Friedrich Kaulbach’s 1861 painting in a re-engraving by Adolf Closs (Johannes Scherr, Germania, 1878) and a few years later in a photographic reproduction (Johannes Scherr, Germania, sixth edition 1890).

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in this edition of the book; for Charlemagne’s coronation there was a photograph of Rethel’s fresco. This type of illustration was new at the time and quickly became the dominant mode for book illustrations.15 The reference beneath the reproduction of Rethel’s fresco “with permission of the Photographic Society in Berlin” points to the role of stock photo agencies in the canonisation process, an issue that has hardly been investigated as yet.16 Prior to the introduction of photography there had occasionally been copyright notices, but references to stock photo agencies appeared only around 1890 in German national histories, especially to the Berlin Photographic Society and to Hanfstaengl in Munich. The technology of photographic reproduction and with it a new commercial form for the distribution of pictures – the agencies – quickly led, as far I have been able to determine, to a reduction in the diversity of images. Rethel’s imperial coronation in Ebner’s book is an example: whereas prior to the emergence of stock photo agencies the anti-papal pictorial idea of the coronation ambush on a defenceless Charlemagne was an idea replayed artistically in different ways (e.g., Streckfuss and Zimmermann – fig. 5), with stock photo agencies a specific version – Rethel’s fresco – became the authoritative, now technologically reproduced form. In similar fashion, Friedrich Kaulbach’s monumental version of the alternative narra­ tive, produced in 1861 for the Maximilianeum in Munich, was frequently reproduced. The transition is evident in Johannes Scherr’s Germania (fig. 7): the first edition of the book (1878) used a re-engraving by Adolf Closs of a photograph of Kaulbach’s paint­ ing, whereas the sixth edition in 1890 replaced this with a photographic reproduc­ tion of the painting. In contrast to Rethel’s anti-papal pictorial idea, which had been appropriated and varied by a number of book illustrators (fig. 5), Kaulbach’s papal friendly interpretation was disseminated only as a product closely tied to photogra­ phy and to the development of photographic printing technologies. As long as German national histories used history paintings as illustration, one of these two coronation narratives was chosen. The two interpretations oriented around Kaulbach’s painting and Rethel’s fresco appeared not only in reference books and schoolbooks on German history, but also in the pictorial universe of collectible picture cards that flourished at the time, and in many other ephemeral materials. Illustrators in France were evidently unaware of the German issue with the imperial coronation. As far as I have been able to determine, Rethel’s version of a papal ambush was never used as an illustration in France. The illustration in the French schoolbook of 1952 (fig. 2) is symptomatic of the indifference to this question. It appeared selfevident in France that the imperial coronation be depicted as a pre-arranged and cho­ reographed hierarchical act, in which Charlemagne did not even have to be – as in Kaulbach’s painting  – a proud, armed giant. A Charlemagne kneeling submissively with his hands folded was no cause of concern for French historians.

15 Ebner 1887, p. 179. 16 On this still young field of research, see Bruhn 2003.

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In short, none of the three leading motifs of French Charlemagne illustrations found together on the double page of the 1952 schoolbook  – Roland, Charlemagne at school, and a devout Charlemagne being crowned – had a German counterpart. What we see in Germany instead is indicated in the chart in fig. 3. Until the decline of fictional historical illustrations between 1900 and 1930, the theme of Charle­magne in Germany assumed pictorial form in the Saxon mission, or more precisely the destruc­ tion of the Irminsul and the baptism of the Saxons, as well as in depictions of the equestrian statuette in the Louvre and of the Aachen Cathedral. None of these motifs were absent in France, but their presence in terms of percentage was much greater in Germany. Several motifs belonged to the repertoire of only one of the countries – in Germany the Dürer portrait, depictions of the Palace of Aachen and Charlemagne as the builder, Charlemagne’s encounter with Muslim emissaries, and finally the opening of Charlemagne’s tomb by Otto III. The themes of Roland, Charlemagne in the palace school, and the coronation were significantly more frequent in France. Depictions of Charlemagne with his scholars as well as an ageing Charlemagne watching the approaching Norman ships from his window were limited largely to France. A particu­ larly instructive, specifically French illustrative tradition for Charlemagne concerns the Imperial Crown, which was in fact created two hundred years after Charlemagne’s death. No German historian has ever used the famous Imperial Crown – today in the Hofburg in Vienna – to illustrate the Carolingians. This French tradition needs to be examined in somewhat more detail.

Why the Imperial Crown is Carolingian in France Ernest Lavisse’s Histoire de France illustrée (“Illustrated history of France”) (1911) is an especially influential example of a peculiarity of French historical scholarship of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the chapter on Charlemagne’s empire (L’empire de Charlemagne) there is a photograph of the Imperial Crown with the caption “So-called crown of Charlemagne” (Couronne dite de Charlemagne) (fig. 8).17 French historians know of course that the crown was of more recent origin, as Lavisse himself indicates in the wording of his text beneath the image. No one in Germany identifies the Imperial Crown as the “so-called crown of Charlemagne”; the crown is never tied to him. Even outside the domain of historical scholarship Charlemagne wears it only occasionally in history paintings.18

17 Lavisse 1911, p. 316, plate 17. 18 The Ravensburg card game Deutsche Geschichte. Ein Quartettspiel (no. 5514) from 1936 contains four cards for Das Reich der Karolinger, including an image of the Imperial Crown with the caption “The German Imperial Crown” (Die deutsche Kaiserkrone). This attribution, however, is unusual in Germany.

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Fig. 8: Ernest Lavisse, Histoire de France illustrée (“Illustrated history of France”), vol. 2 (1911). Beneath the heading “The Empire of Charlemagne” (L’empire de Charlemagne) is a photograph of the Imperial Crown with the caption “Socalled crown of Charlemagne” (Couronne dite de Charlemagne).

In Germany the Imperial Crown is regarded as a core object in the pictorial uni­ verse of the Ottonians, and that is where it belongs historically. Why did French schol­ ars – against their own better chronological knowledge – illustrate the Carolingian era with the Imperial Crown? In Germany illustrators could work chronologically with Ottonian, Salian, and Staufer kings, exactly as the authors of the texts did. The French apparently believed that they could not do this because the kings between the last ‘great’ Carolingian, Charles the Bald, at the end of the ninth century and the first ‘great’ Capetians in the thirteenth century did not, in their eyes, amount to much. Authors and illustrators resolved this problem by suspending their organisation of the material in terms of eventual and political history for three hundred years and already in the nineteenth century by narrating structural history. The chapters after the ‘great’ Carolingians were called Le monachisme (“monachism”), La feodalité (“feudalism”), or something similar; the illustrations in these chapters visualised social history  – Schwertleite, knightly tournaments, a peasant ploughing fields, and so on. The Impe­ rial Crown did not fit into this context, and thus it was predated two hundred years. This would be a minor curiosity not worthy of further mention if it did not fore­ shadow the great accomplishment of French historiography in the twentieth century, the structural historiography of the Annales. From a German perspective it may have been a revolutionary upheaval that the Annales pushed the history of politics and great events into the background in favour of structural and social history. With a view to French national history, however, it should be noted that this breakthrough of

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the Annales had been prepared since the nineteenth century in French national histo­ ries for the ‘king-less’ period of the tenth and eleventh centuries. French colleagues of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries organised their historical depictions (as well as their narratives) dynastically again only beginning with the thirteenth century.

The Documenting Style At first glance one might imagine that the differences between the French Charle­ magne and the German Karl der Große dwindled as the use of historical illustrations declined. In the historical works on the national histories of both countries, the use of re-engravings or photographical reproductions of history paintings and illustrations in the style of these paintings rapidly lost in plausibility after 1900, until it largely dis­ appeared by 1930. Historical illustrations were replaced by a style that appeared to be documentary. The precise development has not been investigated, but the connec­tion between this fundamental change in visual representation and the technical state of photography, the corresponding reproduction technology, and the emergence of stock photography agencies around 1890 is apparent. The epistemic rupture in the academic picturing of history was triggered by tech­ nological and economic developments beyond the realm of scholarship. This trans­ formation of the pictorial style had fundamental consequences for the way in which historians were able to create pictorial authority for their historical conceptions. The decline of fictional illustrations in the style of history paintings meant that the pos­ sibility of providing visual accompaniment to the text disappeared for a variety of key situations of national historiography. The bulk of previous pictorial themes was necessarily lost. In the new documentary style German historians could no longer employ images to thematise the imperial coronation of 800 CE, the Battle of Lechfeld, or the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Their French colleagues lost, for example, the martyrdom of Saint Blandina of Lyon in 177 CE (a standard pictorial theme in France), as well as the baptism of Clovis I or Vercingetorix’s proud surrender to Caesar. Since images of historical knowledge are discursively anchored, the turn from an illustrat­ing to a documenting style between 1900 and 1930 must have been a moment of canonic uncertainty. The repertoire of ‘automatically’ correct images for a historical theme shrank dramatically, and in Germany this occurred precisely during those decades in which the political situation changed drastically several times. If a multiplicity of pictorial re-conceptions of German history emerged in historical scholarship between 1900 and 1930 (at least in Medieval Studies, the field I know best), then references to nationalism and emerging National Socialism explain only a part of the transforma­ tions. The change from an illustrating to a documenting pictorial style in historical works virtually compelled a re-conceptualisation of pictorial narrative patterns. In schoolbooks, fictional illustrations seem to have been used somewhat longer, insofar as fig. 2 is an example. There was not of course a complete change of pictorial style.

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On the one hand, there had always been publications in the documenting style; on the other, historians in both countries have repeatedly employed, up to the present day, peculiar admixtures of fictional illustrations and documents, even in publications with no interest in collective memory, e.g., in the historical reception of Charlemagne. Did the differences between Germany and France in the use of images, for example regarding Charlemagne, disappear with the establishment of the documenting style? If the equestrian statuette or the portrait coinage of Charlemagne became the predom­ inant pictorial formula in both countries for the theme of Charlemagne, how could national differences in images continue to be articulated? Yet even documentary images of the very same object could accentuate completely different arguments in Germany and in France. While the equestrian statuette looks no different in a French than in a German book, meaning – as is well known – arises through context, in the case of images in a national history through pictorial context. Since the 1920s in Germany a second monument has regularly appeared in the context of the equestrian statuette of Charlemagne – Widukind’s eleventh- or twelfthcentury tomb in Enger (in Westfalia in northern Germany). Among the 21 photographs that Walter Goetz and Karl Leonhardt used in 1924 in their Seestern-Lichtbildreihen zur Geschichte (“Seestern slide series for history”) under the title Das Frankenreich unter den Karolingern (“The Frankish kingdom under the Carolingians”), Widukind’s tomb was placed next to the equestrian statuette. In Gerhard Krüger’s Geschichte des deut­ schen Volkes (“History of the German people”) (numerous editions in the 1930s and 40s), images of Widukind (tomb) and Charlemagne (illuminated manuscript) were on facing plates.19 Richard Suchenwirth’s Deutsche Geschichte (“German history”), the most widely disseminated book on German history during the Nazi era (730,000 copies between 1934 and 1942), visualised all of German history from the Bronze Age to Hitler in 41 plates; the book used two plates for the Carolingian era, Dürer’s portrait of Charlemagne followed by Widukind’s tomb.20 In the chapter on the Franks in Hans Hagemeyer’s Bilderatlas zur Deutschen Geschichte (“Picture atlas of German history”) (1944), Widukind’s tomb is depicted on an entire page, and then several pages later there is an image of the Charlemagne statuette.21 In nineteenth-century works ­ eutsche of historical scholarship with documentary illustrations  – for example D 22 Geschichte (“German history”) (1880) by Ludwig Stacke or Kulturgeschichte des Deutschen Volkes (“Cultural history of the German people”) (1886)23 by Otto Henne am Rhyn (himself a Swiss citizen) – this opposition virtually never appeared. In these books Charlemagne was frequently depicted in several variations – the statuette, the

19 Krüger 1937, the plate section after p. 40. 20 Suchenwirth 1934, plates 5 and 6. 21 Hagemeyer 1944, pp. 88 and 91. 22 Stacke 1880. 23 Henne am Rhyn 1886.

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­ riclinium mosaic, Dürer’s portrait – but none of these authors deemed Widukind’s T tomb worthy of an illustration.24 Although the Saxon mission was often depicted in works that employed history paintings, the focus here was not Widukind, but rather the destruction of the Irminsul, for example in Bär, Bildersaal deutscher Geschichte (1890), or religious instruction, for instance in Scherr, Germania (1906). The creation of this opposition between Charlemagne and Widukind as the pic­ torial condensation of the Carolingian era could be passed over by pointing out that these books were largely committed to the spirit of nationalism and National Social­ism and thus that Charlemagne’s uncertain status and Widukind’s special place of honour are not surprising. From other contexts, for instance programmes for the procession on Tag der Deutschen Kunst (“Day of German art”),25 one was already accus­tomed to a politics of history that gave Widukind and Charlemagne equal prominence. However, this constellation did not disappear with the Nazi era, quite the contrary. Eberhard Orthbandt’s Bildbuch deutscher Geschichte (“Picture book of German history”) (1954, with further editions until 1961), as well as his Illustrierte deutsche Geschichte (“Illus­ trated German history”) (1963, with further editions until 1966), repeated this con­ stellation in even more pronounced form.26 In the latter, Widukind (tomb) and Charle­ magne (statuette) are depicted on opposite pages, equally large and on equal footing, programmatically framing the chapter title, “The Epoch of the Charlemagne” (Die Epoche Karls des Großen) (fig. 9). The example can also be used as an occasion to examine the different transfor­ mation speeds of text and image. In the 1950s, few German historians (apart perhaps from contemporary historians) appear to have revised  – that is, to a certain extent de-Nazified – not only their words but also their images. Their focus (and apparently that of the Allies as well) was directed at texts. Otto Brunner, to name only a very

Fig. 9: Eberhard Orthbandt, Illustrierte deutsche Geschichte (“Illustrated German history”) (1963, with further editions up to 1966).

24 An early picture of the grave can be found at the beginning of the twentieth century in Heyck 1905, p. 199. 25 On this subject with illustrations, see Schweizer 2007. 26 Orthbandt 1954; Orthbandt 1963.

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famous example, knew what changes were necessary to the terminology of his book Land und Herrschaft (“Land and lordship”) (1939) in order for the fourth edition (1959) to be acceptable in the post-war era.27 A sensorium evidently existed for encumbered terminology – in Brunner’s case regarding medieval history. But what about pictorial sequences? Did anyone reflect as to when a configuration such as the juxtaposition of Charlemagne and Saxon leader Widukind had emerged and what its message had been? At what time and for what reasons was Uta von Naumburg depicted? When and why did images of Henry the Lion appear in German history books, even occasionally pushing out images of his archenemy, Frederick Barbarossa, the hero of Wilhelmine Germany? Hardly anywhere can we identify an intentional reworking of pictorial pro­ grammes. One of the rare cases of an apparently intentional revision is Veit Valentin’s Geschichte der Deutschen (“History of the Germans”) from 1947 (fig. 10).28 This example, however, also illuminates a particularly instructive aspect for an iconological perspective on historical scholarship, namely the status of authorial volition in regard to an institutionalised pictorial reservoir: on the whole, illus­ trations follow less the intention of an author than the logic of the apparatus, for instance, publishing calculations, the offerings of stock photography agencies, etc.29 Historian Veit Valentin, who fled the Nazis, initially to the United Kingdom then to the United States, and was denaturalised in 1939, wrote Geschichte der Deutschen (“History of the Germans”) in exile in Washington. The book was originally pub­

Fig. 10: On the left the first edition of Veit Valantin’s Geschichte der Deutschen (“History of the Germans”) (1947); on the right Knaurs Deutsche Geschichte (“Knaur’s German History”) (1960), the posthumous new edition of Valentin’s book with an altered title and new images. 27 On this, see Algazi 1997. 28 Valentin 1947. A further example is the book Kleine Deutsche Geschichte by conservative liberal Hubertus Prinz zu Löwenstein (published by Scheffler Verlag in Frankfurt in 1953, one edition), which employed relatively fresh pictorial material. Charlemagne is illustrated here with the rarely used late medieval Charlemagne reliquary in the Aachen Cathedral. 29 The following two paragraphs about Veit Valentin have been drawn from Jussen 2013a.

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lished in 1947 by Pontes in Berlin (it has been widely disseminated and published in repeated editions, most recently in 2012). Valentin’s study was one of the very few history books of the era that was careful to avoid images that had been re-seman­ ticised during the Third Reich or had advanced at that time into the pictorial canon. It is quite evident that Valentin not only wrote the history anew, but also used new illustrations. Even if in doing so he clearly remained a child of his times (em­ploying only portraits of great men and occasionally of great women), he nevertheless had a sense that certain images were encumbered or contaminated, for instance, those of Uta von Naumburg, Widukind, or Henry the Lion, and he altered the stock of images accordingly. This achievement, however, did not long outlive its author. Valen­ tin died in 1947, shortly before the publication of his book. The edition by Knaur (Munich / Zurich) in 1960 already disregarded Valentin’s pictorial programme and revived precisely those constellations which had been invented only in the 1930s and which Valentin had manifestly avoided. In the 1960 edition Charlemagne no longer stood alone, as he had in Valentin’s original, but was instead joined by an image of his ‘Germanic’ counterpart Widukind in equal size. An illustration of Henry the Lion’s tomb was also inserted, while his imperial adversary Friedrick Barbarossa was absent. These pictorial alterations by Knaur were part of a burdened past, a legacy that the publishing house employees who selected the images for the new edition of Valentin’s book in 1960 were probably not clear about at all. The hero of Wilhelmine Germany, Emperor Friedrick Barbarossa, was excluded pictorially in favour of the hero of the Third Reich, of Eastern colonisation, whose star had been elevated into the pictorial canon only in the 1930s. In the 1947 edition of his book, Valentin, an advocate of democracy, had included neither images of the heroes of the Third Reich nor those of Wilhelmine Germany. This example may suffice as an indication of how after the death of an author the pictorial formation of historical imagination was transformed from an author-guided process to an apparatus-guided one. An iconography of scholarly history illuminates such transformations and their lasting influence, which have as yet hardly been noticed. It should be stated explicitly that the change from an illustrating to a document­ ing style was in many situations only a change of style and by no means necessarily led to the introduction of a pictorial document. Since Theoderic, Vercingetorix, and Hermann (Arminius) were no longer admissible in history paintings and preference was now given to documents, images of statues were introduced into history books: a sculpture of Theoderic by Peter Vischer from 1513, or statues of Arminius and Ver­ cingetorix from the nineteenth century. Apparently it was sufficient (and is often still sufficient) that the object depicted simply be old. A modern scholarly exhibition catalogue on the imperial coronation of Charlemagne no longer employs nineteenthcentury history paintings by Kaulbach or Rethel, but instead an illustration from the thirteenth-century Sächsische Weltchronik (“Saxon World Chronicle”). Although this exchange does not accomplish much – an image created 500 years after the event is no more documentary than one created 1500 years later – it evidently appears to be

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more documentary. Even today the use of medieval images from the High and Late Middle Ages to illustrate the Early Middle Ages is widespread. This is what is meant by the phrase ‘documenting style.’ Apparently many historians feel more comfortable with this procedure than with using history paintings from the nineteenth century, although the former is no better than the latter and is perhaps worse because the ten­ sions between image and text are more difficult for many readers to discern.

Charlemagne in Collectible Picture Cards In closing I would like to take a brief look at the diffusion media of the academic interpretive edifice. The pictorial worlds of dissemination media offer a peculiar admixture: on the one hand, perpetuation and intensification; on the other, trans­ cultural mixing and, to a certain extent, “savage” illustrations (to borrow from LéviStrauss). In 1912 the Amsterdam cocoa producer Bensdorp included as an extra with its German cocoa products a picture series of “famous men” with 104 illustrations, including one of Charlemagne (fig. 11). The Charlemagne illustration, which bore a text in German on the back, had clearly been produced in the Netherlands: the Dutch caption on the front “Karel de Groote een School bezoekend” (“Charlemagne visiting a school”) was part of the lithography and could not be altered, whereas the back side of the card had been published separately. The motif – Charlemagne in the palace school – was a scene from the French pictorial universe of Charlemagne that could not, as we have seen, be found in this form in German national histories. The German text on the back of the picture card had nothing to do with the illustration on the front (translation): Born in Neustria in 742, died in Aachen in 814. Charlemagne was king of the Franks and emperor of Western Europe. He succeeded his father Pepin the Short in 768. Charlemagne is famous as a commander and conqueror, as a legislator and patron of literature and the arts and scien­ ces. He defeated the Aquitanians, the Lombards, the Saxons, the Bavarians, and the Avars, and engaged in a military campaign against the Moors, where the rearguard of his army was def­ eated near Roncevaux in the Pyrenees Mountains and where Roland died a glorious death. In 800 Pope Leo III crowned him emperor of Western Europe. He is the most sublime figure of the Middle Ages. As victor he engaged in wars with the aim of uniting the conquered countries into a whole. Through his king’s envoys he always knew what was happening in his enormous empire. However, his accomplishments did not continue after his death because his successors did not share his outstanding qualities.

It was not only through Dutch cocoa that this ‘French’ motif entered German living rooms. Cologne chocolate producer Stollwerck also incorporated the motif of “Charle­ magne in the school” into its Helden-Album (“Hero album”) of 1908 (fig. 11). Although the picture card itself provided no orientation as to the location of the event, the only figure in the illustration that could possibly have been a teacher was a cleric, as is typical of German illustrations of this scene. Charlemagne is dressed in ostentatiously

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Frankish style and – through his moustache – is clearly adapted to the German ico­ nography of Karl der Große. In contrast to the Bensdorp illustration, which in the French pictorial tradition shows an elderly man with a long beard sitting in a chair and leaning on his sword, the Stollwerck Helden-Album depicts an authentic German hero. The Berliner Morgenpost also depicted the scene in their 52 picture series Deut­ sche Kulturbilder (“Images of German culture”) from 1928. This version was replete with palatial architecture, a clerical teacher, and an emphatically Frankish ruler. Al­though these scenes of Charlemagne visiting the palace school were thus somewhat Germanised, the collector albums propagated a theme that did not belong to the stock motifs of German historians but was instead borrowed from the French pictorial uni­ verse of the Carolingian period. The adoption of pictorial motifs from France is most conspicuous in a 1934 series by Abeles, a Munich cigarette and tobacco company. The entire stock of French motifs is reproduced faithfully here: Charlemagne in the school, Charlemagne and the scholars, Charlemagne at the palace window watching the Normans (fig. 11). The simplest explanation for the importation of such motifs and iconography would be that the illustrations had been produced in France. This is true, for example, of a large part of the illustrations by the Liebig company that were included in the product packaging for Liebigs Fleischextrakt (“Liebig’s meat extract”). However, French motifs and iconography can also be found in the Liebig illustra­ tions produced by the Klingenberg company in Detmold (in Westfalia in northern Germany). These cultural interconnections need to be investigated further. For the moment it must suffice to note that the extremely widely disseminated and popular collectible picture cards frequently narrated a German history that differed from the one found in national histories and schoolbooks. These certainly preliminary observations on pictorial narratives in the academic apparatus and non-academic dissemination media of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will have to suffice for an initial sketch. They have sought to demonstrate that a systematic investigation of pictorial politics in historical scholarship is an important aspect of the discipline’s history. Investigative techniques still need to be improved in many ways; in particular, the corpora must be expanded and further media included from non-academic domains. For every key theme of historical argu­ mentation, a history of the discipline in terms of its illustrations can be written; and virtually none of these disciplinary histories – extremely important epistemologically and methodologically  – has yet been told. Most of what can be determined about Charlemagne illustrations in different countries requires quantifying observations, a comparison of the greatest possible number of illustrated works – works that exhibit similar pictorial narrative patterns, as if guided by an invisible hand. The perspec­ tives and the investigative procedures necessary for these massively published and disseminated materials are similar to those developed by historical semantics for texts. Such an approach, based on corpus orientation and quantification, proceeding sociologically and concentrating on discourses, should be supplemented by a second perspective  – one that Reinhard Koselleck sketched in a brief, posthumously pub­

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Fig. 11: Collectible picture cards of Charlemagne from Bendorp (1912) and Stollwerck (1908); in addition, pictures 61 to 63 from the album Der Wanderer durch die Jahrhunderte (“The wanderer through the centuries”) by Abeles Cigarette and Tobacco Products, Munich (1934), as well as the entire page with these illustrations (clockwise from left above).

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lished text entitled “Politische Ikonographie” (written in 1963). This second perspec­ tive does not approach discourse with a sociological attitude, but focuses instead on individuals from a psychological perspective. It poses the question of how individuals are affected by images in comparison to texts. It is not possible within the framework of my brief plea for an iconography of scholarly history to pursue this perspective in more depth. It will have to suffice to outline the issue through several citations from Koselleck’s text:30 “Thinking sets out in images” (Das Denken bricht in Bildern auf); “The image enters more easily than the word” (Das Bild geht leichter ein als das Wort); “The image convinces before one takes a position on it” (Das Bild überzeugt, bevor man sich dazu stellt); or “Thinking in images is an original procedure in the sense of the beginning of our thinking” (Das Denken in Bildern ist ein ursprünglicher Vorgang im Sinne des Anfangs unseres Denkens). The image works “by putting itself in the place of the word, of that to be heard” (indem es sich an die Stelle des Wortes, des zu Hörenden setzt). Koselleck supposed that “humans [remain] attached to the image” (der Mensch am Bild haften bleibt), that an image seen at an early age accompanies a person even when he or she has long been in a position to find out about that image. If this is indeed the case – and I too suppose it to be so – then there are still more reasons to integrate the pictorial argumentation of historians, and the illustrations of their texts, more seriously into academic work and to prepare the ground for an iconography of scholarly history.

Bibliography Algazi 1997: Gadi Algazi / Otto Brunner‚ “‘Konkrete Ordnung’ und Sprache der Zeit,” in: Peter Schöttler (ed.), Geschichtsschreibung als Legitimationswissenschaft 1918 – 1945, Frankfurt 1997, pp. 166–203. Bär–Quensel 1890: Adolf Bär / Paul Quensel, Bildersaal Deutscher Geschichte. Zwei Jahrtausende deutschen Lebens in Bild und Wort, Stuttgart / Leipzig / Berlin 1890. Bonifacio / Mérieult 1952: Antoine Bonifacio / Louis Mérieult, Histoire de France. Images et récits. Cours élémentaire. Illustrations d‘Albert Brenet, Paris 1952. Bruhn 2003: Matthias Bruhn, Bildwirtschaft. Verwaltung und Verwertung der Sichtbarkeit, Weimar 2003. Ebner 1887: Theodor Ebner, Illustrierte Geschichte Deutschlands, Stuttgart 1887. Favre / Baron 2003: Thierry Favre / Cristina Baron, Albert Brenet. Une vie, une oeuvre, Paris 2003. François / Schulze 2001: Etienne François / Winfried Schulze (eds.), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, Munich 2001. Hagemeyer 1944: Hans Hagemeyer (ed.), Gestalt und Wandel des Reiches. Ein Bilderatlas zur deutschen Geschichte, Berlin 1944. Henne am Rhyn 1886: Otto Henne am Rhyn, Kulturgeschichte des Deutschen Volkes, 2 vols., Berlin 1886. Heyck 1905: Eduard Heyck, Deutsche Geschichte, Bielefeld / Leipzig 1905.

30 Facsimile in Locher 2009.

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Jussen 2011: Bernhard Jussen, “Roland,” in: Johannes Fried / Olaf B. Rader (eds.), Die Welt des Mittelalters. Erinnerungsorte eines Jahrtausends, Munich 2011, pp. 396–408. Jussen 2013a: Bernhard Jussen, “Bilderhorizonte. Wege zu einer Ikonologie nationaler Rechtfertigungsnarrative,” in: Andreas Fahrmeir / Annette Warner [née Imhausen] (eds.), Die Vielfalt normativer Ordnungen. Konflikte und Dynamik in historischer und ethnologischer Perspektive, Frankfurt 2013, pp. 79–107. Jussen 2013b: Bernhard Jussen, “Plädoyer für eine Ikonologie der Geschichtswissenschaft. Zur bildlichen Formierung historischen Denkens,” in: Hubert Locher / Adriana Markantonatos (eds.), Reinhart Koselleck und die Politische Ikonologie (Transformationen des Visuellen 1), Munich / Berlin 2013, pp. 260–279. Jussen 2014: Bernhard Jussen, “Bild- und Mediengeschichte: Karl der Große in der Moderne,” in: Stiftung Deutsches Historisches Museum (ed.), Kaiser und Kalifen. Karl der Große und die Welt des Mittelmeers, Darmstadt 2014, pp. 330–349 and 381. Krüger 1937: Gerhard Krüger, Geschichte des Deutschen Volkes. Ein Grundriß, Leipzig 1937. Lavisse 1911: Ernest Lavisse, Histoire de France illustrée depuis les origines jusqu’à la révolution, vol. 2, Paris 1911. Locher 2009: Hubert Locher, “Denken in Bildern. Reinhart Kosellecks Programm Zur politischen Ikonologie,” in: Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte, 3 (4), 2009, pp. 81–96. Locher / Markantonatos 2013: Hubert Locher / Adriana Markantonatos (eds.), Reinhart Koselleck und die Politische Ikonologie (Transformationen des Visuellen 1), Munich / Berlin 2013. Löwenstein 1953: Hubertus Prinz zu Löwenstein, Kleine Deutsche Geschichte, Frankfurt 1953. Moulin-Eckart 1926: Richard Du Moulin-Eckart, Vom alten Germanien zum neuen Reich. 2 Jahrtausende deutscher Geschichte, Stuttgart 1926. Neumann-Strela 1898: Karl Neumann-Strela, Deutschlands Helden in Krieg und Frieden. Deutsche Geschichte von ihren Ursprüngen bis zu Friedrich Wilhelm I., Hannover 1898. Orthbandt 1963: Eberhard Orthbandt, Illustrierte deutsche Geschichte, Munich 1963. Orthbandt 1954: Eberhard Orthbandt, Bildbuch deutscher Geschichte, Baden-Baden 1954. Scherr 1876: Johannes Scherr, Germania. Zwei Jahrtausende deutschen Lebens, Stuttgart 1876. Schweizer 2007: Stefan Schweizer, ‘Unserer Weltanschauung sichtbaren Ausdruck geben’. Nationalsozialistische Geschichtsbilder in historischen Festzügen zum ‘Tag der Deutschen Kunst’, Göttingen 2007. Stacke 1880: Ludwig Stacke, Deutsche Geschichte, 2 vols., Bielefeld 1880. Steinmetz 2007: Willibald Steinmetz, “40 Jahre Begriffsgeschichte – The State of the Art,” in: Heidrun Kämper / Ludwig M. Eichinger (eds.), Sprache – Kognition – Kultur. Sprache zwischen mentaler Struktur und kultureller Prägung, Berlin 2007, pp. 174–197. Streckfuß 1862: Adolf Streckfuß, Das Deutsche Volk. Deutsche Geschichte in Wort und Bild. Ein illustrirtes Hausbuch für Leser aller Stände. Illustrirt von Ludwig Löffler, Berlin 1862. Suchenwirth 1934: Richard Suchenwirth, Deutsche Geschichte. Von der germanischen Vorzeit bis zur Gegenwart, Leipzig 1934. Valentin 1947: Veit Valentin, Geschichte der Deutschen, 2 vols., 2nd edition, Berlin 1947. Zimmermann 1873: Wilhelm Zimmermann, Illustrierte Geschichte des Deutschen Volkes, Stuttgart 1873.

Rolf Sachsse

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 When on 16 November 1945 the first United Nations preparatory education commis­ sion – which became known as UNESCO – came together, there were a number of papers launched by members of British and French committees who had prepared the commission. Up to the final creation of UNESCO in Paris, in late 1946, there must have been a large number of meetings considering an even larger number of sub­ mitted papers. The shelves of the records from this committee alone measure nine metres in length. There is no evidence that the paper to be discussed here ever had a chance to be considered by the commission, and we can only speculate about the impact that it might have had. The only form to be presented here is the digital scan of a photocopy which was found in the archives of Lucia Moholy.1 She submitted the paper in August 1945 when she was the head of the microfilm services of the Association of Scientific Libraries (Aslib) in the United Kingdom. Before 1945, she had played important roles in art, photography, design and education, but was mostly known for her marriage to one of the first true multi-media artists, László Moholy-Nagy.2 The submission – or “suggestion” as she called it – consists of eight ideas for the implementation of microfilm services across libraries in the post-war world. Most of these ideas might be recognised as the usual attempts of a professional striving to become part of a new institution. But there are minor hints at ideas that go far beyond strategies simply designed to promote a small scientific supply organisation such as Aslib Microfilms. The seventh idea in the “suggestion” describes setting up “national

1 The archives of Lucia Moholy is divided into two. The portraits she took in the first years of her Bri­ tish exile (1935–1942) are held in the National Portrait Gallery, London; all other reminiscences of her life can be found in the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin. The author is deeply indebted to Sabine Hartmann, the archivist of this institution, who was endlessly helpful during the preparation of this paper. The papers discussed here were shown at the conference as scans from photocopies and prints. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations are from these papers. 2 Sachsse 1985; Moortgat et al. 1995, some passages of the paper discussed are cited in German trans­ lation on pp. 84–85. All biographical notes on Lucia Moholy may be traced in these publications.

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Fig. 1: Cover page, signed by Lucia Moholy, Microfilm Services and Their Application to Scholarly Study, Scientific Research, Education and Re-Education in the Post-War Period. A Suggestion with 5 Appendixes, photocopy of a lost typescript 1945. The Bauhaus Archive, Berlin.

microfilm services in each and every country” to be co-ordinated by “an international system of microfilm services” and even “a central (universal) microfilm office.”3 What might appear at first sight to be the typical post-war activity of a security service is explained in further detail under the recommended “tasks and potential tasks of Microfilm, now under discussion,” especially after the usual debate about scientific knowledge exchange: the “re-stocking of libraries damaged or destroyed by enemy action, depleted by purging and looting under enemy occupation; or suffer­ ing from the consequences of wartime restrictions” as well as displaying “material for educational purposes and training schemes.” Of more obvious need in post-war Europe was “material for the re-education of children and adults in liberated coun­ tries.” As she said, “Microfilm might facilitate centralised action to direct and super­ vise educational efforts.”4 The paper ends with three lengthy appendices listing types of institutions sup­ plying or using microfilm. The last appendix names “organisations and offices for international and universal co-operation in the fields of education, learning, science

3 Berlin, Bauhaus Archive, Lucia Moholy, Microfilm Services and Their Application to Scholarly Study, Scientific Research, Education and Re-Education in the Post-War Period, A Suggestion With 5 Appendi­ xes, manuscript, August 1945, 9 pp. Photocopy of a lost manuscript submitted to the UNESCO Prepa­ ratory Commission, p. 1. 4 Ibid., pp. 2–3.

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and technology,” which  – among others  – lists “Anglo-Soviet” and “Sino-British” offices as well as societies yet to be founded, such as an “International Information Council” to be run by the physicist and librarian A.F.C. Pollard from Imperial College in London. Well hidden behind all the formal matters concerning the exchange of scien­ tific knowledge through making the transfer of books easier, the suggestions in this paper go far beyond contemporary ideas about bibliographical and archival transfer systems. If summarised properly, this paper contains ideas for setting up new natio­ nal and / or specific archives using microfilms in place of books and original docu­ ments which had been lost, or left in archives that would not allow them to travel. A new organisation for education worldwide, as UNESCO was intended to be, had to have innovative interests about preparing archives and libraries as the basis of any sort of education. But there were other ideas behind this plan, too. Of course, Lucia Moholy, having lived in London since 1935, knew about the Blitz and its effects on historical sites, but she had more radical ideas for using archives as a means to create or re-create nations, among them the country where she herself had been born, Czechoslovakia, and numerous new countries which had recently emerged from colonialism. This can be surmised from the fact that she submitted the paper to UNESCO’s preparatory commission through Sir Alfred Eckhard Zimmern, who until 1944 had held the very first university chair in International Relations, in Oxford, and so was a natural member of the commission.5 Zimmern also had the advantage of having a migrational as well as a Jewish background, like Lucia Moholy herself, but he also may have had the necessary breadth to understand the basic assumptions behind this modest suggestion – the idea of using media archives to support nations and their heritage. We cannot but compare Lucia Moholy’s ideas about the place of microfilm in the future of libraries, especially national libraries, with Vannewar Bush’s text “As We May Think” (published in July 1945) on the future of commercial working practices. In Bush’s future world, every desk would incorporate a device called a “Memex” (a “memory expander”). The Memex was a combination of microfilm reader and tape recorder but is recognised today as the root of physical data storage media such as hard discs and flash memory cards.6 Bush’s text is considered one of the most impor­ tant technical essays written in the twentieth century; Moholy’s text has been almost completely forgotten. Its near disappearance, of course, is the product of its history: there is no trace of the document being delivered to any commission forming part of the early UNESCO.7 We might therefore suggest another approach here: how did ideas like those pres­

5 Toye 2011. 6 Bush 1945 (1997). 7 See: [30.07.2014]

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Fig. 2: Unknown: Draught of the Memex desk. Photomechanical print. In: Vannewar Bush, “As we may Think,” in: The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.

ented in this paper relate to the history of avant-garde art and media design in the first half of the twentieth century? This is first of all a question about personal rela­ tionships. If there is one single witness to the development of visual arts and media in the twentieth century, it is Lucia Moholy – in her long life she not only met most of the key people involved, she also took part in numerous aspects of the avant-garde movement, and in later life wrote extensively and perceptively on it.8 Born Lucia Schulz in Karlín, a suburb of Prague, on 18 January 1894, she was a well-trained girl from a Jewish family of average wealth. She graduated fast from school and then from a teaching college – she was 18 when she received her diploma in English literature – and began to plan a career in writing and editing in her early twenties, in the midst of the First World War. She lived through the war in Germany, first in Wiesbaden, then in Leipzig, where she worked for the publishing house Taeubner, then a well-known publisher of scientific texts, for example the works of the mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who had a major influence on the artists of the De Stijl movements and subsequently on the teachers of the Bauhaus.9 From 1918 onwards, she was a frequent visitor to Worpswede and Loheland, two areas proposing a return to simple life with an emphasis on personal fitness, food regimes, and selftaught practice of the arts, music and literature.10 Following one of these visits, where

8 Moholy 1972. 9 Minkowski 1909. This text was widely re-published throughout the 1910s and 1920s. 10 Mollenhauer-Klueber / Siebenbrodt 2012.

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she lived with the painter-poet-anarchist Heinrich Vogeler, she returned to Berlin to work in a bookshop, and shortly after this, in the autumn of 1920, she met László Moholy-Nagy. They were married on 18 January 1921. She had gained some experience in pho­ tography when she had been in Worpswede and Loheland, and together they learnt about, and eventually practised, the technique of the photogram in the summer of 1921, which they spent in Loheland. They wrote Moholy-Nagy’s first manifesto on “art and reproduction” in the same summer of 1921, so it seems obvious that from the very beginning she was a part of the artist’s now-famous approaches to media art and design.11 When László Moholy-Nagy was appointed to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Lucia Moholy began documenting the first products of his introductory and indus­ trial design classes. She even took lessons with the Weimar photographer Otto Eckner and in the Leipzig Academy for Graphic and Book Arts; the latter consisted of courses in pre-print and printing technology. With Bauhaus’s move to Dessau, Lucia Moholy emerged as the school’s documentary artist; her visions of the Bauhaus buildings and its inhabitants became icons of its institutional memory. Even her cautious attempts to integrate a modern vision into Walter Gropius’s documentary visions of his work attained iconic status.12 Her influence on László Moholy-Nagy and his teaching at the Bauhaus should neither be over- nor under-estimated but, at least, there were short term students like Florence Henry in Dessau who later testified to her influence. In early 1928, the Moholys left the Dessau Bauhaus and returned to their Berlin studio (which they had never given up). Lucia Moholy concentrated on editing a number of Bauhaus books and worked as a documentary photographer for her husband, for example in his stage settings for the Deutsche Oper. A large file of papers from this time includes pre­ paratory notes on a number of events being planned, among them the famous Room No.1 in the Stuttgart exhibition Film und Foto from 1929.13 These papers, collectively written and mostly noted down by Lucia (as László’s German still needed some atten­ tion), show a very deep interest in the social role a medium like photography would be likely to play in future societies, and it emphasises to a certain extent the impor­ tance of the reproductive qualities of everyday photographic recording. In the autumn or winter of 1928–29, Lucia moved out of their studio and started living on her own  – the divorce was not settled until 1935. Lucia Moholy kept doc­ umenting and printing for László but started as well to teach photography at Johannes Itten’s private art school in Berlin; in this position she followed the former Bauhaus student Umbo, and according to the records we have for this time, she understood her

11 Haus 1978, pp. 74–75. 12 Prigge 2006. 13 Werkbund 1929, pp. 49–50.

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training as a form of basic research into photographic technology.14 One of her Berlin students, Fritz Brill, later became one of the most important scientific photographers in Germany.15 It was in these years that Lucia Moholy started her interests in travelling to Yugo­ slavia and other countries in southeastern Europe, which not only brought her to a form of travel photography but to planning books on the development of these coun­ tries by instigating new forms of tourism – in her archives there are a number of book concepts to be found on the subjects. Around 1930 Lucia Moholy started a personal relationship with Theodor Neubauer, then the parliamentary leader of the Commu­ nist party in Germany; in one photograph she depicts him with Clara Zetkin, the grand old lady of the party. The relationship was so close that there are prints signed “Lucia Moholy-Neubauer” but the official GDR biographies of Neubauer refused to admit that he had any relationship with her (his family lived three hours away from Berlin).16 But it was in Lucia Moholy’s apartment that Neubauer was arrested by the Nazi Gestapo in August 1933. The result was that Lucia had to flee Germany immedi­ ately.17 First she went to her hometown Prague, then to Paris, and by late 1934 she found herself in London, where she was lucky enough to establish herself the portrait photographer of the Bloomsbury Set, a gathering of intellectuals around the writer Virginia Woolf. One of the first portraits Lucia Moholy took in early 1935 was of Emma, Countess of Oxford and Asquith, who seemed to have helped her with the emigration process by submitting an affidavit for her. Lucia Moholy had, of course, given her Bauhaus material to Walter Gropius – who himself had made a very weak compromise with Nazi Germany when moving to the United States (officially he never emigrated) – leading her to fight a lifelong law suit with him over her copyright.18 It appears that he neither considered photographs to be art nor female photographers to be genuine artists in their own right. Besides her photographic career (and the work she still did for László Moholy-Nagy until his move to the United States in late 1936), Lucia Moholy pursued an old idea that she had explored in letters with the German photographic historian Erich Stenger of writing a cultural history of photography. Though this was perhaps not as well founded theo­ retically as Giséle Freund’s thesis of 1936, it was an instant success – the first edition of 40,000 sold out within six months.19 After the outbreak of the Second World War, German exiles in the United Kingdom were interned in camps. Most were later transported to either Australia or

14 Itten 1984. 15 Frecot 1982. 16 Hammer 1956. 17 Lucia Moholy, “Letter to Heinrich Jacoby, London 1947-10-01,” in: Moortgat et al. 1995, pp. 81–83. 18 Moholy 1983. 19 Halwani 2012, pp. 154–178.

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Canada. Lucia Moholy was lucky not to have been interned too: her divorce from László Moholy-Nagy meant that she was a citizen of Czechoslovakia, which had a government-in-exile in London from 1940. After two years of preparation, Lucia Moholy managed to open a microfilm service for scientific research in 1942. This, in fact, was a spying organisation working almost entirely for Bletchley Park.20 As she proudly stated, Aslib during the war covered the microfilming of more than 300 German scientific and technical magazines, plus ten from Belgium, ten from Scan­ dinavia, ten from Czechoslovakia, roughly 40 from France, and more than 30 from Italy. In total, between 1943 and May 1945, Aslib microfilmed 12.5 million pages of scientific information.21 The crisis came after the end of the war. Nobody knew what to do with a micro­ film service that had functioned well under wartime conditions, and that had no science yet to support. The United Kingdom was experiencing an economic crisis, the Bloomsbury Set that had helped the social integration of exiles like Lucia Moholy had disappeared (Virginia Woolf and other leading lights had died during the war), and there was no prospect of a return to the arts. Lucia Moholy tried nearly everything that she thought of. Knowing about the thousands of wounded soldiers lying in hospital beds, she even thought of offering reading services by projecting microfilms onto the ceiling.22 She conceived new societies such as “Microfilms for the Disabled,” which would spread reading material throughout hospitals and homes, and she wrote dozens of letters to important newspapers and magazines about her ideas. She even tried to pick up the threads of her pre-war life; of László Moholy-Nagy she learned only that he had died before her letters had reached him, and Walter Gropius an­swered almost none of her letters at any time.23 It must have been in this situation that Lucia Moholy took the chance of address­ ing the UNESCO preparatory commission – which in itself was totally unsuccessful, having been prepared unprofessionally in many respects.24 Thus, Lucia Moholy had to start her own documentation consultancy. Besides publishing on the advantages of using microfilm for academic purposes, her most successful claim was made in 1948 in the magazine Future, which was translated into half a dozen languages.25 From 1948 on, Lucia Moholy frequently visited German symposia and meetings on repro­ graphic questions – and, at the same time, tried to pursue her legal case against the Federal Republic for having been forced into exile in 1933. She never made progress with this as she could not claim that she had been persecuted for being Jewish. In

20 Moholy 1946. 21 Berlin, Bauhaus Archive, Lucia Moholy, Private Report: The Aslib Microfilm Services, with 10 Enclo­ sures, manuscript, London c. 1947, 9 pp. 22 Moholy 1945. 23 See ref. 16. 24 See ref. 5. 25 Moholy 1948.

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Fig. 3: Unknown photographer (Lucia Moholy?): Laboratory of the National Archive, Ankara, Turkey. Photograph, silver halogenide print, 1957. Unmounted photograph: 18 × 13 cm. The Bauhaus Archive, Berlin.

addition, she had been sharing her apartment with a communist politician, and such politicians were generally exempted from any restitution process in post-war West Germany. But, at least, she was successful in part with her UNESCO proposal. In 1946–47, she was allowed to help the Czechoslovakian government under Edvard Beneš with its creation of a national library – only to be thrown out of the country by the Sovietdriven Gottwald government in early 1948. In 1952–53 she helped to set up the Nation­al Library of Turkey in Ankara and spent more than a year there installing reprographic and microfilm laboratory that included the best of German equipment available at the time.26 A photograph of this laboratory shows a Leitz and an Agfa enlarger with auto­ matic focusing on the left and right of the image, a large film copier apparently manu­ factured by Meteor in Siegen, a large film developing and drying unit produced by the same company towards the back of the image, and a large portable light box in the

26 Berlin, Bauhaus Archive, Lucia Moholy, Suggestions for Title and Synopsis of a Book on Turkey, manuscript, London 1957, 30 pp.

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foreground on the right. It seems that Lucia Moholy’s work in Turkey was a success: she spent another year there (1955–56), which resulted in another book concept of hers (again never realised). After completing her time in Turkey, Lucia Moholy’s career in reprography and microfilm was finished. Now 63, and without no social security after more than ten years of freelance consultancy work, she had to think of how she was to survive. From 1957 to 1958 she lived in Berlin and wrote a company history of the build­ ing workshop supplier Eternit, and then – after a brief return to London – moved to Zurich, where Johannes Itten had asked her to settle and edit his writings on colour, art and education. His books Kunst der Farbe and Mein Vorkurs am Bauhaus: Gestal­ tungs- und Formenlehre were published in 1961 and 1963 with her help.27 There were a number of other book plans with Itten but his death in 1967 ended the partner­ ship. Meanwhile Lucia Moholy had established herself as an authority on the history of the Bauhaus:28 from the Burlington Magazine to the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, Lucia Moholy was the most eminent critic of the many mysteries and mistakes that happen in historical writing when concise description is misunderstood as a form of hagi­ ography of all the geniuses who happened to congregate in the small towns of Weimar and Dessau in the mid-1920s. Lucia Moholy’s last work in this field was the editing of Krisztina Passuth’s huge monograph on László Moholy-Nagy.29 Lucia Moholy survived on an inheritance from her brother, Franz Schulz, a.k.a. Franz Spencer, who had been the author of a number of successful films, including some by Billy Wilder, and who had died in southern Switzerland in 1971.30 During the very last years of her long life, Lucia Moholy was praised and feared in equal measure as the guardian of the memory of the avant-garde. When she died on 17 May 1989, at the age of 95, the history of the twentieth century lost its most critical and its most precise witness. Returning to the draft proposal Lucia Moholy launched in 1945, we notice two key results. First, the emphasis on reproduction as a basic photographic function is both a question of media history – as all media begin to reproduce themselves and each other after a phase of introduction and establishment – and a question of the role of women within the complex history of the avant-garde.31 In terms of the work of couples within modern photography in the 1920s, there were more examples where the women carried out the reproductive work and the men were featured as the new artists than vice versa.

27 Itten 1961; Itten 1963. 28 Herzogenrath 1968. 29 Passuth 1982  / 1985. 30 Buelow 1997. 31 Sachsse 1994.

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Secondly, this – weak, hesitant, conservative – paper delivered to UNESCO’s pre­ paratory conference gives us an idea of what a great opportunity the end of the Second World War represented, and how it was used for ideas that would have a radical impact on forthcoming generations. The importance of the idea of colossal microfilm libraries – the next step in moving memory out of the human brain into large-scale data storage facilities – could only be recognised after several decades. Even when Lucia Moholy published her last article on microfilming and the creation of largescale microfilm libraries, she could not foresee the impact the invention of personal computers in the 1970s, making way for huge individual knowledge databanks thanks to the installation of hard discs in the 1980s, was to have.32 This tiny draft proposal of 1945 is part of the pre-history of today’s digital world.

Bibliography Buelow 1997: Ginny G. von Buelow, Franz Schulz. Ein Autor zwischen Prag und Hollywood, Prague 1997. Bush 1945 (1997):Vannewar Bush, “As we may Think,” in: The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, reprinted, with comments by Hartmut Winkler, in: formdiskurs, Zeitschrift fuer Design und Theorie, 1, 2, 1997, pp. 136–146. Frecot 1982: Janos Frecot (ed.), Fritz Brill: Grafik, Fotografie, Analyse, Exhibition Catalogue (Berlin, Berlinische Galerie, 1982), Berlin 1982. Halwani 2012: Miriam Halwani, Geschichte der Fotogeschichte 1839–1939, Berlin 2012. Hammer 1956: Franz Hammer, Theodor Neubauer, Berlin 1956. Haus 1978: Andreas Haus, Moholy-Nagy. Fotos und Fotogramme, Munich 1978. Herzogenrath 1968: Wulf Herzogenrath (ed.), Bauhaus, Exhibition Catalogue (Stuttgart, Württembergischer Kunstverein, 1968), Stuttgart 1968. Itten 1961: Johannes Itten, Kunst der Farbe, Ravensburg 1961. Itten 1963: Johannes Itten, Mein Vorkurs am Bauhaus, Gestaltungs- und Formlehre, Ravensburg 1963. Itten 1984: Anneliese Itten (ed.), Aus der Ittenschule Berlin 1926–1934, Exhibition Catalogue (Baden, Galerie im Trudelhaus, 1984), Baden 1984. Minkowsky 1909: Hermann Minkowski, “Raum und Zeit,” (lecture delivered on the 80th assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, at Cologne on 21 September 1908), in: Physikalische Zeitschrift, 10, 1909, pp. 104–111. Moholy 1945: Lucia Moholy, “The Bedroom Ceiling, Letters to the Editor,” in: The Times, 3 January 1945. Moholy 1946: Lucia Moholy, “The Aslib Microfilm Service: The Story of its Wartime Activities,” in: The Journal of Documentation, 11, 3 (12), 1946, [offprint in Moholy’s archives] (coll. Bauhaus Archive Berlin). Moholy 1948: Lucia Moholy, “Microfilms in Industry,” in: Future, 3, 2, 1948, pp. 59–63. Moholy 1964: Lucia Moholy, “‘Freeing the mind’, Entlastung des Gehirns: Befreiung des Geistes?,” in: du – atlantis, 23, 8, 1964, [offprint], unpag.

32 Moholy 1964.

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Moholy 1972: Lucia Moholy, Marginalien zu Moholy-Nagy / Marginal Notes, Dokumentarische Ungereimtheiten, Documentary Absurdities, Krefeld 1972. Moholy 1983: Lucia Moholy, “The Missing Negatives,” in: The British Journal of Photography, 130, (7.1), 1983 , pp 6–8, 18. Mollenhauer-Klueber / Siebenbrodt 2012: Elisabeth Mollenhauer-Klueber / Michael Siebenbrodt (eds.), Bauhaus-Parallelen. Die Loheland-Werkstaetten, Weimar 2012. Moortgat et al. 1995: Elisabeth Moortgat / Rolf Sachsse / Sabine Hartmann (eds.), Lucia Moholy, Bauhaus Fotografin, Exhibition Catalogue (Berlin, Bauhaus Archive, 1995), Berlin 1995. Passuth 1982 / 1985: Kristina Passuth, Moholy-Nagy, Budapest 1982, London 1985. Prigge 2006: Walter Prigge (ed.), Ikone der Moderne. Das Bauhausgebaeude in Dessau, Berlin 2006. Sachsse 1985: Rolf Sachsse, Lucia Moholy, Düsseldorf 1985. Sachsse 1994: Rolf Sachsse, “Die Frau an seiner Seite, Irene Bayer und Lucia Moholy als Fotografinnen,” in: Ute Eskildsen (ed.), Fotografieren hieß teilnehmen, Fotografinnen der Weimarer Republik, Exhibition Catalogue (Essen, Folkwang Museum, 1984), Essen 1994, pp. 67–75. Toye 2011: Richard Toye, Alfred Zimmern, Julian Huxley and the initial leadership of UNESCO: a comparative perspective, 2011 [30.07.2014]. Werkbund 1929: Deutscher Werkbund (ed.), Internationale Ausstellung Film und Foto, Stuttgart 1929.

Tiziana Serena

Cultural Heritage, Nation, Italian State: Politics of the Photographic Archive between Centre and Periphery Introduction 1870: with the incorporation of Rome and Lazio, the long process of Italian unifi­cation was complete. Eight years later, Giuseppe Airenti, a Member of the new Italian Par­ liament, commissioned the painter Domenico Laura, a fellow Ligurian, to produce a series of family portraits. In one of these oil paintings we can see the son Tommaso: the little boy is wearing a uniform; with his right hand points out Rome – the capital where his father worked – on the map of Italy, while the other hand shows off a little black and white photograph – his father’s carte de visite (fig. 1). This painting bears many traces which I think are interesting in terms of the confe­ rence theme on “The Photographic Archive and the Idea of Nation,” in particular: the value of personal and family identity; the identity of the space and the territory; the value of social representation and memory, and the sense of their sedimentation in an ideal archive constituted by photographs. According to the Italian historian Federico Chabod, in his well-known volume L’idea di nazione (1961): a sense of nationality means a sense of historical individuality. The principle of nation is reached when it is possible to affirm the principle of individuality, that is to affirm, against the general­ ising tendencies, the principle of the specific, of the single individual.1

So in all, the painting with the depiction of the photograph expresses a dream of per­ sonal and collective identity and a sense of nationality through relationships between geography and photography. The geographic factor, as in numerous other examples from the “long nineteenth century” (Hobsbawm), was key too in conditioning many aspects of the dream of an Italian nation (and of a certain ‘nationalism’), and – as we shall see – in influencing the dreams and projects of a photographic archive as a place for announcing the nation’s representation and cultural identification strategies. The famous letter written in 1865 by the republican Francesco Crispi (a future prime minister of the Italian State) to Giuseppe Mazzini (the founder of the revolu­ tionary organisation Giovane Italia – “Young Italy” – 1831), on the unification of the

1 Chabod 2010 (1961), p. 17 (in Italian: “dire senso di nazionalità, significa dire senso di individualità storica. Si giunge al principio di nazione in quanto si giunge ad affermare il principio di individualità, cioè ad affermare, contro tendenze generalizzatrici ed universalizzanti, il senso del particolare, del singolo”).

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country is the most emblematic document of the effectiveness of the old theory of the Italian nation as “naturalness,” a key concept that is useful, inter alia, in defining the role of cultural heritage in its relationships with the idea of nation and with the project of a photographic archive. Crispi, in fact, declared: the nation exists in the same way the individual does, and has no need for a people or a Parlia­ ment to proclaim the fact in order to exist. […] the unity of Italy […] is grounded in Italian geogra­ phy, the Italian language, and in all of the other moral conditions known to everyone.2

The portrait of Tommaso represents the single individual, but the photograph of the father refers to the family and the values it embodies for society; according to the romantic ideology, the love of family was a necessary foundation for the love of the whole country of Italy. In the painting the carte de visite tells us of the possibility of the photograph itself in the process of the imaginary construction of a State that had ‘naturally’ felt itself to be a nation for some time. The photograph represents the individual, but longs to incorporate the representations of individuals and groups in the discussion of the photographic archive, within which the national character, summarised in the images of costumes, people, traditions and the territory, could be systematically collected – excluding others. The photographic archive is a sedimen­ tation of representative images of a certain idea of nation, formed at a certain moment in history, and whose strength lies not so much in itself as in the ability to influence subsequent narrations on the nation, offering them compelling visual documents. It is my contention that the photographic archive in question is not necessarily a concrete object, and that to describe it we must encompass the dreams and aspi­ rations for its construction, the cultural and political strategies that oversaw its for­ mation and disappearance. In other words, we must see the photographic archive as a field of complex forces, where the aspirations of the social classes that forged the idea of nation found photography to be an irresistible ally.3 But the greatest alliance lies in the power of the photographic archive, in the reassuring order of the taxonomy and in the possibilities that the archive materials signify through real words of order,4 as well as in the narrative possibilities contained in the photographic series. Photo archives, like photography itself, are capable of authenticating what the social classes who formed them and use or re-use their photographs believe them to be. The father’s carte de visite and the map are the bearers of the illusion of social control over time, space and territory, but are also pieces of a puzzle concerning the construction of Italian national identity and ‘citizenship’. The model of the new

2 Chabod / McCuaig 1996, p.  53, note 219. On the Italian as a “national character,” its history and invention see: Bollati 1983. 3 See: Schwartz / Ryan 2003; and also Tagg 2004 (1984); Sekula 2004 (1986); Caraffa / Serena 2012; and for the relationships with art history: Caraffa 2011. 4 Serena 2011, pp. 67–68. See also Ferraris 2012.

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Fig. 1: Unknown photographer: Domenico Laura, Portrait of Tommaso Airenti. Oil painting, Porto San Maurizio 1878. Digital photograph, 2011. Courtesy of Marco Re, Imperia.

Italian citizen was without doubt the politician Airenti, the leading figure of a political and social project who, with his new role, was able to reassign meaning to the home province. He lived in Porto Maurizio, still today a small city on the western Ligurian Riviera (Liguria di Ponente), 50 km from France and over 600 km from Rome, which at

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the time and in the imagination of the Italians was the our “Far West,” known among foreigners and travellers for its ‘exoticism’. This geographic specification allows us to clarify some key terms in my essay. I use pairs of opposing and dialectical terms, and the first is centre-periphery under­ stood as a specific trait of Italian culture and its historical and artistic production,5 but also with implications for the foundation of photo archives. Centre-periphery can be placed alongside other pairs: Italian nations–the Nation, and public–private. As we shall see, the nation–state pair also continues to be used as an unresolved political crux in managing the “memory pact” of the values of the Italian nation; this pair occurs between citizens (who feel they belong to a Nation) and the State (which at times represents the political response). I must also clarify a few points. The first is that I consider the photographic archive to be a specific memory “apparatus.”6 It is only a virtual container of memory, but it does not represent it because its potential to detect it depends solely on its value in society. The second is that I am speaking about Italian society in relation to that highly specific idea of nation that was formed in the young Italian state as a natural heir to the “artistic primacy” of the peninsula. And the last clarification: the connection between photographic archive, memory and identity is always fraught with contradictions and complexities. It has mainly been tackled from one point of view – the politics of the photographic archive – in the conviction that the methods of its sedimentation and its use could be used as a litmus test to enlighten the same politics on cultural heritages, even in relation to the value of the word “citizenship” in a democracy.

The Risorgimento and the dream of a photographic archive The future young patriots of the Italian Risorgimento discovered the nation, “an imagined political community” (Anderson), and managed to envision it in symbols and images, enough to endanger their lives, thanks to poetic literature, historical novels, melodramas and various types of images that circulated in the era of “print capitalism.”7 According to some scholars, these were all ‘texts’ that, while originat­ ing from various political factions, had some characteristics in common. The first is certainly the fact of projecting the idea of nation “onto an emotional and symbolic plane,”8 thereby making it comprehensible, often and obviously drawing on the Leit­

5 Castelnuovo / Ginzbourg 1979; Pelizzari (2011, p. 7) underlined that the emphasis on Italian polycen­ tric and regionalism is equally valid for photography. 6 Agamben 2009. On the photographic archive as “apparatus” see: Serena 2010, pp. 103–107. 7 The role of the print press in making nations is analysed in Anderson 1991, p. 6. For Italy see: Rus­ sell Ascoli / Henneberg 2001; Banti 2010; Banti 2011. 8 Ibid., p. 45 (in Italian: “su un piano emotivo e simbolico”).

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motiv of foreign oppression. The second concerns the reference to topics and figures that represent a sort of “single idea of the nation.”9 Nevertheless, we should highlight an apparently contradictory aspect: in the pre-unification decades, the use of expressions such as “Italy” and “Italian” more than being complex symbols were, more than anything else, an almost exclusively geographic connotation. Precisely because this geographic meaning was clear to all, the pact of the collective founding of the nation and the redemption of the homeland from foreign domination found the ancient monuments – highly celebrated by travel­ lers and non-Italian scholars – to be eloquent visual evidence on which to base the historical legitimisation of the modern nation. This visual evidence pointed to both the relationship between the territory and the populations that had lived there, and to the richness and variety of the land itself, which over time structured the memory of a very long past.10 The monuments (especially given the predominance and the role of religious monuments and sacred images dear to the Italian Catholic culture) allowed the transformation of an abstract idea of the nation, established ab origine, and its population into concrete images, with photography contributing to this concreteness. It is no coincidence that the first photographic project to introduce the monu­ ments of the nation to its people had political connotations and was conceived in the north of the peninsula, in Milan, where the publishing industry was more deve­ loped and, in many well-known cases, even politically deployed. The man behind the project was Luigi Sacchi (1805–1861),11 trained as a painter, who from 1852 pub­ lished a photo­graphic volume on monuments from all over Italy (including those in cities not includ­ed on the Grand Tour itineraries), which foreshadowed the need for the photo­graphic archive. The salt papers album was entitled Monumenti, vedute e costumi d’Italia (“Monuments, views and costumes of Italy”), and in it the metonymies of the nation made their appearance in order of importance: the stone symbols of the past; the representation of the city as a symbolic place of civilisation; and the people (through the “costumes” that indicated their geographic and cultural origin). This last reference is important because it did not refer to an abstract idea (the population), but rather to the different social groups that were rooted in the places and participated in their history, to the point that they were depicted at the foot of their monuments. Sacchi’s project most likely failed for economic reasons, as did that of Eugène Piot (1813–1890), a French photographer and apprentice of Gustave Le Gray, who came to Venice, his chosen homeland, which had recently capitulated to Austrian bombs in 1849, after having worked at the general secretariat of the brief Parisian republic. It was in that very Venetian lagoon, most likely due to his political ideas,

9 Ibid., p. 53 (in Italian: “pensiero unico della nazione”). 10 Ibid., p. 74. 11 Miraglia 1996; Cassanelli 1998.

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that he developed (in 1851) his initial project, now entitled L’Italie monumentale.12 The Milanese Sacchi probably reacted to this initiative, feeling that his right to take possession of the images of monuments of his nation had been usurped by foreigner. After the wave of revolutions in 1848, these ambitious projects of depicting the heri­ tage declined and were credited with providing a glimpse of the need for and useful­ ness of the photographic archive in the name of the nation. The photographs of the ruins following the siege of Rome (1849), the first reportage of its kind in the history of photography, by Stefano Lecchi (1804–1859 or 1863),13 were a case apart, and were followed by Le Gray’s famous documentation of the ruins and the barricades created by the popular insurgency in Palermo (1860),14 which paved the way for the Expedi­ tion of the Thousand organised by the democrat Garibaldi, who declared the end of the monar­chy of the Bourbons in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. In any case, the work of the individual operators, artist-photographer roman­ tics and patriots working at the time of the Risorgimento with the eagerness of a first embryo­nic photographic archive that embodied the idea of nation through the ­natio­n­al cultural heritage, was soon replaced by that of photographic companies. They started a dialogue with the emerging modern historiography of art, with its systems renewed by visual analysis, and with the fluctuating interests of the State in operations concerning the knowledge and protection of its cultural heritage and the planning of a photographic archive.

Creating a nation past: the cultural heritage and the national heroes In 1865, the unification process remained incomplete: Lazio and Rome were not yet were part of the new nation, nor were the Veneto region and Venice. Florence had just been made capital when the first national holiday was celebrated here, on the sixth centenary of the birth of the poet Dante (1265–1321). Icon and undisputed ­national hero, he was considered the forerunner of the Unity of Italy, a man more than 500  years ahead of his time. His icon became popular due to engravings and photographs, illustrated books, medals, and the statues erected by sculptors in various cities. The statues of Dante were quickly reproduced by photography agen­ cies, making photography a tool for the celebration of a national glory instrumental to the assertion of Italian genius (fig. 2). The fame of the nation’s civil prophet was joined by that of Giotto (c. 1267–1337), another national hero. The genealogy of the national heroes of the Middle Ages,

12 This discussion about Piot is drawn from Serena 2014b. 13 Critelli 2001, and Poggi in this volume. 14 Aubenas 2002, catalogue nn. 186–193, pp. 374–375.

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Fig. 2: Unknown photographer: Santa Croce square in Florence with the Dante monument. Photograph, albumen print, c. 1880–1890. Mounting board 24 × 33.9 cm, photograph: 24.7 × 17.8 cm. Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, n. 530049.

deployed in the name of the national discourse, highlights the role of the apologia of that historical era, the “naturalness” and purity of which was observed both by the nostalgics of the pre-revolutionary era and the neo-Guelphs, who even drew on the values of the Sacred Roman Empire and the figure of Charlemagne adapted for all uses (who, as has been pointed out, was made a saint by the Catholic Church, was considered the greatest king by the French and the greatest compatriot by the Germans, as well as the greatest emperor of the Italians).15 In any case, the Middle Ages also represented a testing ground in art history as it allowed amateurs to be distinguished from the new scholars with their new scien­ tific paraphernalia. This paraphernalia, in providing for the systematic use of pho­ tographs for stylistic analyses of works of art, in turn prefigured the need to estab­ lish the photographic archive.16 Immediately after Veneto (1866) and Lazio (1870) were incorporated into Italy, the beauty of Giotto’s frescos was restored: first in the

15 Porciani 2004, p. 259, and p. 273. 16 Bann 2011; Caraffa 2011; about Italy: Miraglia 2000; Levi 2010; Spiazzi et al. 2010; Serena 2014a.

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­ crovegni Chapel in Padua (1867)17 (fig. 3), and then in the Upper Basilica in Assisi (1872).18 S These, however, were also the first restorations where the use of photography was systema­ tic and ‘scientific’ before and after the work and where the photographs were intended for the institutional archives. These ‘calque’ processes and the transformation (and not mere ‘invention’) of tradition are supported by other identity processes, again with a close relationship to photography. To enrich the photographic pantheon of national heroes, contemporary ones were soon added, linked to the Risorgimento. First and foremost, Giuseppe Garibaldi’s remarkable photographic fame was strikingly modern: it was part of a personal communication strategy where, for example, the many letters he wrote to his supporters from all over Italy were each

Fig. 3: Carlo Naya: Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel. Photograph, albumen print, 1863. Mounting board: 40.2 × 47.5 cm, photograph: 25.8 × 27.8 cm. Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. n. 605594. After 1867, collected in an album, the series of photographs on Giotto’s fresco was distributed to educational institutions in Italy immediately after the annexation of the Veneto. 17 Costantini 1985; Filippin 2009. 18 Mozzo 2011.

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Fig. 4: Daniela Lauria: Cans of olive oil with lithographic portraits of Garibaldi and Mazzini respectively, c. 1900–1920. Digital photographs, 2011. Courtesy of Tiziana Guatelli and Daniela Lauria.

accompanied by a signed photographic portrait of him.19 His case was even translated into forms ranging from the domestic altar to the curious portable ‘archive’, familiar and intimate, which was to be kept on the table at home together with images of other national heroes, such as the perpetually mournful Mazzini. Cans of olive oil destined for export, for an Italian public and produced during the first decades of the century bear photographs of national heroes of the Risorgimento (fig. 4). The olive oil was sold based on their popularity. Their photographic portraits are the result of an extreme iconographic synthesis of the idea of nation: the choice between Mazzini or Garibaldi extra virgin olive oil obviously depended on one’s taste, even in political terms. Garibaldi’s fame as a leader and hero in real-life portraits was followed by por­ trayals in the form of statues or sculptural busts. With Garibaldi photography for the first time was dedicated to celebrating the modern monuments of the Italian State which had to become a nation, located close to historical ones in the squares of the so-called “one hundred Italian cities.”20 The result was to emphasise the continuity of history as an essential ingredient of national identity. As noted by the historians Amedeo Quondam and Gino Rizzo, the construction of the national identity was a process fraught with difficulty: it was necessary to recognise “a meta-patrimony of a meta-country, capable of re-semanticising (and not replacing) the micro-identities (and micro-countries) of the many municipal micro-traditions.”21

19 Tomassini 2009. 20 Tobia 1991. 21 Quondam / Rizzo 2005, p. VI (in Italian: “un metapatrimonio di una metapatria, in grado di riseman­ tizzare (e non rimpiazzare) le microidentità (e le micropatrie) delle tante microtradizioni municipali”).

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The memory pact: projecting the photographic archive The question of cultural heritage in Italy fits within the context of these pairs of oppos­ing terms  – on the one hand its changing definition, and on the other the ways in which its photographic archive, or the dream for it, is designed to provide a visual representation of national sentiments linked to the memory of the glorious and ancient past and the identity of the present. The question of artistic primacy is key. Any form of identity requires memory: this was the historical reservoir chosen to culturally define the Italian peninsula as the rich inheritor of an undoubtedly highly valuable ancient patrimony. Italians also gained an awareness of the reality of this primacy through photographic images, starting for example with the earliest illus­ trated newspapers or periodical publications of the late nineteenth century, through which the heritage in visual terms came into circulation. The series of periodical publications in instalments by the publisher Sonzogno of Milan, launched in 1888, bearing the title Le cento città d’Italia illustrate (“The one hundred cities of Italy illus­ trated”), is still one of the most famous examples of this series of initiatives (fig. 5). Along with postcards, in vogue from the 1870s, these photomechanical images made it possible to start thinking about and imagining the nation in visual terms. For Italy, the greatest political ambition was linguistic unification, but it was equally necessary to create visual unification and thus artistic “local, municipal identities” were organically incorporated into a national framework. The State tried to plan the institutional photographic archive from the 1870s onwards. From this point on the legacy of the artistic primacy evoked in literature became a political issue. The “duty of memory”22 was felt as a civic sense cultivated by the municipal National History Commissions, which were widespread throughout the country. But in a united Italy the duty of memory – precisely due to the extension of the heritage, its variety and the difficulties in defining it for the purposes of protection – called for political action. The State took forty years to produce relevant legislation on the protection of the cul­ tural heritage. The delay was due to tensions between public and private interests. The laws of 1902 and 1909 ratified the duty of memory as a social pact with citizens, which I call the “memory pact.” With this the State assumed the responsibility of defin­ing public interest in the patrimony as an identity symbol, and of ensuring knowledge of it by accompanying the inventory with photographic campaigns. In 1878 the Ministerial Inspector Francesco Bongioannini asked the prefects of the provinces to send the Ministry of Education photographs of the main monuments of the province specially taken by the most important local photographers (the ministry was in charge of organising the first steps towards promoting knowledge of the artistic heritage.) They had to be identified by local scholars; the only condition was that the monuments had to date to the Middle Ages, the historical period that no one doubted

22 The expression is from Jeudy 2011, p. 7.

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Fig. 5: Le Cento città d’Italia illustrate. Cover n. 10: Bologna. “Alma madre degli studi” (with photomechanical print by Alinari, Florence); and cover n. 127: Anzio e Nettuno e Torre Astura (with photomechanical print by unknown photographer); reprint of the first series, Milan 1924–1929. Private collection.

was important and highly symbolic as the origins of the Italian nation could be traced back to it. The purpose was to establish in Rome, the capital, the first public “visual archive” of the national patrimony. But in Verona there was great confusion over the fact that the arena, the Roman amphitheatre dating to the first century A.D., an undis­ puted old symbol of the city’s identity (with its axes of 152 × 123 metres), was excluded from the visual archive: it was too ancient to be considered a symbol of the modern and national identity.23 The “memory pact” between the periphery and the centre, between cities and the State – to be established with the entry of this multitude of photographs into the ministerial photographic archive – therefore failed. There was thus a clear dif­ ference between the meaning of heritage in relation to the idea of nation and the way it was understood in the concrete local dimension. Here, verification on the territory of the individual traditions that each city (from the Latin civitas) had woven, creating deep relationships of civilisation (from the Latin civilitas) with its citizens was impor­ tant, to the point that the image of the city coincided with the same idea of citizenship.

23 Mozzo 2004, pp. 259–270.

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The exclusion of the Roman amphitheatre from the national patrimony and its exclusion from the institutional photographic archive lead us to other questions. The first state initiatives on protection were launched, and later the first laws were enacted at a time when the symbolic and cultural investment in the patrimony of the State was politically clear. The Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale (“National Photo­ graphic Laboratory”) was founded in 1892, the same time that archivists were dis­ cussing central regulations concerning the organisation and management of the periphery archives. Its foundation preceded the national law on the protection of artistic patrimony by ten years. It was set up as a Laboratory of the Royal Chalco­ graphy (whose origins, in the Camerale Chalcography of Rome commissioned by Pope Clement XII Corsini to “promote the magnificence and splendour of Rome to foreign nations,” date back to 1738) and in 1907 became part of the Ministry’s general department of antiquities and fine arts. The photographic service was involved in mapping the territory and the census of the artistic heritage. To manage memory it was necessary to establish a patrimonial order and hierarchies of cultural goods immediately implicated with the topic of the photographic archive and its classificatory organisation of the heritage. “It is not a question of first classifying and then remembering […], conserving and organising are one”24: so classification is part of each cultural project aimed at recovering memory. The order of the photographic archive therefore reflects the notion of patrimony and the ideas about identity connected to it. For the sake of efficiency the patrimonial order was established by private pho­ tography agencies. The order of a virtual archive was substantiated in the actual archives of the photographic companies. Of course, it was topographical in nature, favoured certain categories of objects, and was intended for the foreign market. It was also very extensive. By the end of the century Alinari and Brogi had archives of 10,000 items and 9,000 items respectively. A very high number overall which highlighted the insufficiency of the State’s work, but, at the same time, this was a matter not to be left exclusively in the hands of private photographic companies due to the identity and political implications. And so in 1911, at the Universal Exposition in Turin, Florence and Rome to celebrate fifty years of unity, faced with the enormous work awaiting to be done, the State involved itself in the documentation of national assets at the Third Italian Photographic Congress. A decision was made to merge the private photo archives into an institutional archive (the “General Italian photographic archive”) to remedy the fifty-year gap caused by the State’s absence from the documentation of the artistic patrimony.25

24 Rossi 2001, p. 78 (in Italian: “Non è che prima si classifichi e poi si ricordi […] conservare e orga­ nizzare sono una cosa sola”). 25 Tomassini 2011; Atti 1911.

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In fact, the State’s recent activity was not sufficient to understand and document the territory of the entire nation. Yet in 1904 the young art historian Pietro Toesca complained about it at the start of the century, highlighting the need to support a nation­al photographic archive project.26 And before that, in Milan in 1899 a public photographic archive Il ricetto milanese (from the Latin receptum, meaning a refuge) was founded to bridge the gap.27 The promoters included the art historian Corrado Ricci, the Director of the Pinacoteca in Brera. The purpose was to provide the library of Brera with a photographic archive of pictures of the regional and Italian artistic heri­ tage, people and picturesque sights. For this reason, as was happening in similar Euro­ pean initiatives,28 he collected the work of professional and amateur photographers. Amateurs especially, members of the photographic societies numerous in Italy, estab­ lished at the turn of the century a fruitful relationship with the territory, which was the subject of explorations, photographic safaris, and real photographic campaigns involving photographers as well as the many experts in local history. The Brera project is particularly interesting: the key players (such as Camillo Boito, Gaetano Moretti, Giuseppe Fumagalli, and Corrado Ricci) were all involved in the public sector of the city (such as universities, academies, and institutions responsible for protection); they re-established the coordinates of a “memory pact” and relocated it within the political dimensions, on a reduced scale, of feelings for a “municipal country.” Il ricetto mila­ nese was successful as it formed part of a service in a specific area. Many other projects involving the establishment of photo archives were instead destined to fail. Often they were not linked to a territory, or were utopian projects aiming at universal taxonomy. One such was an early nineteenth-century project created by the photography expert Giovanni Santoponte; this had the aim of creating an “Italian museum of docu­ mentary photographs.”29 The use of the word “museum” focuses on the relationship with the territory, tradition and education. But it was a museum, borrowing an educa­ tional ambition, which was supposed to be based on the idea and functioning of the photographic archive. And Ricci, who the following year (1906) would have become Director General of Antiquities and Fine Arts at the Ministry of the Education, would have been – according to Santoponte – the promoter of international regulations on photo archives. His recommendations on sizes, unalterable printing systems, correct storage and his classification methods would have become internationally agreed cri­ teria as discussed in Paris. They would have prepared document exchanges between photo archives in different states and different municipalities. The idea was to create a kind of total archive intended for communication. In short, what Italy dreamed of – together with Europe, as in the case of Lèon Vidal – was the photographic archive of

26 Toesca 1904. 27 Ceriana / Miraglia 2000. 28 The English situation is emblematic, and on this see: Edwards 2012. 29 Santoponte 1905.

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the past-present, with a strong focus on the future. The project was utopian, but the foundation was solid, with the intention of giving “a true and accurate account of the present state of a population and the environment in which it lives (as well as the current conditions of objects of earlier civilisations contained in the country) for the use, generally speaking, of the generations to come.”30 The project failed, much as another had done thirty or so years before in the period when the first projects for the protection of the cultural heritage were being presented to Parliament by the forward-looking minister Giuseppe Fiorelli. This was a grand utopian scheme for a serial photography museum, and had been put forward by an important art historian in the pre-unification period due to his connections with foreign historiographical culture. The museum would have opened in the “one hundred Italian cities”: each location would have exhibited the same 10,000 photos – taken by local amateurs and selected at national level – as the cornerstones of the national artistic heritage. These actions would have re-established a connection between the local dimension, with its civic emphasis on memory, and the national dimension. The declared purpose of the project was to make visible and safeguard those works of art that were not included on tourist itineraries, and that were there­ fore not photographed by private photography companies. The originator was the art historian Pietro Selvatico (1803–1880), who as early as 1852, in the role of Director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, promoted photography in Italy for the first time as an essential tool for student artists and who, once Italian unity had been achieved, came up with the plan of a photographic archive spread over the country in serial form but established as a museum.31 Santoponte’s idea, however, was partly revived during the fascist era with the estab­lishment of the Istituto Luce (1924), a national cinematographic archive with a strong core dedicated to photography; this brought together a confluence of photo­ graphs about various sectors of public life, but also national monuments and the Italian landscape. The Istituto Luce primarily collected ‘documentary’ material. The “memory pact” with the nation now had a different focus: it was tilted entirely in favour of the State, the policies of the fascist regime, and the manufacturing of consent.

Memory pacts, photo archives After the Second World War, the list of Italian photo archives of art objects pub­ lished in UNESCO’s Repertoire international des archives photographiques d’oeuvres d’art revealed an unusual situation: 103 registered photo archives in Italy, of which twenty percent were in the hands of private companies and art historians, pointed

30 Ibid. 31 Serena 1997.

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to the inadequacy of the central model.32 This inadequacy was made even clearer by the damage wrecked upon Italian cities by the war. It was a cultural and political ­inadequacy that signalled a rift between places where cultural heritage was managed and places where its memory was produced and conserved. In the same period, society had to establish new social pacts linked to the memory of the past, but in this case a more recent one – the memory of the victory of democracy, and the recognition of political and cultural identity that led to the Liber­ ation of Italy in 1945 and the end of the fascist period. The memory of the victory of democracy began as a spontaneous process; it took commemorative and celebratory forms until it came to take shape in local and town monumentalism. In these years the “memory pact” shifted more towards the nation, or at least towards an idea of the representation of national values understood differently, but did not find suitable space in the institutional photographic archive. It was necessary to wait for the Istituti per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione (“Institutes for the History of the Liberation Movement”) and their federal network (there are now over sixty institutes established for civil, democratic and didactic purposes for the history of anti-fascism). However, their photographic archives, even if emblematic of a certain nation-state-citizenship and centre-periphery relationship of the historical and political cultural identity, are only tangential to my argument since they are not based on the representation of the historical-artistic heritage. Nevertheless, the revival of a cultural discourse based on the concept of nation and on the value of the citizenship that had redeemed it from the bottom of society, through the clandestine struggle of the Resistance, had in fact established a renewed civil society. It was a new society, full of hope and projects, capable through the cul­ tural heritage of reuniting the symbols of the nation and a glorious history whose value exceeded the recent fascist history, and thus actively brought together the value of memory and tradition. To a society experiencing economic and cultural recovery it seemed that photography could play a different role. The photographic culture the 1950s was marked by the success of the great exhibition of 1953 on the representation of Rome following the invention of photography.33 The visibility of the public and private collections provoked a participatory movement that took shape in the dona­ tion of private photographic collections to the photographic archive of the munic­ ipality. To a certain extent the functions of the photographic archive of the city of Rome were thereby transferred to the museum (the Musei comunali di Roma), while at national level the example of the capital set the pace for future projects. In Milan, one of the most culturally and economically active cities in Italy, the idea of a photographic archive was quickly transformed into a project for a photogra­ phy museum to acknowledge the autonomous status of photography. The instigator

32 UNESCO 1950. 33 Associazione 1953.

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of this was Lamberto Vitali, an undisputed key player in the world of art collecting and, since the 1930s, of new studies on the history of Italian photography. He was also supporter, after the Second World War, of important photography exhibitions (also in the regional capital), including the one on the Helmut Gernsheim collection (1957). But once again the project failed.34 But it should be pointed out that for the first time it involved a didactic museum aimed at conserving the photographic object and not centred exclusively on its figurative value with respect to the object portrayed, which necessarily made reference to relations with the territory. These were obviously the key characteristics used to determine the various periph­eral photo archives in the peripheral Superintendencies of the State, archives that aimed at collecting images of the cultural heritage of the territory. The policies of these archives were determined by the centre-periphery network of the ministry’s Direzione Generale delle Antichità e Belle Arti (“Directorate General of Antiquities and Fine Arts”), and by the ability of each individual office to turn the photographic archive from a neutral container of images into a place for establishing a proposed policy on cultural heritage. In 1967, Carlo Bertelli, director of the Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale (“National Photographic Laboratory”), asserted that despite the quality of the photo archives in the individual Superintendencies,35 the idea of grouping all the material into a single national photographic archive had failed.36 Yet a lively relation­ ship with the peripheral administrations of the state was supposed to be one of the duties of the National Photographic Laboratory, which, in the design of that single image archive, could have created “a museum without limits of location promoting knowledge of Italian art everywhere”37 (fig. 6). Alongside this type of institutional photographic archive, which embodies a certain idea of nation and acts as an interpreter in the translation of the concept of heritage into visual terms, there is – through the action of the State – another type that accompanies transformation processes in local public museums that have accu­ mulated collections and works of art as a result of long historical sedimentations in the home territory.38 The Italian model of this type of museum is largely the result of the city’s history and relations with its territory which has increased its collections. The territory therefore has a close and ongoing relationship with the local museum and recognises the photographic archive as an essential tool. The history of photo­graph­ic archives that embody the idea of nation based on cultural heritage and establish a memory pact with it, one which owes its very strength to the particular

34 Paoli 2004. 35 A first survey of photographic archives of the Superintendencies is published in Spiazzi et al. 2010; for the case of Bologna: Giudici 1995. 36 Bertelli 1967. 37 Ibid., p. 47 (in Italian: “un museo senza limiti di luogo che promuove la conoscenza dell’arte ita­ liana ovunque”). See the recent exhibition: Fotografare 2013. 38 Settis 2002, p. 10.

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Fig. 6: G.F.N. [Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale]: Rome. National Portrait Laboratory. The Photo Library, in: Carlo Bertelli, “Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale,” in: Musei e Gallerie d’Italia, 33, XII (1967), fig. 4, p. 43.

relationship with the territory, therefore incorporates the history of another institu­ tion: the local museum.39 Their destiny is intertwined with that of the photographic archive in a special osmotic relationship. In Italy there are therefore a great many cases where a photographic archive destined to collect visual documents on the ter­ ritorial heritage is encapsulated within the local museum, and therefore documents an idea of historical and artistic continuum and not only the items conserved in the museum, but also with those that remain in the context that the items are extrapola­ ted from. The cases range from the northeast of Italy, to Udine, shifting over to Lom­ bardy (for example Milan and Pavia), Emilia-Romagna (Bologna) and Rome.40 We have covered the memory pact of the artistic patrimony but we have still not touched on the theme of the landscape understood as a collective asset with a high identity intensity. This is a hot topic, at least right now. According to Salvatore Settis, former director of the Getty Research Institute and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, in his recent book Paesaggio costituzione cemento (“Landscape constitution cement”),41 the enormous rate of land consumption we have witnessed in recent decades is the highest it has been in Italian history: the rate is wrecking that pact of memory and civilisation, caught between the state and citizenship.

39 Emiliani 1979. 40 See: Serena 1998 / 1999, passim. 41 Settis 2010.

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Law 1497 / 1939 (on “natural beauty”) established the importance of the land­ scape in its own right within the Italian cultural patrimony. It is no coincidence that the principle was partly implemented by the Constitution of 1948, in the fun­ damental principles section. The word “nation” also appears. It is used a few times in the Italian Constitution, so its presence here is of key importance for us. Article 9 states: “The Republic promotes the development of culture and of scientific and technical research. It safeguards natural landscape and the historical and artistic heritage of the Nation.” Here natural landscape does not mean uncontaminated landscape, but rather landscape as the humanised “social production of space” in Italy, the reflection and memory of the stories and societies that formed it over time (as Lefebvre said): the landscape has created a genuine “code of space” which is closely linked to questions of identity. It can be interpreted as a common lan­ guage by the inhabitants of cities and the countryside, authorities and artists and all those who experience it. “Landscape” in Italian is paesaggio (from the French paysage) and it is defined as “a part of the land that can be seen in a single gaze.” A “landscape” requires a gaze to make it more than an “administrative territory”: it is an experience inter­preted through the gaze, and which even encompasses, with a physi­cal and emotional metaphor, a portion of space. From a certain point of view, it exists only as such in cultural terms. In Italy this has been the basis for several public commissions since the 1980s, associated with the fine art photography of minor landscapes. There are many, and we need only mention the forerunner: the photographer Paolo Monti (1908–1982) and his photographic surveys, which are among the most famous. He dedicated nearly a decade to them, starting in 1966 with the man-altered landscape and the rural settle­ ments in the valleys of the Emilian Apennines, the Po River Delta, and the historical centres (and not the monumental emergences) in the cities of Emilia-Romagna. But today the proliferation of websites with collections of photographs documenting the assault on the landscape is clear evidence of a rift between the political centre and the culture of the periphery, between State and the idea of nation. These sites function as a kind of ‘invented archives.’ One of the most authoritative, www.patrimoniosos.it, was launched by Marco Collareta and Donata Levi at the Scuola Normale in Pisa. It can be used to trace a network of invented archives for the defence of a tradition, this time by no means invented.

Conclusions I wish to conclude this brief historical path by focusing on the politics of the photo­ graphic archive. It does not concern the contents of the archive, as one might misun­ derstand; it does not concern the content of the individual photograph (if we belie­ ved this, we would believe in the miraculous catch of a big fat fish, like those we always hear of in fishermen’s tales). The policies of a photographic archive are solely

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concerned with its nature. It engages in political affairs as a photographic archive, as a sediment that originates from the founding gesture, namely the “mise en archive” mentioned by Michel De Certau, as it implies a clear choice and, at the same time, reveals somewhat aware planning skills. Moreover, the politics of the photographic archive should not be confused with its power. The power it is acknowledged to have depends on the practices of the politics in general with which we govern our collec­ tive life as citizens. It is politics together with culture that persuades us that certain monuments and certain landscapes are common patrimony – and that through them we can trace our history, and our identity as a guarantee of the future, which his­ torically as citizens of today we feel is uncertain and threatened. It is politics that persuades us that there are pacts such that certain key players are appointed to take responsibility for our patrimony and make decisions: to conserve its memory, carry out proper maintenance or leave it to collapse – but always leaving a trace of all this in the apparently neutral archive, namely the photographic archive. For Aristotle politics was the power to speak. In the connection between State, Nation and Cul­ tural Heritage, speech is expressed on a controversial, and perhaps today particu­ larly problematic, battlefield. How has this happened? It was enough, in the confusion of territorial jurisdic­ tion, to strip those symbolic objects (cultural heritage, landscape) of their social value through certain political actions, the State condoning irregular building prac­ tices (which marked the long years of the Berlusconi government), and much more besides. In this way even the images of those objects were stripped of their meanings, just as the photographic archive was disempowered. The crisis of the system of Super­ intendencies of the State, and their reduced effectiveness and operations, has been highlighted by several intellectuals and experts.42 Besides this, the main principle of the constitution of the photographic archive was to make the politics of memory visible with respect to the objects loaded with particular symbolic and identity values. At the same time its creation, as a central, omni-comprehensive and omnivorous entity of the State, had already registered its failure in the practices of oblivion. Thus the politics of the photographic archive cannot occur far from the State, in the relationship with the territory, recovering the autonomy of the place, where signs of identity are traced in its landscape – the land­ scape as a theatre of history. Thus we face that duality between State and Nation, between the governing of things and management of the patrimony. The spontaneous action of citizenship regains possession of that “memory pact.” One of the leading Italian historians of art, Andrea Emiliani, stated that governing well means conserv­ ing well – conserving not only the object itself, but above all its intimate connections with its history.43 We would like to borrow this phrase to consider the photographic

42 For the general debate, the most authoritative voice is: Settis 2002; Settis 2010. 43 Emiliani 1979; Emiliani 2005 and Emiliani 2010.

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archive as a special device, an apparatus, a particular window from which we can reconstruct the ways of constructing memory in the context of established social acts, documents that are deemed reliable. To do this we must start with its complex and deeply contradictory living materiality.

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Emiliani 2005: Andrea Emiliani, “Il patrimonio artistico come volontà, disponibilità e rappresentazione pubblica,” in: Paola Callegari / Walter Curzi (eds.), Venezia: la tutela per immagini. Un caso esemplare dagli archivi della Fototeca Nazionale, Rome 2005, pp. 15–24. Emiliani 2010: Andrea Emiliani, “L’apparizione della fotografia come servizio pubblico e conoscenza tecnico-scientifica del patrimonio artistico,” in: Anna Spiazzi / Luca Majoli / Corinna Giudici (eds.), Gli archivi fotografici delle soprintendenze. Storia e tutela, Crocetta del Montello 2010, pp. 61–67. Ferraris 2012: Maurizio Ferraris, Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces, Fordham (NY) 2012. Filippin 2009: Sara Filippin, “Carlo Naya e gli affreschi di Giotto a Padova. La prima campagna fotografica tra mercato e conservazione,” in: Archivio Fotografico Toscano, 50, 2009, pp. 18–30. Fotografare 2013: Fotografare le belle arti. Appunti per una mostra. Un percorso all’interno dell’archivio fotografico della Direzione generale delle antichità e belli arti, Fondo MPI Ministero della pubblica istruzione, 1860–1970, Exhibition Catalogue (Rome, ICCD, 2013), Rome 2013. Giudici 1995: Corinna Giudici, “Archivio e Gabinetto fotografico,” in: Quaderni di Palazzo Pepoli Campogrande, 1, 1995, pp. 7–27. Jeudy 2011: Henry-Pierre Jeudy, Fare memoria. Perché conserviamo il nostro patrimonio culturale, Florence 2011. Levi 2010: Donata Levi, “Da Cavalcaselle a Venturi. La documentazione fotografica della pittura fra connoisseurship e tutela,” in: Anna Spiazzi / Luca Majoli / Corinna Giudici (eds.), Gli archivi fotografici delle soprintendenze. Storia e tutela, Crocetta del Montello 2010, pp. 23–33. Miraglia / Ceriana 2000: Marina Miraglia / Matteo Ceriana (eds.), 1899, un progetto di fototeca pubblica per Milano: il “ricetto fotografico” di Brera, Exhibition Catalogue (Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera, 2000), Milan 2000. Miraglia 1996: Marina Miraglia (ed.), Luigi Sacchi lucigrafo a Milano 1805–1861, Exhibition Catalogue (Rome, Calcografia / Milan, Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, 1996), Milan 1996. Miraglia 2000: Marina Miraglia, “La fortuna istituzionale della fotografia dalle origini agli inizi del Novecento,” in: Marina Miraglia / Matteo Ceriana (eds.), 1899, un progetto di fototeca pubblica per Milano: il “ricetto fotografico” di Brera, Exhibition Catalogue (Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera, 2000), Milan 2000, pp. 11–21. Mozzo 2004: Marco Mozzo, “Note sulla documentazione fotografica in Italia nella seconda metà dell’Ottocento fra tutela, restauro e catalogazione,” in: Enrico Castelnuovo / Giuseppe Sergi (eds.), Arti e storia nel Medioevo, vol. IV Il Medioevo al passato e al presente, Turin 2004, pp. 847–870. Mozzo 2011: Marco Mozzo, “Il restauro di Cavalcaselle nella documentazione fotografica: interventi e interpretazioni,” in: Studi di Memofonte, 7, 2011, pp. 59–89. Paoli 2004: Silvia Paoli, “‘Onestà di mestiere... castità di visione.’ Sguardo critico, promozione culturale e collezionismo fotografico,” in: Silvia Paoli (ed.), Lamberto Vitali e la fotografia. Collezionismo, studi e ricerche, Milan 2004, pp. 21–34. Pelizzari 2011: Maria Antonella Pelizzari, Photography and Italy, London 2011. Porciani 2004: Ilaria Porciani, “L’invenzione del Medioevo,” in: Enrico Castelnuovo / Giuseppe Sergi (eds.), Arti e storia nel Medioevo, vol. IV Il Medioevo al passato e al presente, Turin 2004, pp. 253–279. Quondam / Rizzo 2005: Amedeo Quondam, Gino Rizzo (eds.), L’identità nazionale. Miti e paradigmi storiografici ottocenteschi, Rome 2005. Rossi 2001: Paolo Rossi, Il passato, la memoria, l’oblio. Otto saggi di storia delle idee, Bologna 2001. Russell Ascoli / Henneberg 2001: Albert Russell Ascoli / Krystyna von Henneberg, Making and Remaking Italy: the Cultivation of Nation Identity around the Risorgimento, Oxford / New York (NY) 2001

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Santoponte 1905: Giovanni Santoponte, “Per un Museo Italiano di Fotografie Documentarie,” in: Annuario della fotografia e delle sue applicazioni, VII, 1905, pp. 38–48. Schwartz / Ryan 2003: Joan M. Schwartz / James R. Ryan, (eds.), Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination, London 2003. Sekula 2004 (1986): Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital,” in: Patricia Holland / Jo Spence / Simon Watney (eds.), Photography / Politics Two, London 1986, now in: Liz Wells (ed.), The Photography Reader, London / New York (NY), 2003, pp 443–452. Serena 1997: Tiziana Serena, “Pietro Selvatico e la musealizzazione della fotografia,” in: Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, 4 (I) 1997, pp. 75–96. Serena 1998 / 1999: Tiziana Serena (ed.), Per Paolo Costantini, vols. 2, Pisa 1998 / 1999. Serena 2010: Tiziana Serena, “L’archivio fotografico: possibilità derive potere,” in: Anna Spiazzi / Luca Majoli / Corinna Giudici (eds.), Gli archivi fotografici delle soprintendenze. Storia e tutela, Crocetta del Montello 2010, pp. 102–125. Serena 2011: Tiziana Serena, “The Words of the Photo Archive,” in: Costanza Caraffa (ed.), Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History, Berlin / Munich 2011, pp. 57–72. Serena 2014a: Tiziana Serena, “L’album e l’archivio fotografico nell’officina dello storico dell’arte: da outils pratiques a outils intellectuels,” in Monica Maffioli / Silvestra Bietoletti (eds.), Ri-conoscere Michelangelo. La scultura del Buonarroti nella fotografia e nella pittura dall’Ottocento ad oggi, Exhibition Catalogue (Florence, Gallerie dell’Accademia, 2014), Florence 2014, pp. 62–77. Serena 2014b: Tiziana Serena, “Eugène Piot e l’Italie Monumentale: fra documento ed égotisme,” in: Rivista di Studi di Fotografia, 1 (2014), forthcoming. Settis 2002: Salvatore Settis, Italia S.p.A. L’assalto al patrimonio culturale, Turin 2002. Settis 2010: Salvatore Settis, Paesaggio costituzione cemento. La battaglia per l’ambiente contro il degrado civile, Turin 2010. Spiazzi et al. 2010: Anna Spiazzi / Luca Majoli / Corinna Giudici (eds.), Gli archivi fotografici delle soprintendenze. Storia e tutela, Crocetta del Montello 2010. Tagg 2004 (1984): John Tagg, “Evidence, Truth, and Order: Photographic Records and the Growth of the State,” in: Ten.8, 13, 1984, now in: Liz Wells (ed.), The Photography Reader, London / New York (NY), 2003, pp. 257–260. Tobia 1991: Bruno Tobia, Una patria per gli italiani. Spazi, itinerari, monumenti dell’Italia unita (1870–1900), Bari / Rome 1991. Toesca 1904: Pietro Toesca, “Notizie Romane. L’Ufficio Fotografico del Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione,” in: L’Arte, VII, 1904, pp. 80–82. Tomassini 2009: Luigi Tomassini, “Garibaldi in fotografia: un contributo allo studio della costruzione del mito garibaldino dal punto di vista della comunicazione per immagini,” in: Andrea Ragusa (ed.), Giuseppe Garibaldi. Un eroe popolare nell’Europa dell’Ottocento, Manduria / Bari / Rome 2009, pp. 127–182 Tomassini 2011: Luigi Tomassini, “La costruzione dell’immagine fotografica dell’Italia unita, fra pubblico e privato: i grandi fotografi editori del XIX secolo,” in: Andrea Ragusa (ed.), La Nazione allo specchio. Il bene culturale nell’Italia unita, Manduria / Bari / Rome 2011, pp. 193–224 UNESCO 1950: UNESCO, Repertoire international des archives photographiques d’oeuvres d’art, Paris 1950.

Photo Archives, Revolution, National Heroes

Isotta Poggi

“And the Bombs Fell for Many Nights.” Stefano Lecchi’s photographs of the 1849 Siege of Rome in the Cheney Album* In the summer of 1849, in the aftermath of a major, yet little-known, revolutionary battle on the Janiculum Hill, in the western outskirts of Rome, the Italian photo­ grapher Stefano Lecchi toured the sites of the military conflict to photograph the damage to buildings and city walls. These photographs, with some overlaps, have been preserved in a few public and private collections or reproduced as book illustra­ tions or memorabilia prints. The narrative of the Lecchi album of photographs in the collection of the Getty Research Institute retraces the events as they unfolded at that critical time through the nationalist sentiments that animated patriotic Risorgimento literature. Analysing the photographs in the album and the illustrations in Jessie White Mario’s biography of Giuseppe Garibaldi, it is possible to find deep connections between Lecchi’s photo­ graphic campaign and the patriotic Republican cause.

Historical Background The gate of San Pancrazio … was chosen because from there communications with Civita Vecchia could be maintained with less risk and because from the Gate of San Pancrazio, the Janiculum, dominating Rome, offered the opportunity of conquering it, not by a war of men, but of bombs and cannons ...1

The destruction “by bombs and cannons,” as described by Giuseppe Mazzini, refers to the Siege of Rome, a military intervention by the French in June and July of 1849. The French operation, undertaken on behalf of Pope Pius IX, ended with the toppling of the Roman Republic, a short-lived constitutional government founded in February of the same year while Pope Pius IX was in exile in Gaeta, under the protection of the Kingdom of Naples. In the checkerboard of European states in the mid-19th century, the Roman Republic was viewed as an extraordinary attempt – quite ahead of its time – to form

* For this article I am most grateful to Murtha Baca, Mario Bottoni, Costanza Caraffa, Lavinia Ciuffa, Maria Pia Critelli, Caterina Fiorani, Annita Garibaldi Jallet, Julia Grimes, Claire Lyons, Silvia Paoli, Marjorie Ornsten, Simonetta Lopez Y Royo Poggi, Giacomo Sanfelice, Sara Scotti, Tiziana Serena, Frances Terpak, William Tronzo, Cristina Cuevas Wolf, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, and the Reference Libra­ ry Services of the Getty Research Institute. 1 Mazzini 1849, p. 1f.

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a constitutional government with a parliament and a “radically innovative”2 constitu­ tion, one “bound to be immortalised in the history of European civilization.”3 It suppor­ ted social and civil justice and advocated the separation of Church and State; the fate of the Eternal City was as closely watched by the Italian states as by the rest of the world. Considered one of the deadliest battles of the Italian Risorgimento, the 1849 Siege of Rome ended with the death of about 3,000 volunteers recruited from supporters of the Roman Republic, and fighting against a French army of 30,000 soldiers under the command of General Charles Oudinot.4 Mazzini, who had been a founding member of the triumvirate heading the Roman Republic, wrote an open letter to the French ministers Alexis de Tocqueville and Frédéric de Falloux in August 1849 in response to the French reports that had used terms such as “anarchy, foreign factions,” and “terror” when describing the Italian movement. While Mazzini, in exile in England and supported by the Italian Refugee Fund, was writing his letter to the French, Stefano Lecchi, with camera equipment and horse and cart in tow, was touring the Roman landmarks post-siege  – a strategic bridge, large squares, walls and gates, and beautiful countryside villas on the Janicu­ lum Hill which the fighting armies had turned into military outposts during the battle. The body of work that Lecchi created appears to mirror the republican and nation­ alist spirit of the time.5 The 1849 Siege of Rome received extensive coverage in the international press6 and the use of photography for the first time played a major role in documenting the war damage for political propaganda purposes – the noble city of Rome in ruins, classical ruins alongside newer damage, villas reduced to rubble, walls breached, and bridges and hospitals destroyed… They all stood for the heroes who died in the city’s defence.

Fotografie di Roma 1849: the Getty Album The Getty Research Institute holds an album of forty-one salt prints made from paper negatives by Stefano Lecchi. Most of the images are signed by the photographer on the negative or the verso. The album is a tall folio bound in vellum with gilt and embossed

2 Fracassi 2005, p. 459: Italian text: “La nuova costituzione era… un meditato documento, moderno e radicalmente innovativo, destinato a restare nella storia della civiltà europea.” 3 Ibid., p. 459. 4 Fracassi 2005, p. 412. 5 The Cheney album at the Getty Research Institute is the only collection of Lecchi’s photographs pre­ served as an intact album specifically laid out as a predetermined narrative. The Lecchi photographs in the collections in Rome and Milan have been preserved loosely and therefore cannot intrinsically show an intentional sequencing narrative. 6 The foreign press (see for example the Illustrated London News and L’Illustration Française) fol­ lowed the events leading up to the Roman Republic through its final days in July 1849.

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decoration, and a red morocco label on the spine with gilt letters7. The spine of the album bears the title Fotografi di Roma 1849, arguably standing for Fotografie di Roma  1849 (“Photographs of Rome, 1849”). On the inside front cover is pasted the bookplate of Edward Cheney with the motto Fato Prudentia Major, and on the first leaf appears the inscription “E. C. Rome Pal. Caetani 7br 20 1849” (Edward Cheney, Rome, Palazzo Caetani, September 20, 1849). The dedication day helps confirm the terminus ante quem of the photographs and the compilation of the album.8 Thirty-four photographs depict buildings and architectural structures that were heavily damaged in the course of the battle and trace key encounters during the siege in a sequel that seems to follow the order of Lecchi’s photographic campaign. First come the photographs taken in the northern part of Rome (the Milvian Bridge, the Villa Borghese and its garden, and the Piazza del Popolo); then there is a walk ascend­ing the Janiculum Hill, with the Church of San Pietro in Montorio, Villa Aurelia, and Villa Spada, and then the inside and the outside of Porta San Pancrazio. Passing through the gate, the vistas of the ruins continue: the Vascello, the Casino dei Quattro Venti, Villa Valentini, the walls of Rome with Villa Barberini and Casino Malvasia, the Mura Leonine and nearby defence posts. The album ends with five photographs of ancient Roman monuments and traditional city views of Rome.9 The penultimate photograph is a view of the Casa dei Forni in Pompeii, one of the earliest photographs in existence of this archaeological site and the second known print of Pompeii by Lecchi.10 In this album, the modern ruins are followed by a series of ancient ruins, a visual juxtaposition that evokes the unification of the Italian past, present, and future, both politically and culturally. Lecchi’s inspired choices reveal his Republican sentiments. He juxtaposed the devastation of his city, with the wrenching series of photographs of the havoc wreaked on the city by enemy bombardments, with the splendid architec­ ture of the glory days of Rome and Italy – the Roman Forum, the Temple of Vesta, the Arch of Constantine, the Arch of Septimius Severus, Hadrian’s tomb in the Castel Sant’Angelo, and the ruins of Pompeii. The order of the photographs in the album resonates strikingly with the narra­ tive of the events and the nationalist sentiments found in Risorgimento literature. British historian Macaulay Trevelyan describes how Garibaldi’s troops, upon retreat­ ing from the conflict, gathered in St Peter’s Square, and from there marched “via

7 The photographs are salted paper prints measuring circa 22 × 16 cm or smaller. The album measures 43 × 31 cm. 8 The Cheney album has been photographed and digitised in its entirety and is available on the Getty Research Institute’s website at [30.07.2014]. The album is in remarkably good condition. The forty-one salted paper prints range in quality from excellent to light in tonality. 9 Two photographs of the gardens of the Villa Borghese, showing bare trees and people wearing warm clothing, were likely taken in the winter months of 1848–1849, i.e. before the Siege. 10 The collection of Ruggero Pini in Como includes a view of a street in Pompeii. See Paoli 2005.

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Castel Sant’Angelo, past the adored ruins of the Forum and Coliseum towards the open space of the Lateran.”11 The final photograph in the album is a foreshortened view of the front façade of St. John Lateran. Nearby stands the San Giovanni Gate (which also features in the album), where the Garibaldian troops, an army of 4,000 volunteers  – Italian and European patriots – glimpsed their last view of Rome on the march to the north to support Venice against the Austrians. American journalist Margaret Fuller, who was writing for the New York Tribune and had witnessed the siege as a nurse, followed Garibaldi’s lancers as they galloped to the San Giovanni Gate: “Never have I seen a sight so beautiful, so romantic, and so sad.”12 Significantly, the album opens and closes with images of two of the iconic monu­ ments of ancient Christian Rome  – the Milvian Bridge and the Lateran. Given that liberal factions were fighting the reactionary authority of the Vatican, one may specu­ late that a clever appropriation of historical symbolism is intended. These sites sym­ bolise both religious and secular liberty. It was at the Milvian Bridge in the first century BCE that Cicero accused Catiline of conspiring to overthrow the Roman Republic, and there in the third century CE that Emperor Constantine defeated Maxentius, enabling Christianity to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. The Lateran was Constantine’s first cathedral and the site of the final assembly of Garibaldi’s army. Taken as a whole, the album is a narrative of a city under siege. It reads like a Garibaldian epic poem, pausing at both the noble ruins of villas that Garibaldi fought to protect and at the fiercely defended city walls and gates. Though Garibaldi had already left the city by the time Lecchi toured the ruins to take these photographs, both men were well aware of the iconic significance of Rome. In his autobiography, Garibaldi wrote of his thoughts when the republic was proclaimed in Rome: Here, in the same hall which used to witness the assemblies of the ancient tribunes of Rome’s greatness, where we assembled ... tomorrow the Republic ... will be hailed in the Forum by a people who have suffered for centuries, but have never forgotten that they are descended from the greatest of Peoples.13

His feelings echo Mazzini, who spoke of a new “Eternal City,” a “Rome of the People” that would eclipse even the glory of the Caesars and the Popes and unite the world.14 Garibaldi’s understanding of the significance of reclaiming the monuments of Rome for the Republican cause and of the effectiveness of photographs in mustering the support of allies becomes clear in a later statement made to his friend Alexandre Dumas in 1860: he urged that the Parisian photographer Gustave Le Gray, who was accompanying

11 Trevelyan 1907, p. 224. 12 Fuller 1869, p. 412, and Fuller 1986, p. 346 ff. 13 Garibaldi 1889, pp. 312–313. 14 Hibbert 1966, p. 42.

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Dumas on a Mediterranean voyage, should, instead of taking portraits of the Repub­ lican leaders, “shoot our ruins; Europe must know these things: two thousand eight hundred bombs in a single day!”15 Gustave Le Gray did as in­structed, photograph­ing barricades and buildings destroyed by the war in Palermo that same year. Original photographs by Stefano Lecchi were first re-discovered in 1997, by fortui­ tous chance, in the holdings of the Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome by photography historian Marina Miraglia, and were soon after published in the first monograph on Lecchi.16 The group of Lecchi’s photographs in this collection, coincidentally also forty-one images partially overlapping with the Cheney album, has a remarkable provenance: they came from the archive of Alessandro Calandrelli, who had fought heroically on the Janiculum and had been appointed triumvir on 1 July 1849 upon Mazzini’s resignation. Juxtaposing new and modern Roman ruins, the Calandrelli photographs, like the Cheney album, convey their own unique dra­ matic narrative of the Siege of Rome.17

The Photographer Stefano Lecchi Stefano Lecchi (b. 1804) was a pioneer photographer, active in Italy, France, and apparently also in Tunisia in the 1840s and 1850s. Born in the northern Italian region of Lombardy, he moved to Rome, where he was part of the “Roman School” of calotyp­ ists. Though he is primarily known for the photographs discussed here of the 1849 Siege of Rome, his career can be reconstructed in part on the basis of – albeit scanty – information from contemporary sources. Lecchi’s innovative experimentation in photography is attested by the method for colouring daguerreotypes that he presented to the Académie des sciences in Paris in 1842 and by his technique for optimising for sharpness of focus the distance between the photographic plate and the camera lens in relation to the subject. It is known that he was in southern France in 1844 and 1845 and in this highly experimental environment may have turned his attention to calotype technology, abandoning the daguerre­otype. He was noted for inventing the use of iodine bromide on paper and for contributing to the development of the salt print process.18 Correspondence between photographers George W. Bridges and Henry Fox Talbot indicates that Lecchi undertook a photography campaign in Pompeii (c. 1846 or 1847)

15 Aubenas 2002, p. 168. 16 I am most grateful to Maria Pia Critelli for showing to me the photographs by Stefano Lecchi held by the Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome in November 2011. For extensive documen­tation on these photographs see Critelli 2001 and Critelli 2011. 17 For a reproduction of all forty-one photographs from the Calandrelli collection see Critelli 2011, pp. 50–107. 18 Ibid.

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at the behest of the King of Naples (then Ferdinand II, 1810–1859), during which he created fourteen views of the excavated site.19 Only two photographs from this ­campaign are so far known to exist: a view of a street in Pompeii and the Casa del Forno,20 included in the Cheney album. These are among the earliest known photo­ graphs taken at Pompeii. In the same correspondence, Bridges described to Fox Talbot Lecchi’s successful technical achievements in creating images that were sharp, even when printed on paper “of inferior quality,” and spotless, especially in the rendition of the skies. Both qualities are evident in the photographs of the Siege of Rome, the body of work for which he is best known. Lecchi’s photographs were appropriated extensively as source images for illus­ trations. Before 1997, the work was known through copy prints in the Museo del Risorgimento in Rome and through lithographs in albums such as Danesi and Soleil’s Ruine di Roma dopo l’assedio del 1849 (“Ruins of Rome after the siege of 1849”), which influenced contemporary paintings of the events and heroes of the Risorgimento. Other images are views of cities in Italy and the south of France, with an emphasis on ancient ruins and major historical monuments. In spite of Lecchi’s innovations and professional reputation, there are few refer­ ences to him in the photographic history of the late 1850s, despite his important role in the defining events of the time. According to city records, he had an address in Rome in 1851, left the city between 1855 and 1856, and returned around 1859. He prob­ a­bly died in Rome between 1859 and 1863, reportedly ending his life in poverty.21

Edward Cheney and the British Connection As previously mentioned, the Getty album bears the bookplate of Edward Cheney (1803–1884), and an inscription on its first page indicates that the album came into his possession at Palazzo Caetani in Rome, where he was staying as a guest of the Roman aristocrat Michelangelo Caetani. Born into a noble British family from Shropshire, Cheney had deep connections with Italy. After his father’s death, the family took up residence at Palazzo Sciarra in Rome, where Edward joined his mother in 1825. Welcomed into the intellectual circles of Rome and Venice and popular with other members of elite Anglo-Italian society, Cheney quickly became enamoured of his artistic surroundings and turned to collecting

19 Schaaf’s website ( [30.07.2014]) docu­ments the correspondence from Bridges to Fox Talbot (29 August 1847). 20 The view of the so-called Casa del Forno at Pompeii (from his photo campaign of 1846) anticipates Garibaldi’s future visit to the city in 1860, when he opened the infamous Museo segreto in a gesture of popular liberation. 21 See Silvia Paoli’s biographical entry on Stefano Lecchi for detailed sources (Paoli 2005).

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paint­ings, rare books, bronzes, sculptures, and classical antiquities. The instability of the period may explain the success he had in purchasing objects from many Italian ari­ stocrats and church collections – for example, he obtained a bronze door knocker after it had been removed from Palazzo Grimani in Venice during the unrest of 1848 in the city.22 After 1851, Cheney served as unofficial consultant to the trustees of the National Gallery, though he did not return permanently to the United Kingdom until much later. His presence in Rome during the Siege of 1849 and the gift of the album so soon after the events on the Janiculum suggests sympathy for the cause of Italian unification. Although a direct connection between Cheney and Lecchi awaits further investi­ gation, it is plausible that they met, because Cheney received the Lecchi album while staying in the palazzo of Michelangelo Caetani, a close friend of Augusto Castellani’s. Castellani (1829–1914), a jewellery designer and patriot who fought in the battle on the Janiculum, is also one of the main sources for Lecchi’s biography, as described in Notizie di fotografia raccolte e dedicate agli artisti italiani, a document from 1863 found in the Castellani papers, and now held in the Archivio di Stato di Roma. Although the archive of Palazzo Caetani, now a private foundation, has no docu­ mentation on Edward Cheney’s presence there, and although the circumstances sur­ rounding the compilation of the album are still unknown, the photographs remain remarkable documents mirroring the cause of nationalist patriots.23 British political ties to Rome were very strong in this period. During the siege, the British consul, John Freeborn, invited diplomats of Italian and foreign states24 to his house to condemn officially Oudinot’s aggressive bombing, “which cost not only several innocent lives, but also the destruction of irreplaceable masterpieces and constituted a threat to the historic city which was considered to be under the moral protection of all civilised countries of the world.”25 The bombing continued nonetheless. When Mazzini was eventually forced out of Rome after the republic capitulated, he obtained a British passport and escaped to London, where he remained politically active.26

22 See the auction catalogue Christie 1905, p. 11, no. 56. Cheney’s nephew Francis Capel-Cure inher­ ited Edward Cheney’s art collection and estate. According to a handwritten note in the title page of the paintings auction catalogue, “the papers had passed into the hands of Sir Edward Capel-Cure, who destroyed them as the result of a family quarrel.” (Ellis Waterhouse collection, Getty Research Institute). 23 I would like to thank Caterina Fiorani, historian and curator of the archive of the Caetani Foun­ dation. 24 The countries which signed the letter were the USA, the United Kingdom, Prussia, the Nether­ lands, Denmark, Switzerland, Württemberg, San Salvador, Piedmont (also representing Tuscany) and later also Portugal. 25 Fracassi 2005, pp. 445–446. 26 Mazzini died in Pisa under the assumed name of Dr. Brown in 1872.

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Jessie White Mario, or “Hurricane Jessie” The connection between Lecchi’s photographs and the circle of British nationals sup­ porting the Italian unification cause is also strengthened by the work of Jessie White Mario (1832–1906), a Sorbonne-educated English writer who, after meeting both Gari­ baldi and Mazzini, came to sympathise strongly with their ideals. After marrying the Italian patriot Alberto Mario in 1857, she and her husband joined Garibaldi’s fight, pro­ viding medical assistance to the wounded and witnessing some of the key moments in the Italian Risorgimento. Her commitment to the cause was so wholehearted that she was soon nicknamed “Hurricane Jessie” in the Italian press. After the unification of Italy, she wrote extensively for British newspapers and Italian publishers on the histori­ cal period she had experienced at firsthand. A close friend of Garibaldi, who referred to her as a “sister,”27 she published his biography, Garibaldi e i suoi tempi, in 1884, two years after Garibaldi’s death; it has been released in multiple editions ever since. Although Jessie White Mario was not in Rome during the siege – she joined the cause in the late 1850s – she was familiar with the Siege of Rome and the Lecchi photo­ graphs. In the biography she wrote of the Italian patriot Agostino Bertani (1812–1886), she recounted seeing Lecchi’s photographs in his house as a trophy commemorating those who shed their blood fighting to unify Italy.28 Bertani, a physician who had volunteered his medical services to Garibaldi’s side during the Siege of Rome, brought a set of photographs by Lecchi mounted and framed with lengthy handwritten cap­ tions back to Genoa. After Bertani’s death, Jessie White Mario, the executor of his will, donated these photographs to the Civico Archivio Fotografico at Castello Sforzesco in Milan. Just like the Getty album and the Calandrelli archive, the Milan set (which con­ tains roughly 20 images) includes views of the ancient ruins juxtaposed with images of the modern ruins of the Janiculum siege. The Milan photographs were rediscovered by Silvia Paoli in 1998 in the Civico Archivio Fotografico di Castello Sforzesco and published in the book on Stefano Lecchi edited by Maria Pia Critelli. Though heavily faded, these photographs are the most valuable documents bearing witness to the patriotic and political spirit pre­served in

27 In Garibaldi e i suoi tempi, after the title page, a reproduction of a portrait of Giuseppe Garibaldi (in wood engraving) is included with his reprinted hand-written dedication to the author: “Alla carissima sorella mia, Jessie White Mario, infermiera de’ miei feriti in quattro campagne, 1860, 1866, 1867, 1870. Giuseppe Garibaldi” (“To my dearest sister, Jessie White Mario, nurse of my wounded men in four military campaigns, 1860, 1866, 1867, 1870”). 28 “Quei ricordi di Roma Bertani teneva presenti a sé e agli ospiti suoi, ad ammonire che la loro vita oramai stava fra il sangue e il fremito, Dove si pugna e spera Rivolti all’avvenir,” in Mario 1888, pp. 133. Jessie quotes two lines from Ad un Angelo, Epitalamio, a patriotic poem composed by G ­ offredo ­Mameli, precursor of his famed Fratelli d’Italia, the hymn poem that became the Italian National an­ them in 1946. Mameli joined the fighting on Garibaldi’s side and died at age 22 from wounds at the Casino Quattro Venti.

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them.29 Twelve photographs in the Milan collection, depicting ruins and war damage from the fights on the Janiculum, are signed by Lecchi and dated 1849. Silvia Paoli’s article “Veduta e Reportage” provides descriptions of the images and transcriptions of the texts, which chronicle the events as they unfolded in the locations depicted. For example, the photograph of the Casino dei Quattro Venti (the seventh figure in the Cheney album shows the same view, see fig. 1) reads: Occupied by betrayal by the French on June 2–3, re-taken by the Romans the morning of the 3rd and lost to the French again by the evening of the same day ... Here Daverio, Masina, and Dandolo died, and here Goffredo Mameli was wounded.

The caption describing the view of San Pancrazio Gate (matching the fifteenth figure in the Cheney album) fig. 3 is “Destroyed by the artillery and devoid of any defence; here Calandrelli was wounded.” A third example is of Villa Savorelli (the eleventh figure in the Cheney album, see fig. 5) “where General Garibaldi had his headquarters till past June 15 and where the Medici legion and Manara’s bersaglieri fought till the end.” The images and the captions accompanying the photographs immortalised the names of the places and the heroes who fell for the Roman and Italian cause.30

Stefano Lecchi’s Legacy in Garibaldi e i suoi tempi That Lecchi was leaning towards the Roman side has already been clearly articulated by Maria Pia Critelli, who identified in the Calandrelli collection a unique photograph of the façade of a house with a mural-size quotation from the French constitution advocating civic respect for foreign nations and the recognition of the freedom of all people.31 This photograph reflects Lecchi’s choice of subjects for his photography and the media he was serving: the French were seen as aggressors in a foreign country in spite of the tenets of France’s constitution. Other photographs taken by Lecchi, all featuring in the Cheney album, are included in Garibaldi’s biography Garibaldi

29 I am very grateful to Silvia Paoli, who gave me access in November 2011 to the Lecchi photographs held the Archivio Fotografico in Milan. 30 As previously mentioned, Silvia Paoli provides detailed information on the photographs from the Bertani estate, including transcriptions of the captions in the book Stefano Lecchi (Critelli 2001), pp. 43–52. See also Lamberto Vitali’s Il Risorgimento e la Fotografia, which provides the captions to the photographs as the words of Jessie White Mario in Agostino Bertani e i suoi tempi (Mario 1888). 31 Maria Pia Critelli succeeded in identifying – in a Lecchi photograph from the Calandrelli archive – the writing on the wall of the antica osteria cucina (Critelli 2001, pp. 78–79). The quotation painted on the wall is an article from the French Constitution acknowledging the integrity of foreign nations and guaranteeing that the French will not ever use force against the freedom of any people. Flyers re­ producing these words were distributed at the locations where French troops could find them during the fighting.

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e i suoi tempi, the book which Jessie White Mario wrote and published in Milan four decades after the events in Rome. The wood engravings in this article, drawn from Garibaldi e i suoi tempi, demon­ strate how Lecchi’s images were re-purposed to strengthen the narrative of the Repub­ li­can cause. The chapters discussing the Siege of Rome (chapters 26 and 27) are illustrat­ed with 16 scenes, nine of which – specifically the views of buildings wrecked by the bombs – appear to be based directly on Lecchi’s photographs (counting also the preamble to battle of 30 April, on page 265, which also matches a photograph in the Cheney album).32 Lecchi, however, is never acknowledged by name. The prints are cred­ ited to “Matania” or “Centenari.” Two images (the Villa Barberini and Outside San Pan­ crazio Gate, see figs. 7 and 4) are both captioned “photographs taken by Dr. Bertani.” This hints that Bertani’s photographs were used as source images for the book illustra­ tions. Bertani might have loaned the photographs to the editor so that the prints could be made – or perhaps Bertani’s name was used as a cover-up, since Bertani lived in Genoa in the 1880s under the protection of the King of Sardinia, Vittorio Emanuele. One could also speculate that Lecchi’s name was kept intentionally undisclosed for politi­ cal reasons since, at the end of the conflict, the papal restoration was accompanied by tighter security, press censorship and harsh political repression. However, Lecchi was evidently free enough to move around the city and take photographs of the main sites of the conflict, while non-residents in Rome were forced to leave the city. In the aftermath of the siege, Lecchi’s photographs were appropriated systemati­ cally, without crediting the photographer, by printmakers on both sides of the conflict. A number of portfolios, etchings, wood engravings and lithographs show a direct con­ nection to Lecchi’s photographs – as details such as the shadow lines prove. These portfolios have been thoroughly analysed and described by Marina Miraglia in Gari­ baldi arte e storia.33 In this article, due to limited space, only a small selection from

32 The remaining images are all ‘action’ scenes of close-up battle fighting inside, or in direct view of, the buildings. The only landscape view that does not match Lecchi’s photographs is the one of Ponte Molle (on p. 385). However, even an ‘action’ scene is clearly based on Lecchi’s aftermath photograph: The Batteria Romana sulla Cinta Aureliana, che smontò una batteria francese (p. 289). 33 The sets include: 1) Pompilio Cuppis, Atlante generale dell’assedio di Roma avvenuto nel giugno 1849;­­contenente due carte militari ed una collezione completa di vedute rappresentanti le rovine degli edifizi piu rimarchevo­ li, preceduta da una cronologica esposizione dell’assedio con note illustrative. Roma: G. Ferrini, 1849. Lithographs by Gallassi and Ferrini. 2) Thirty-two early-20th-century gelatin silver prints from original calotypes (Museo del ­Risorgimento). This was the earliest documentation known of Lecchi’s photography work until 1997. 3) Michele Danesi (Naples, 1809–1887), Rovine di Roma dopo l’Assedio del 1849: tratte dal daguerro­ tipo (four lithographs in black and white “Tratte dal daguerrotipo,” Soleil Carlo Roma proprietario – Roma Litografia Danesi). The graphic artists of the Danesi series are Badioli and Berzotti. The Danesi series is most closely based on Lecchi’s photographs as it reproduces them without any additional narrative or graphic element. Only the buildings standing in ruin are shown, no soldiers in combat or

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Lecchi’s photographs is juxtaposed with the wood engravings produced for White’s Garibaldi e i suoi tempi, highlighting the direct correspondence of the source image with the final rendering by the book illustrators. The wood engravings are clearly based on the original photographs used to re-enact a full action scene during the battle: sol­ diers are fighting and falling, smoke is coming from the ruined buildings, and so on. In the illustrations that follow, the sepia-toned images (on the left) are the salt prints by Stefano Lecchi from the Cheney album in the Getty Reserch Institute; the wood engravings (on the right) are those published in Jessie White Mario’s Garibaldi e i suoi tempi.

Casino dei Quattro Venti Villa Corsini, also known as Casino dei Quattro Venti, was the site of “Bloody Sunday,” 3 June 1849 (Fracassi 2005), and was the first Italian stronghold to be lost to the French. In the paragraph referring to this image, White (1884) wrote: “Once the enemy had taken this site, which [Garibaldi] had understood to be the strategic key to

Fig. 1: Stefano Lecchi: Casino dei Quattro Venti. Photograph, salted paper print, 1849. Album page: 43 × 31 cm, photograph: 22.5 × 16.5 cm. Getty Research Institute, acc. no. 2002.R.45.

Fig. 2: Edoardo Matania: Roma nel 1849: Al Casino dei Quattro Venti, il 3 giugno. Print, wood engraving, Page: 34.1 × 25 cm, Plate: 17.8 × 23 cm, in: Jessie White Mario, Garibaldi e i suoi tempi, Milan 1884, p. 241. Private collection.

weaponry spread out, as in all other prints found in the reproductive series. 4) Vedute dell’Assedio di Roma del 1849 divise in dodici tavole dipinte dal prof. Werner ed incise all’Acqua Forte e Bulino da Domenico Amici, Romano. The Buffalo and Erie County Public Library holds a copy of this set.

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defence… the fall of Rome was close.” It was taken by the French on 3 June, retaken by the Italians, and then destroyed by French bombardment on 20 June. As documen­ ted in Bertani’s hand-written notes (see above in the description of the Milan set), this military post was strenuously defended – though in vain – by Francesco Daverio, Angelo Masina, Enrico Dandolo, and Goffredo Mameli.

Porta San Pancrazio

Fig. 3: Stefano Lecchi: Porta S. Pancrazio di Fuori. Photograph, salted paper print, 1849. Album page: 43 × 31 cm, photograph: 22 × 16.5 cm. Getty Research Institute, acc. no. 2002.R.45.

Fig. 4: Edoardo Matania: Roma nel 1859 – A San Pancrazio (da una fotografia presa dal dottor Bertani). Print, wood engraving. Page: 34.1 × 25 cm, Plate: 17.8 × 23 cm, in: Jessie White Mario, Garibaldi e i suoi tempi, Milan 1884, p. 305. Private collection.

In Garibaldi e i suoi tempi (p. 327), the illustration provides the context for this nar­ rative: When the battle ended, with the death of Luciano Manara, the mortal blow, though expected by everyone any time soon, when it came, felt like a lightning bolt! The Roman people all heard together the roaring of the cannons as if the heart of Rome were still beating. Anxiously the civi­ lians hurried in growing numbers to the barricades of Porta San Pancrazio.

The site of one of the most prolonged and bloody of Garibaldi’s battles, Porta San Pancrazio was rebuilt after this siege; the contiguous city walls were removed to improve the traffic flow in and out of the city. In 2011 (as part of the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Italian unification), Porta San Pancrazio was restored to host the newly-created Museo della Repubblica Romana e della Memoria Garibal­ dina, a museum dedicated to the period. The gate is also the headquarters of the ­Associazione Nazionale Veterani e Reduci Garibaldini, headed by Annita Garibaldi Jallet, great-granddaughter of Giuseppe Garibaldi.

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Villa Aurelia

Fig. 5: Stefano Lecchi: Casino Savorelli, prima dimora di Garibaldi. Photograph, salted paper print, 1849. Album page: 43 × 31 cm, photograph: 22.5 × 16.5 cm, Getty Research Institute, acc.no. 2002.R.45.

Fig. 6: Edoardo Matania: Roma nel 1849: Villa Savorelli, Quartier Generale di Garibaldi. Print, wood engraving, Page: 34.1 × 25 cm, Plate: 17.4 × 24.6 cm, in: Jessie White Mario, Garibaldi e i suoi tempi, Milan 1884, p. 313. Private collection.

Garibaldi e i suoi tempi (p. 307) reports: Garibaldi himself settled in the eagle’s nest that is Casino Savorelli, whose tower, higher than Porta San Pancrazio, allowed him to assess the French army’s movements in the villas and those of his own army at the Vascello. When Villa Savorelli crumbled under the cannonballs, Garibaldi moved his headquarters, this time to the neighboring Villa Spada, which also met a disastrous end and marked the final blow and the surrender of the Roman Republic.

Known as Casino Savorelli, after its owner at the time of the siege, this villa was built around 1650 by Cardinal Girolamo Farnese. After a century of neglect and disputes among the tenants, the villa was bought in 1841 by Count Alessandro Savorelli, who was a supporter of the Pope and held a monopoly on candle production in the Papal States. Unaware of the political winds blowing at the end of the decade, Savorelli had just completed a decade-long renovation of the villa when Garibaldi occupied it to take advantage of its strategic location overlooking the city and the Janiculum. More details of the ensuing disputes around the reparations are provided in Geffcken’s book. In the early 20th century, this villa became the property of the American Academy in Rome and was renamed Villa Aurelia.34

34 Geffcken 2007. Geffcken’s Janus View has described in depth the history of the landmark locations of the siege on the Janiculum, outposts with a long history lasting from the time they were built in the seventeenth through the twenty-first century.

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Fig. 7: Edoardo Matania and Ambrogio Centenari: Roma nel 1849: Assalto alla Villa Barberini (Da una fotografia presa dal dottor Bertani). Print, wood engraving, Page: 34.1 × 25 cm, Plate: 19 × 25.2 cm, in: Jessie White Mario, Garibaldi e i suoi tempi, Milan 1884, p. 369. Private collection.

Garibaldi e i suoi tempi (p. 315) recounts: And a horrible fight ensued for the possession of Villa Barberini. Many lay dead at the entrance. Girolamo Induno, the great painter, received twenty-seven wounds from bayonets and was carried away by Enrico Guastalla. Carlo Gorini was seriously wounded in his left arm …. After realising the high death toll here, Garibaldi understood that Rome was lost, and hence ordered the withdrawal of his troops.

In Bertani’s biography (Mario 1888, p. 97), the caption transcribed from the photo­ graph in Bertani’s house referring to this image reads: Casino Barberini, near the breach of the 3rd bastion, on the left, occupied by the French the night of June 21–22, reconquered by [Giacomo] Medici the following morning and then re-taken by the French. Here died Rasnesi and Veneziani, and where Carlo Gorini, Girolamo Induno and Cadolini were wounded.35

In the late 1840s, when photography was still in its infancy, an animated debate ensued between those who embraced the new technology and traditional artists, who

35 “Casino Barberini, vicino alla breccia del terzo bastione a sinistra, occupato dai Francesi la notte del 21–22 giugno, ripreso da una frazione della legion Medici la mattina seguente e quindi riconqui­ stato dai francesi. Vi furono morti Rasnesi e Veneziani, feriti poi Carlo Gorini, Girolamo Induno, Ca­ dolini.”

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questioned its achievements. In Lecchi’s photographs, for the first time in history, photography is used to document a specific historical event with deep political and emotional implications for thousands of people, those impacted directly by the Italian movement for unification and independence. In the immediate aftermath of the event, the perspective views of ruined villas, framed like the traditional vedute of monuments and palaces of the Grand Tour prints market, were now used to docu­ ment a page of heroic Italian idealism. The static architectural structures of ravaged buildings, walls, bridges and gates were no longer left to the artist’s interpretation, but were created by light ‘cast’ onto paper, and constituted real memories. Lastly, other than for one or two figures posing in the pictures – possibly the pho­ tographer himself and one or two of his children or a lonely French guard – Lecchi’s photographs of ruins and monuments are significantly devoid of human figures, especially of the dead still lying on the ground in the weeks following the surrender. This may point to the difficulties of moving around the city before he undertook his photographic campaign. Agostino Bertani recounts how – upon the reinstatement of papal authority, reinforced by the French occupying military force – the heroic defen­ dants of Rome lay without burial.36 Poignantly, Lecchi’s photographic campaign, with the city outskirts having now been used as a theatre of battle, includes a view of three standing crosses. In contrast with the imposing views of ravaged buildings, here, by the Milvian Bridge, with the Valadier Torretta in the background and – even more significantly – with

Fig. 8: Stefano Lecchi: Ponte Molle. Photograph, salted paper print, 1849. Album page: 43 × 31 cm. Photograph: 22 × 16.3 cm, Getty Research Institute, acc.no. 2002.R.45.

36 White 1888, p. 170 ff.: “I prodi difensori di Roma giacevano senza sepoltura, …. E le famiglie non sanno dove rivolgere lo sguardo per cercare una croce, e raccogliervi una preghiera di pace…”

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 Isotta Poggi

the silhouette of St Peter’s Dome fading away on the horizon, a child is looking at three anonymous crosses (fig. 8). This quiet and somber moment of silence, the only direct visual reference to the dead in Lecchi’s whole body of work, is the first image in the Cheney album, where it works almost as an introduction to the devastation to come. Although Lecchi left no written account of his views, the trail he left with his pho­ tographs seemingly follows the script of Bertani’s testimony to the plight of Italian unification: the photographer, rejecting the simple depiction of places and events, deliberately chose to capture the political, cultural, and human dimensions of this memorable page of Italian history.

Bibliography Amici 2007 [1870]: Domenico Amici, Vedute dell’Assedio di Roma del 1849 divise in dodici tavole dipinte dal prof. Werner ed incise all’Acqua Forte e Bulino da Domenico Amici Romano, 1870 c., reprint, Rome 2007. Aubenas 2002: Sylvie Aubenas (ed.), Gustave Le Gray, Los Angeles (CA) 2002. Becchetti 1978: Piero Becchetti, Fotografi e fotografia in Italia, 1839–1880, Rome 1978. Christie / Manson / Woods 1905: Christie / Manson / Woods, The Capel-Cure Collection of Objects of Antiquity of the Renaissance and of Later Times, London 1905. Critelli 2001: Maria Pia Critelli (ed.), Stefano Lecchi. Un fotografo e la Repubblica Romana del 1849, Rome 2001. Critelli 2011: Critelli 2011 (ed.), Fotografare la storia. Stefano Lecchi e la Repubblica romana del 1849, Rome 2011. Cuppis 1849: Pompilio Cuppis, Atlante generale dell’assedio di Roma avvenuto nel giugno 1849; contenente due carte militari ed una collezione completa di vedute rappresentanti le rovine degli edifizi più rimarchevoli, preceduta da una cronologica esposizione dell’assedio con note illustrative. Rome 1849. Dewitz et al. 1994: Bodo von Dewitz / Dietmar Siegert / Karin Schuller-Procopovici (eds.), Italien – Sehen und Sterben. Photographien der Zeit des Risorgimento (1845–1870), Heidelberg 1994. Falzone del Barbarò et al.: Michele Falzone del Barbarò / Monica Maffioli / Emanuela Sesti, Alle origini della fotografia: un itinerario toscano, 1839–1880. Firenze 1989. Fracassi 2005: Claudio Fracassi, La meravigliosa storia della repubblica dei briganti: Roma 1849, Milan 2005. Fuller 1869: Margaret Fuller, At Home and Abroad; or, Things and Thoughts in America and Europe. By Margaret Fuller Ossoli. Ed. by Her Brother, Arthur B. Fuller. New York (NY) 1869. Online at: [30.04.2014]. Fuller / Mamoli Zorzi 1986: Margaret Fuller / Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, Un’americana a Roma, 1847–1849, Pordenone 1986. Garibaldi 1889: Giuseppe Garibaldi, Autobiography, trans. by Alica Werner, London 1889. Geffcken / Goldman 2007: Katherine A. Geffcken / Norma Goldman, The Janus View from the American Academy in Rome: Essays on the Janiculum, New York (NY) 2007. Hibbert 1966: Christopher Hibbert, Garibaldi and His Enemies: The Clash of Arms and Personalities in the Making of Italy, Boston (MA) 1966. Lassam / Gray 1988: Robert E. Lassam / Michael Gray, The Romantic Era. Reverendo Calvert Richard Jones 1804–1877, Reverendo George Wilson Bridges 1788–1863, William Robert Baker di

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Bayfordbury 1810–1896. Il lavoro di tre fotografi inglesi svolto in Italia nel 1846–1860, usando il procedimento per Calotipia (Talbotipia), Florence 1988. Lewis 2006: David Lewis, Jessie White Mario: An English Heroine in the Liberation of Italy, Oxford 2006. Mario 1884: Jessie White Mario, Garibaldi e i suoi tempi, Milan 1884. Mario 1888: Jessie White Mario, Agostino Bertani e i suoi tempi, Florence 1888. Mario 1909: Jessie White Mario, 1832–1906. The Birth of Modern Italy, London 1909. Mazzini 1849: Giuseppe Mazzini, French Intervention in Rome: a letter to Mssrs. De Tocqueville and de Falloux, Ministers of France, London 1849. Matsumoto-Best 2003: Saho Matsumoto-Best, Britain and the Papacy in the Age of Revolution, 1846–1851, Rochester (NY) 2003. Miraglia 1982: Marina Miraglia, “I Luoghi dell’Epopea Garibaldina: Reportage Bellico e ‘veduta’ nella fotografia dell’Ottocento,” in: Garibaldi, arte e storia, Florence 1982, pp. 273–334. Paoli 2005: Silvia Paoli, s.v. Lecchi Stefano, in: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 64 (2005), pp. 269–271, on line at: [30.07.2014]. Rossi 2001: Lauro Rossi et al. (eds.), Fondare la nazione: i repubblicani del 1849 e la difesa del Gianicolo, Rome 2001. Signorini 2007: Roberto Signorini, Alle origini del fotografico: lettura di The Pencil of Nature (1844–46) di William Henry Fox Talbot, Pistoia 2007. Soleil 1849: Carlo Soleil, Le rovine dell’assedio di Roma tratte dal dagherrotipo non che costumi militari italiani, Rome 1849. Trevelyan 1907: George Macaulay Trevelyan, Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic, London 1907. Vitali 1979: Lamberto Vitali, Il Risorgimento e la Fotografia, Turin 1979.

Martina Baleva

The Photographic Portrait of Georgi Benkovski, or the De-Archiving of the National Hero1 [I]n our modern cultural life, the establishment of the corporeal personality, of the undeniable identity of an adult, corresponds to the most widely varied needs. Raymond de Ryckère2

The photographic portrait of Georgi Benkovski, one of the emblematic figures in the Bulgarian national liberation movement, is among the most well-known in the por­ trait gallery of the great national heroes of that country. Only initiates are granted a look at the unremarkable, poorly preserved carte de visite portrait that holds the status of a national relic in the photo archive of the National Library in Sofia.3 At the same time, it has been reproduced hundreds of times – in scholarly and popular liter­ ature, in illustrated encyclopaedias, anniversary publications and school textbooks. Its reproductions are exhibited in museums, it decorates public buildings and offices, schools and universities, book covers and commemorative plaques, and it frequently finds its way into the mass media. In the Bulgarian and English-language Wikipedia entries on Benkovski’s biography, the prominent likeness crowns the hero’s birth and death dates.4 The portrait began its career in 1907, when it was first reproduced as a wood engraving by the historian Dimitar Strashimirov in his three-volume history of the Bulgarian uprising of 1876.5 Half a century after this first publication, a discussion of a kind unique in the history of Bulgarian imagery flared up over the identity of the

1 This essay first appeared in an abridged version in Bulgarian: Baleva 2012. 2 Quoted in Bertillon 1895, p. LXXV. 3 Despite repeated official requests, I was ultimately able to inspect the original photograph only by a circuitous route. 4 Georgi Benkovski (c. 1840–1876), whose real name was Gavril Gruev Hlatev, was among the lea­ ding members of the group of radical Bulgarian exiles to Romania who, from their base in Bucharest, organ­ised and led the brutally suppressed 1876 April Uprising against the Ottoman government. An in­ itial attempt at a Bulgarian revolt had been undertaken in the autumn of 1875, in the context of which Hlatev had been entrusted with the task of setting fires at strategic locations in the Ottoman capital. The revolt failed, as did Hlatev’s role in it. As a result, he fled to Romania with the forged passport of a Pole by the name of Antoni Benkovski. During the April Uprising of 1876, Hlatev – now known as Benkovski – led a group of rebels who went down in the nation’s history as the “Flying Squad.” Just a few days after the outbreak of the uprising in the heart of the empire, Benkovski and many of his comrades were captured and killed by government troops. On the name change, see below. 5 Strashimirov 1907, vol. 1, after p. 236.

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portrait’s subject, and thus over its ‘authenticity.’ The debate was soon to be stifled, however, in the pathos of Communist historical patriotism. It was carried out primar­ ily between the author Anna Kamenova and the historian of Bulgarian photography Hristo Jonkov. Two decades after this initial polemic, the painter Zhechko Popov like­ wise adopted a stance on the matter, bringing the dispute to an end – at least for the time being – in favour of the advocates of the ‘authentic’ portrait. I would like to take this discussion as a point of departure and an opportunity to examine the relationship between historical photography and its archiving in the service of the nation. In the process, I will summarise the main arguments of the two sides of the discussion as a basis for developing a number of issues that have never yet undergone investigation with regard to “the establishment of the corporeal person­ ality, of the undeniable identity”6 of the photographed person. The various archival layers that have come to be superimposed on the photograph, and in a sense to lend it identity, will be revealed one by one as a means of reconstructing the photo’s career – a very adventurous one at times – from simple carte de visite portrait to the status of national icon. In other words, I will endeavour to ‘de-archive’ the image of the hero. The inspection of the portrait’s so-called ‘authenticity’ and its ‘de-archiving’ are not an end unto themselves. I am taking them as an occasion to clarify the mecha­ nisms by which visual (national) identity is generated through photographic archives. The case study will thus provide insights into the lengthy process of photo-archival practice within the Bulgarian national discourse, an overwhelmingly complex process distinguished in part by contradictions and caprice. After all, this case is eloquent testimony to the treatment of photographic sources and to the nation’s unquench­able thirst for photographic images.

The Dispute It was on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of the April Uprising of 1876 that Anna Kamenova, the great niece of Gavril Hlatev, alias Georgi Benkovski, first pub­lished her doubts about the authenticity of the portrait of her kinsman and the leading revolutionary of the Bulgarian national movement in the weekly Literatu­ ren front (“Literary front”) (fig. 1). According to Kamenova, who describes at first a bust portrait of Benkovski, “this calm man […], gazing out of the picture indifferently […], with black eyes, black hair, sleek, reddish skin […], a small black moustache, of medium height, rather plump, with an absent and vacant gaze” could not be Benkov­ ski.7 To support her line of reasoning, Kamenova cites the comparison of the available pictorial material with contemporary descriptions of Benkovski in written sources. As

6 Bertillon 1895, p. LXXV. 7 Kamenova 1956, front page.

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is apparent from the text quoted, she subjects the visual material to very free interpre­ tation, without basing it on formal analysis or comparing it with any contemporary artistic practices that would permit the deduction of objective criteria for assessing psychological characteristics such as the portrait subject’s facial expression or intel­ lectual capacities. It is, moreover, problematic to determine the “height” of a person on the basis of a bust portrait. Then Kamenova compares the qualities of the image she has thus described with descriptions of Benkovski’s appearance in written sources such as Zahari Stoyanov’s famous Memoirs or the less well-known Memories of Michail Madzharov.8 According to Kamenova, both authors could vouch for the truth because they were “eyewit­ nesses who knew Benkovski very well.” They described their comrade as “tall, slender, blond, with light eyes, a long, blond […] moustache, his fingers – long, his gaze – sharp.”9 In view of the juxtaposition of the portrait bust’s characteristics with those from the written descriptions – “black eyes” vs. “light eyes,” “black hair” vs. “blond hair,” “small black moustache” vs. “long blond moustache,” “squat” vs. “tall,” “plump” vs. “slender”  – any doubts about the portrait’s ‘non-authenticity’ seem to be out of the question. From the comparison of the diametrically opposed characteristics, the author comes to the conclusion that “there can be no doubt that the widely disseminated portrait of the black-eyed man is not of Benkovski.”10

Fig. 1: Dragan Iliev: Georgi Benkovski, 1902. Technique, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photomechanical reproduction from: Anna Kamenova, “Obrazat na Benkovski,” in: Literaturen front, 18, 3 May 1956.

8 Stoyanov 1933; Madzharov 1968. 9 Kamenova 1956, front page. 10 Ibid., my italics.

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On the basis of this assessment, Kamenova subsequently raises the question as to how and why, despite these contradictions, it came about that the portrait was considered to be one of Benkovski. To answer this question, she now resorts to the reminiscences of her father, Michail Madzharov, Benkovski’s nephew and the son of one of his sisters. Here I will quote the passage in its entirety since it contains interest­ ing information that contributes to clarifying the question of the portrait’s ‘authen­ ticity’ and also provides insight into the early practices of photo archiving in Bulgaria around the turn of the century. On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the April Uprising (1901), the committee in Sofia and Panagyurishte entrusted with the festivities had to obtain portraits of all of the famous revo­ lutionaries who led the uprising. There were portraits of [Panayot] Volov, [Todor] Kablesh­kov, and Nayden P. Stoyanov. Only the portrait of Benkovski was missing. The members of the committee remembered that Benkovski had been a tailor in Eski Şehir for a time, and had worked in partner­ ship with a man from Panagyurishte. This partner was believed to have been married to a Greek woman and to have died after the liberation [of Bulgaria from Ottoman rule in 1878]. A letter was written to the wife in Eski Şehir with the request that she send a photo of her husband’s partner, if such a photo existed. The Greek woman will hardly have been capable of understanding the committee’s letter, which was written in Bulgarian! [...] She then really did send a photo, not of Benkovski, however, but of her departed husband. Without thinking, the committee took the photo to be authentic. And that is the picture that today is circulated as a portrait of Benkovski.11

According to the passage, the portrait had a completely banal misunderstanding to thank for its initial circulation. Yet Kamenova also discusses another portrait, now a full-length one (fig. 2), which she claims is of Benkovski, in which, however, he is much younger, taken in Istanbul when he first travelled abroad. In it, Benkovski is seen with a fez, light eyes, a blond moustache, tall, slender, with a spirited face. In view of the family resemblance it could be assumed that this is the likeness of the young Gavril Hlatev.12

In this portrait (fig. 2), in addition to the “family resemblance,” Kamenova identifies all of the outward features that correspond to the written sources and at the same time contrast with the characteristics of the portrait bust she has described (fig. 1).

11 Ibid. Michail Madzharov (1854–1944), a prominent Bulgarian politician, diplomat and commenta­ tor and alumnus of the prestigious American Robert College in Istanbul, began compiling his famous Memories in the first decade of the twentieth century; he committed them to paper between 1939 and 1942. In the second edition of the Memories published in 1968, the publisher, Vesselin Andreev con­ firms Kamenova’s account “that Benkovski’s portrait […] is actually that of his partner Hrelkov in Eski Şehir”: Madzharov 1968, p. 762. 12 Kamenova 1956, front page.

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Fig. 2: Pascal Sebah: Anonymous photo portrait of an Ottoman intellectual. Albumen print, calling card format, front, Istanbul after 1874. Mounting board: 6.3 x  9.6 cm, photograph: 5.3 × 9.4 cm. Photo archive of the Cyril and Methodius National Library, Sofia, call no. C 507.

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The Picture As is the case with the majority of Bulgarian historiography and illustrated litera­ ture, Kamenova’s article contains no information on the portraits discussed. I cite this information here not only for the sake of completeness, but also because it is indis­ pensable for a study of this kind. Information about the author, the place of origin and the date, the dimensions, the technique, and the present whereabouts – in short, the picture’s provenance – will help to answer the question raised by Kamenova. At the same time, I will endeavour to carry out a formal analysis as well as a comparison of the two portraits discussed by Kamenova. The portrait bust Kamenova published in her article, labelling it the “unreal photo of Benkovski” (fig. 1), is – in keeping with the newspaper printing technique of the time – black and white, and identifiable already at first sight as having been painted by hand. As we learn from the article by Zhechko Popov, who was to participate in the discussion sparked by Kamenova on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the April Uprising, the portrait was indeed painted – by Dragan Iliev in the year 1902.13 It depicts the bust of a man in three-quarter profile, gazing towards the right. His facial features are regular, and his hair thick, dark and slightly wavy, but carefully combed back to reveal the high brow and the slightly protruding, shapely ears. The gaze is earnest and direct, as is suggested by the dark eyes and the thin, well-formed eye­ brows. The slightly curved contour of the full lower lip harmonises with the carefully shaped and slightly upward-curving dark moustache. The man, of young to medium age, wears a light-coloured shirt, the collar of which protrudes from under a dark vest. The black-and-white reproduction, and a bust portrait at that, allows neither the ascertainment of the subject’s height nor of his skin colour, two features Kamenova includes in her description, possibly working from a colour reproduction of the por­ trait, or one coloured by hand at a later date. The portrait of the young Benkovski that Kamenova identifies as “authentic” and “real” is captioned simply “Photo no. 3” in the article (fig. 2). This portrait is indeed a full-length photograph of a male figure resting his right arm on a decorative pedes­ tal – a typical prop in the portrait studio of every professional photographer of the nineteenth century. The man, of young to medium age, wears a fez, a light-­coloured shirt beneath a dark vest, a short, dark jacket (a saltamarka), pantaloons (potur in Turkish), a sash (around his waist), over which he has hooked his left thumb, lightcoloured stockings and dark shoes with small, pointed heels. Around his neck he wears a chain connected to a divit (Turkish for pen case) hanging demonstratively from his sash. Owing to its small dimensions in Kamenova’s publication, the portrait does not permit a detailed description of the subject’s facial features. Its wide circula­ tion in historical and encyclopaedic literature, however, where it has frequently been

13 Popov 1976, p. 11.

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enlarged, and the personal inspection of the original, have simplified this task.14 The man’s facial features are regular and his lips are full. He is posing in a three-quarter profile and looking towards the right. His short hair, neatly combed back beneath the fez, reveals the regularly formed and slightly protruding ears, while the eyes beneath the well-formed eyebrows are distinguished by a solemn, direct gaze. The faint dark contour above the upper lip is perhaps thin blond moustache, or possibly merely as a shadow. Already at first sight, a formal comparison of the two portraits clearly reveals that the portrait bust which Kamenova claims does not show Benkovski was painted after the photo of the man Kamenova identifies as the young Benkovski. The doyen of the history of Bulgarian photography, Hristo Jonkov, comes to the same conclusion in his response to Kamenova’s publication: “The portrait she [Kamenova] cites is a drawing, print, or the like, made after the only extant original photograph.”15 To explain the reasons for the author’s “serious erroneous conclusions,” her opponent continues the account by Madzharov: For the festivities on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the uprising and Benkovski’s heroic death, the organisers needed his portrait. What they had at their disposal was the origi­ nal, in which […] Benkovski had been portrayed as a young man in 1868, i.e. eight years before the uprising, but with a fez. The fact that the beloved leader had been photographed with a fez, the symbol of the Bulgarians’ submission to the Turks, wounded the initiators’ pride and patriotic feelings. They therefore commissioned an artist to paint Benkovski after the photo, but without a fez.16

Jonkov goes on to say that it must have been difficult for an artist to know whether Benkovski had been blond or not from the photo.17 The artist had simply rendered Benkovski’s eyes and hair darker, producing precisely the portrait whose authenticity Kamenova denies. Jonkov concludes his deliberations with a brief formal comparison of the two portraits: Contrary to Comrade Kamenova, we must emphasise, however, that the portrait of Benkovski in question (the painted one) resembles the original [the photograph] extremely strongly. The oval shape of the face, the position of the head and the shirt are the same, as is the chain around the neck and the jacket; only the fez is missing.

14 The original is located in the photo archive of the Cyril and Methodius National Library in Sofia, call number C 507. I had the opportunity to examine it in October 2010. 15 Jonkov 1956, p. 3. 16 Ibid. 17 Here Jonkov makes passing reference to a special characteristic of early photography – the presu­ med capacity to repro­duce reality faithfully (though not in colour).

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On the basis of this comparison, Jonkov comes to the conclusion that the painted portrait questioned by Kamenova “is a more or less well-wrought translation of the original into the drawing medium, but without a fez.”18 The attempt undertaken by Zhechko Popov twenty years later to sum up the results of the debate in favour of Hristo Jonkov’s line of reasoning essentially contributes little to the actual question of the ‘authenticity’. On the contrary, the author resorts to Anna Kamenova’s comparative method  – this time, however, from a reverse perspective. According to Popov, the written descriptions by Zahari Stoyanov, Konstantin Velichkov and others, which he quotes in his article, “correspond perfectly with the photo of Ben­ kovski […] with the fez on his head,” rendering “further comparisons unnecessary.”19 The only new argument Popov contributes to the discussion in defence of the ‘authen­ tic’ portrait is the silence of a number of Benkovski’s friends and acquaintances with regard to this question. The author points out that the figures he has enumerated, every one of them proven revolutionaries and likewise nationally venerated heroic figures – for example Stoyan Zaimov, Nikola Obretenov, Rayna Knyaginya and several others – “would not have permitted a random person who had done nothing of merit to appear next to their portraits in place of the legendary Benkovski.”20 In other words, except for Benkovski’s nephew Michail Madzharov, all of the hero’s comrades had confidently identified him in the photo. Otherwise they would have staunchly refused to allow the portrait to be included in the photo archive of national heroes or to be circulated. It is nevertheless remarkable that the author mentions neither Madzharov’s opinion nor a statement uttered by Benkovski’s sister about a certain Petar Zagorov in around 1899, who “could not inspect the likeness of Benkovski because the latter had unfortunately left no portrait of himself behind.”21 Popov’s contribution is rather of an art-histori­ cal nature, since he offers a well-founded survey of the abundant portrait production revolving around the figure of Benkovski, all of which is based entirely on the photo, except for the bronze bust of 1912 by Zheko Spiridonov in the Boris Garden in Sofia.

The Text To date the discussion has revolved solely around the visual information conveyed by the portrait. The rest of the information it contains, above all in the form of handwrit­ ten and printed text on the back, has never been questioned and accordingly never been made a topic of discussion. It was Jonkov who first drew attention to the back of the photo when he cited its author, time and place of origin, and dimensions:

18 Ibid. 19 Popov 1976, p. 11. 20 Ibid., p. 12. 21 Zagorov 1899, p. 4.

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In this portrait measuring 6.5 × 10 cm, Benkovski was photographed by the famous photographer Pascal Sebah of Istanbul. […] The style, the cardboard on which the photo is mounted, and the hand­ writing all point to the portrait’s dating to before 1870. Or, more precisely, 1868 can be considered the verified year of origin, as there is a dedication on the back that was written in pen and black ink.22

Popov’s article likewise contains information on the provenance, which – very pro­b­ ably taken from Jonkov’s article – he presents as being absolutely certain.

Fig. 3: Pascal Sebah: Anonymous photo prtrait of an Ottoman intellectual. Album print, calling card format, back, Istanbul after 1874. Mounting board: 6.3 × 9.6 cm. Photo archive of the Cyril and Methodius National Libary, Sofia, call no. C 507.

It can indeed be gathered from the information on the back that the portrait was taken in the studio of Pascal Sebah, one of the most famous photographers of his time in the Ottoman capital (fig. 3). Sebah worked for several sultans, among them Abdul Hamid II, who was himself known as an amateur photographer and as one of the great­ est promoters of photography in 19th century. The portrait print measures 5.3 by 9.4 cm, the cardboard backing 6.3 by 9.6 cm. As was usual for carte de visite photos, the back of the photo – which also served as an advertising medium for the photo studio – con­ tains information about Sebah’s establishment. In addition to this information, which will be discussed in detail below, the back contains the stamps of the photo archive,

22 Jonkov 1956, p. 3.

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applied later, and numerous handwritten memos by archivists. Undoubtedly the most important of the latter, and presumably for that reason the only one to be mentioned in the discussion, is Benkovski’s handwritten dedication. The usual text encountered on such portraits, it reads as follows: “I give my portrait to my friend [name illegible]. Carigrad [Istanbul], 19 May 1868, Gavril Hlatev.” The photo, in other words, is a classi­ cal photo portrait in carte de visite format dating from the second half of the nineteenth century, originating in Istanbul in the studio of Pascal Sebah in 1868, and was given – or at least intended – as a gift to a friend whose name is not known. At first sight, this information seems to make sense. It also seems logical in view of Benkovski’s biography, even if the latter is shrouded in mystery up until 1875 – the year of his emigration to Romania and one year before his death – since everything known about it is based on hypothesis and information conveyed by word of mouth. Or, as the most important chronicler of the April Uprising of 1876 and Benkovski com­ panion Zahari Stoyanov writes, “Georgi Benkovski emigrated to Romania, known to nobody until that time.”23 Not even his date of birth has come down to us. Born in Koprivshtica (present-day Bulgaria), presumably between 1841 and 1844, Benkovski is thought to have attended school for three years before departing for Asia Minor at the age of about sixteen. In the Anatolian cities of Denizli, Uşak, Aydin, Eski Şehir and Istanbul, he was allegedly active as a tradesman until 1875.24 He verifiably visited the Ottoman capital again in the autumn of 1875 with a group of Bulgarian mi­grants from Romania, with the aim of setting fires at strategic locations in the city – an undertaking which, as we know, failed, not least thanks to good work on the part of the Ottoman police. This stay in Istanbul also marks Benkovski’s last meeting with his nephew, Michail Madzharov, who was attending the prestigious Robert College at the time, and who would later write in his Memories that the portrait was not of Benkovski. The dedication on the back of the photo indicates that Benkovski must already have visited the Ottoman capital in 1868, and had himself been photographed by Pascal Sebah. Apart from Istanbul, Eski Şehir is the only city in which Benkovski – according to the evidence – lived or sojourned before going into exile in Romania. The same applies to the dates of his travels. Until his emigration in 1875, we are informed only of two dates on which Benkovski spent time outside his native Koprivshtica – 1866 in Eski Şehir, where he was the business partner of a certain Hrelkov, whose wife would later supply the photo, and 1868 in Istanbul. Apart from the photo, two written documents relating to Benkovski and providing information about his stays abroad

23 Stoyanov 1933, p. 188. 24 Benkovski’s biography is based primarily on information passed down orally. Apart from the two documents cited below and a small number of official Ottoman police documents which, in keeping with their function, contain precise descriptions of the wanted man’s outward appearance, there are no written sources whatsoever. The biographical information cited here was drawn from one of the few relatively straightforward descriptions of Benkovski’s life: Strashimirov 1907, vol. 1, pp. 235ff.

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have come down to us. The first is a credit token for eight Turkish lira, which Ben­ kovski received from his uncle, Michail Madzharov’s father, and which he signed in Koprivshtica in 1866, apparently right before leaving for Asia Minor to seek his fortune as a merchant. The second is a letter from Benkovski to his creditor, written in the Anatolian city of Eski Şehir and likewise dating from 1866. In it he writes that he will not be able to pay the loan back that year because he has not yet earned enough money. Kamenova publishes a facsimile of the credit token in her article, commenting that we thus finally have at our disposal a document bearing Benkovski’s handwrit­ ing and signature (fig. 4).

Fig. 4: Credit token in the name of Gavril Grujov (Georgi Benkovski), issued in Koprivshtica, August 1866. Photomechanical reproduction from: Anna Kamenova, “Obrazat na Benkovski,” in: Literaturen front, 18, 3 May 1956.

A comparison of the handwriting on the photo and that on the credit token, however, reveals great stylistic differences. Whereas the credit token exhibits a neat, even, almost elegant handwriting style, the dedication on the photo was undoubtedly set down by a different, less practised, and very uneven hand. The latter corresponds to the description of Benkovski’s handwriting by Michail Madzharov, according to whom his uncle “could speak incomparably better than he could write; his writing was irregular and he made a lot of grammar mistakes.”25 It is very likely that it was not Benkovski himself but someone else who wrote and signed the credit token, presu­m­ ably because this other person had better handwriting.

25 Madzharov 1968, p. 308.

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The Front In this context there arises another question of no less importance for the identifica­ tion of the person in the photo. It is related to the attribute demonstratively displayed hanging from the sash around the subject’s waist – a divit. The latter was a kind of pen case with two compartments, one for a pen and one for ink. In the Ottoman cul­ tural world, the members (mostly male) of the educated class always wore the divit conspicuously on their belts, not only as a working utensil kept always close at hand, but also as a symbol of intellectual activity, education and mastery of calligraphy. A large number of portraits of educated Ottomans depicted with divits on their belts have come down to us. Our portrait obviously adheres to this iconographic tradition, its subject having presumably attached high importance to being shown as a member of the educated class, or, in other words, as an intellectual. This observation, however, is diametrically opposed to the image of the national hero that we have from written sources, and to which his contemporaries testified in many cases. Here we will confine ourselves to a few examples from Zahari Stoyanov’s Chronicle, which indicates that Benkovski at no time considered himself an intellec­ tual, but on the contrary had a strong aversion to educated people: “I am glad”  – Stoyanov quotes the words spoken by his comrade-in-arms Benkovski at their first meeting – “that there are no grammars or commas roving about in your [Stoyanov’s] head.”26 There is also the story of the conflict between Benkovski and the head of the Revolutionary Committee, Panayot Volov, arising from Benkovski’s avowed antipa­ thy towards the educated Volov: “Volov bungled everything with his grammar – Ben­ kovski cried, beside himself, after receiving a letter full of poetry.” And: “Benkovski hated all more or less educated people, but first and foremost Volov.”27 A final quo­ tation from Stoyanov suffices to attest Benkovski’s attitude towards education and well-formed handwriting: It was Volov and Bobekov whom Benkovski attacked most frequently – the former was a grammar school pupil in Russia, the latter at the Istanbul School of Medicine. He called them grammar­ ians and philosophers and told them openly to their faces that grammar and gunpowder had nothing in common. To express his distaste for this class of people, he ignored all letters that had been written in calligraphic handwriting.28

These written descriptions and the photograph’s visual message are completely at odds with one another. It seems highly unlikely that a person who abhorred beautiful handwriting should have himself portrayed with the quintessential attribute of calli­ graphy, the divit. Yet even if we were to assume that Benkovski may have ­cherished

26 Stoyanov 1933, p. 244. 27 Ibid., p. 259. 28 Ibid, p. 264.

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intellectual ambitions in 1868, when the photo was dedicated, and even if the irre­ concilability of the rather clumsy writing on the back of the photo and the divit as a symbol on the front does not provide us with a reliable basis for an answer to our question, there is another much more significant problem, one resulting not so much from the handwriting style but from the date of the dedication and the dating of the photograph. On the basis of the dedication, it is unanimously assumed that the pho­ tograph was taken in 1868, leading in turn to the conclusion that 1868 was the year in which Benkovski first visited Istanbul for the first time. According to Dimitar Stra­ shimirov, however, who, as already mentioned, was the first to publish the photo, “the portrait of Benkovski dates from the year 1862 and was made in Istanbul.”29 If Strashimirov is correct, the photo was not taken in 1868, as suggested by the dedica­ tion, but six years earlier, in 1862.

The Back Whether the date in Strashimirov’s book is a misprint that turned “1868” into “1862,” or whether in 1907, the year the book was published, the portrait still bore no dedication certifying the photo’s date, is an important question hitherto not raised in the discussion. It had, however, been alluded to. “Even if we were to ques­ tion the authenticity of the dedication” – Hristo Jonkov writes – “there is no reason to doubt this youthful portrait of Benkovski.”30 Unfortunately, Jonkov does not explain why he doubts the authenticity of the dedication, but whatever the reason, it was very probably what led him to set the date of the portrait rather vaguely at “before 1870.”31 The reasons for Jonkov’s doubts can be clarified solely with the aid of the adver­ tising information on the back of the picture, and thus with the aid of information about the photographer Pascal Sebah’s studio. Sebah opened his studio in Tom-Tom Street in Istanbul in 1857, “opposite the Austrian postal station,” and moved to a loca­ tion in the capital’s most prominent street, the Grande Rue de Pera (number 439), next to the Russian embassy, in around 1868. This we know from the addresses found on the mounts Sebah used for his portrait photos. In 1873, having come to great fame not only in the Ottoman Empire  – after all, he worked for the sultan  – but also in Europe and the United States, Sebah opened a branch in Cairo.32 He was awarded a number of distinctions, for example at the photo exhibitions in Paris and the world

29 Strashimirov 1907, p. 236. 30 Jonkov 1956, p. 3. 31 Ibid. 32 On the life and work of Pascal Sebah, see for example Öztuncay 2003, pp. 259–81; Çizgen 1995, pp. 78–89. On his role as court photographer and the historical context, see Baleva 2012a, pp. 273–94.

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Fig. 5: Pascal Sebah: Photo portrait of Milan Todor[ov]. Albumen print, calling card format, back, Istanbul 18 April 1869. Mounting board: 6.6 × 10.3 cm. Photo archive of the Cyril and Methodius National Library, Sofia, call no. С 1628.

fairs in Vienna and Philadelphia, as well as the highest distinction of the empire, the Order of Osmanieh, presented to him by Sultan Abdülaziz in 1874. This information is important for answering the question whether or not the portrait is of Benkovski. In fact, it is the only means of arriving at a definitive answer. In the nineteenth century, distinctions in the form of medals and deeds not only brought honour and fame to any commercial photo studio, but were also important for advertising. Every distinction, whether a medal or a certificate, was reproduced on the back of the photo mounts shortly after its presentation, thus increasing the pres­ tige not only of the photographer, but also of the people that he photographed. The more distinctions a studio had received, the more expensive it was, the wealthier the customers who had themselves were being portrayed there and – most importantly for the historian – the more precisely can its production be dated. In the case of Sebah, we are very fortunate in this respect, because from 1870 until his death he received a distinction every two years on average, and the distinction always appeared on the backs of the cardboard mounts a short time later. Before Sebah received his first dis­ tinction in 1870 at the exhibition of the Société française de photographie in Paris, the mounts were white with nothing but the address of the studio printed on them in black. The photographic likeness of Milan Todorov, produced when he was studying in Istanbul, signed by him personally, and dating with all certainty from the year

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Fig. 6: Bronze medal of the Société française de photographie, engraved with the name Pascal Sebah, 1870, Paris, design: Eugène-André Oudiné, 1866, Pierre de Gigord Collection. Photomechanical reproduction from: Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople. Pioneers, Studios and Artists from 19th-Century Istanbul, Istanbul 2003, vol. 1, p. 266.

1869, was taken by Pascal Sebah (fig. 5).33 All that appears on the back of the mount is the address of the studio in Latin letters, and an advertising slogan in Arabic with the usual rhetoric of early photographic studios. Other well-preserved and unequivocally dated calling card portraits of the 1860s by Sebah feature similar mounts. The portrait of Benkovski, on the other hand, which on the basis of the findings discussed so far would have to date from between 1862 and 1868, is mounted on a backing of an entirely different design. It is yellowish in colour and the informa­ tion about the studio now appears in red. These are the colours Sebah would retain until the end of his life. What is more, the mount now not only features the name and address of the studio, but also two medals, reproduced in the most conspicuous place, the centre. The medal on the left is from the Paris exhibition and bears the clearly discernible date 1870 in Roman numerals as well as the name of the prize’s recipient, Sebah (fig. 6). The photographer received the one on the right at the world fair in Vienna for his album containing photos of all of the peoples living in the Ottoman Empire, a volume that was already very famous at the time.34 The fair took place in 1873, and by 1874 the Viennese medal was to be found on the Sebah photo mounts (fig. 7).

33 The well-preserved original is located in the Cyril and Methodius National Library in Sofia, call number C 1628. 34 The volume, entitled Les costumes populaires de la Turquie en 1873 and illustrated with seventyfour phototypes, was published in Istanbul in 1873 for the Vienna World Fair by, among others, the most prominent Ottoman painter of the time, Osman Hamdi Bey.

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Fig. 7: Medal of Progress awarded at the Viennese World Fair of 1873, design: Josef Tautenhayn, c. 1873. Photomechanical reproduction from: Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople. Pioneers, Studios and Artists from 19th-Century Istanbul, Istanbul 2003, vol. 1, p. 268.

This finding permits us to raise justifiable doubts about the dating of the photo, hitherto considered accurate. Among other things, it poses the question as to why a mount dating from 1874 could have been used for a photo taken in 1868. Older mounts are known to have been used by such photo studios, including Sebah’s, for photo­ graphs of later dates. However, we have never yet encountered the reverse instance, i.e. the use of a new mount for a photograph of an earlier date. Yet even if we were to assume that the subject of the photograph really is Benkovski – who, however, to judge from all of the findings gathered here could not have had himself photographed before 1874 – it would hardly make sense for him to have predated a portrait intend­ed for a friend by six years. We must concede that there is no logical explanation for such an inscription. On the contrary, it is to be assumed that the photographic por­ trait of an anonymous and presumably well-educated young man only received its inscription at a later date as a means of awarding the unknown Ottoman intellectual on the photo the identity of the well-known Bulgarian revolutionary as desired and undisput­ed by Bulgarian historiography.

Conclusion In view of all of the arguments and facts cited here, the photo portrait is presumably not a portrait of Benkovski. The only means of identifying the national hero in this photographic likeness is by adhering to the historiographic methods and intentions exposed here with the aid of source-critical pictorial analysis. If we were to follow this historiographic example, it would be entirely conceivable that the photograph actually

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was taken on one of those fateful days in the autumn of 1875 when Benkovski is known to have set out for Istanbul with a small group of Bulgarian emigrants to set fires at certain strategic locations in the city. As we know from the memories of his comrades likewise involved in the undertaking, but also from the Ottoman files on the case, the plot was detected by the Ottoman police at an early stage and nipped in the bud. Ben­ kovski, or Gavril Hlatev, who was in Istanbul illegally at the time, left the city rapidly with the identification card of a certain Polish emigrant by the name of Antoni Benkov­ ski. The Bulgarian emigrant adopted the Pole’s surname for his own, and within a few years it had become a symbol of Bulgarian bravery and willpower. Significantly, the national hero went down in history with this – and not his real – name. The bravery and willpower of Gavril Hlatev, alias Georgi Benkovski, today consti­ tute one of the undisputed historical truths of national historiography. These officially sanctioned qualities could readily deceive one into thinking  – and I here take the liberty of elaborating on the heroic story in the spirit of the national idea  – that a hero like Benkovski would by all means have been capable of making and keeping an appointment with the Ottoman court photographer, whose studio was located in the most well-known and safest street in town, while the police were hunting for the conspirator far and wide. Bravery and willpower, however, do not suffice to explain why the front of the photographic portrait shows an Ottoman intellectual. An analysis of Benkovski’s intellectual side – a side hitherto ignored by historiography – could accordingly be a project for future research. If the historians would have us accept this hitherto unknown characteristic of the national hero, however, they will have to present us with well-founded scholarly arguments – naturally, only in the event that they do not agree with the conclusion that the photographic portrait of the ‘Bulgarian national hero’ is a construct of the national archive that has never been anything but untenable.

Bibliography Baleva 2012: Martina Baleva, “Obrazat na Benkovski. V lice i v grab” [The portrait of Georgi Benkovski: front and back views], in: Kultura Weekly, 18 (2680), 11 May 2012, pp. 6–7. Baleva 2012a: Martina Baleva, “The Empire Strikes Back: Image Battles and Image Frontlines during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878,” in: Ethnologia Balkanica, 16, 2012, pp. 273–94. Bertillon 1895: Alphonse Bertillon, Das anthropometrische Signalement. Zweite vermehrte Auflage mit einem Album, ed. by Ernst von Sury, 2 vols., Bern et al. 1895. Çizgen 1995: Engin Çizgen, Photography in the Ottoman Empire. 1839–1919, Istanbul 1995. Hamdi Bey et al. 1873: Osman Hamdi Bey / Marie de Launay / Pascal Sebah, Les costumes populaires de la Turquie en 1873. Ouvrage publié sous le patronage de la Commission impériale ottomane pour l’Exposition universelle de Vienne (1873), Constantinople 1873. Jonkov 1956: Hristo Jonkov, “Za portreta na Benkovski” [On the portrait of Benkovski], in: Narodna mladezh, 180, 28 July 1956, p. 3. Kamenova 1956: Anna Kamenova, “Obrazat na Benkovski” [The portrait of Benkovski], in: Literaturen front, 18, 3 May 1956, front page.

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Madzharov 1968: Michail Madzharov, Spomeni [Memories], ed. by Vesselin Andreev, Sofia 1968. Öztuncay 2003: Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople. Pioneers, Studios and Artists from 19th Century, 2 vols., Istanbul 2003. Popov 1976: Zhechko Popov, “Istinski li e portretat na Benkovski?” [Is the portrait of Benkovski authentic?], in: Otečestvo, 4, 20 February 1976, pp. 10–12. Stoyanov 1933: Zahari Stoyanov, Zapiski po balgarskite vastaniya. Razkaz na ochevidci, 1870–1876 [Notes on the Bulgarian uprisings: told according to eyewitness accounts, 1870–1876], Sofia 1933. Strashimirov 1907: Dimitar Strashimirov, Istorija na Aprilskoto vazstanie [History of the April Uprising], 3 vols., Sofia 1907. Zagorov 1899: Petar Iv. Zagorov, Edno poseshtenie na istoricheskata Koprivshtica [A visit to the historical city of Koprivshtica], Sofia 1899.

John Mraz

Archives and Icons: Constructing Post-Revolutionary Identities in Mexico Images have been inextricably linked to Mexican ideas of nation, especially since the revolution of 1910–1920, the first major social uprising in the modern world to be extensively photographed and filmed. The extraordinary murals by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros that cover the walls of government buildings, are only the most apparent manifestation of imagery’s importance in con­ structing national identities. Films have also been an important element, for Mexico has produced the most prolific national cinema in the Spanish language. Further, the Mexican government invests substantially in photograph archives and conservation, in spite of being an underdeveloped, “Third World” country. In fact, photos have no doubt been a fundamental element to promote among the semi-literate public what the Nobel Prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa described as “the perfect dictatorship.”1 Those archives have been disseminated extensively through picture histories, historias gráficas, that began to be published in 1921, and of which at least ten large series have been produced; some have been republished as many as five times, and print runs have been as large as 100,000.2 There are hundreds of photographic archives in Mexico, but two massive image repositories are the cornerstone of the nation’s visual history: the Fototeca Nacional (of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia – INAH) and the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN). The Fototeca Nacional began with the Casasola Archive, formed by a family of photojournalists that produced many historias gráficas.3 At its core are the half a million negatives sold to the government by the Casasolas in 1976, although it also contains the photos of Nacho López, Tina Modotti, and many other photogra­ phers among its million (or so) images. The Archivo General de la Nación preserves many more images; the Hermanos Mayo archive alone numbers around five million negatives, and there are many other archives in AGN collections. In terms of identity construction, the two repositories have had somewhat different uses: the Fondo Casa­ sola of the Fototeca Nacional is widely known for its images of the Mexican Revolu­ tion (though its holdings include photos taken into the 1970s). The Fondo Hermanos

1 In a 1990 interview on Mexican television, Vargas Llosa declared that “Mexico is the perfect dic­ tatorship,” a reference to the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) which has largely ruled the nation since 1920 (albeit under different names). He was immediately hustled out of the country. 2 On these picture histories, see Mraz 2009, passim. 3 The Casasola archive is best known for the multi-volume series, which have been reprinted on dif­ ferent occasions; see Casasola 1960–1973 and Casasola 1962–1989.

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Mayo furnishes photos from 1939 to the 1980s, though other collections in the AGN incorporate images from the nineteenth century. The Mexican Revolution was one of the most photographed social uprisings in the world, and is one for which the most images are conserved.4 Some of the pho­ tographs made during the armed struggle have become icons with their reiterated appearances over time and in different places: on political banners, both oficialista and dissident;5 in the pages of picture histories, newspapers, illustrated magazines, books, comics, and broadsheets, national as well as international; on the walls of banks, restaurants, and government buildings; on t-shirts and coffee mugs and other items in common use, and in murals painted during the post-revolutionary efferve­ scence, as well as more recently. I find four of particular interest: Emiliano Zapata standing stolidly in charro apparel, a sash across his chest, with a carbine in one hand and the other hand on the hilt of his sword; “Adelita-the-soldadera” peering intensely from the train; Pancho Villa galloping toward the camera; and Villa lolling in the presidential chair next to Zapata. All these icons were formerly attributed to Agustín Víctor Casasola, but the stories of their authorship are much more revealing. Why these particular images have become icons – and not, for instance, photos of Francisco Madero (who led the 1911 rebellion against Porfirio Díaz’s 35-year dic­ tatorship) or Álvaro Obregón and Venustiano Carranza (the eventual winners)  – is complex. The icons are largely products of popular sentiment, a consensus among the rank and file (national and international) on the attraction of the referents themsel­ ves as historical actors, and hence as ocular spaces in their imagination that must be filled: the revolutionaries por excelencia, Villa and Zapata, and the massive (if largely unrecognized) participation of women. The incorporation of these images in forms of artistic expression, and their very attraction to their public, is also a result of their visual power: all pack an aesthetic punch. Three of them capture a sense of movement characteristic of modern photojournalism: “Adelita” seems to lean into the frame, straining to locate her loved one; Villa-the-centaur gallops toward the viewer, dust kicking up at his mount’s hooves; Villa-the-conqueror appears to squirm in delight on sitting in the presidential chair. The portrait of Zapata is carefully posed, but it would be a splendid picture even if it were of a regional chieftain whose name and exploits remained unknown. Within the visual historiography of the Mexican Revolu­ tion, these icons are symbols of popular struggle and of the presence of women.

4 See an earlier version of parts of this essay in Mraz 2012. 5 In Mexico, the party dictatorship has functioned by subsidizing the media and by working handin-hand with their wealthy owners. Hence, while there were and are ‘official’ publications, the real ideological cement has been provided by the ‘oficialista’ publications, which look neutral but were and are part of the State apparatus.

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Emiliano Zapata: Revolutionary Charro The picture of Emiliano Zapata in Cuernavaca, the capital of Morelos State, during May 1911 has become an international revolutionary icon (fig. 1). Although author­ ship of the image was initially claimed by the Casasolas, the caudillo’s suspicions of Agustín Víctor probably make that unlikely.6 More recently, it was argued that the photo was taken by Hugo Brehme, a German photographer who moved to Mexico in 1906.7 Then, Mayra Mendoza Avilés would seem to have established that it was not Brehme who made the famous portrait but another foreigner, an “F.M.”; whereas she felt it might be a Moray, or perhaps a McKay, Arturo Guevara believes that it was Fred Miller.8 Nonetheless, the plot thickens on discovering that another photo was taken at the same time in which Zapata is dressed in exactly the same clothing that he wears in the iconic image; it is signed by Walter P. Hadsell and F. Wray.9 As this instance demonstrates (and as I have argued in my study on the photography of the Mexican Revolution), a signature is by no means definitive in determining authorship, and I believe that the icon was made by Hugo Brehme, above all for its extraordinary quality. The fact that an outsider (whoever it was) could get close to the fearsome warrior rein­ forces the idea of Zapata’s concern for constructing his own image; he may have felt that someone from another country would be more neutral than the capital’s photo­ journalists, and that the image would also reach eyes outside Mexico.10 Zapata had little trust in the metropolitan press – and rightly so, considering the eventual use it made of this picture. The icon appeared in the press two years after it had been made, when it was a front-page illustration for the attack by the reactionary and oficialista newspaper El Imparcial on Zapata as the “Attila of the South.” The publication of the photo in the periodical may have been part of a campaign to discredit Madero, since Zapata was wearing emblems linked to that cause, the Maderista general’s sash and the crossed cartridge belts.11 However, if Maderista symbols could be targeted in April 1913, that was not the case when the photo was made, and research by Ariel Arnal has established that the image is of intriguing complexity and may represent a start­ lingly graphic depiction of triumph.12 Zapata is dressed with the sash and sword that

6 Agustín Víctor claimed authorship, at least implicitly, as early as in 1921, when he published the image in the Albúm histórico gráfico as if he had been the photographer; Casasola 1921. 7 See Ruiz 1995, p. 12. 8 Mendoza Avilés 2009, pp. 83–84; Guevara 2010. 9 Casasola 1994, p. 19. This photo is a useful comparison, because Zapata projects a much less digni­ fied and powerful presence. 10 Dennis Brehme believes that foreigners had an important advantage because the revolutionaries considered them neutral; Brehme 2004, p. 27. 11 Arnal 2011. 12 See Arnal 2010, pp. 80–91, and Arnal 1998, pp. 65–70.

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Fig. 1: Hugo Brehme: Emiliano Zapata with rifle, sash, and saber, Cuernavaca, May 1911. Digital copy from a glass plate negative. Inv. 63464, Fondo Casasola, SINAFO-Fototeca Nacional del INAH.

Manuel Asúnsolo had worn as a symbol of his status as the authority in Cuerna­ vaca. By putting them on, Zapata was evidently demonstrating the prerogative he had apparently acquired to determine who would govern the city and the state of Morelos. Zapata’s wearing of these emblems could also represent an attempt on his part to legitimate his movement. He and his campesinos were portrayed in the Mexico City press as cruel and ferocious savages, so Zapata may have been attempt­ ing to counteract that mindset, presenting himself as a professional soldier, with the rank of general, and thus a man deserving of Madero’s political recognition, which was vital at that moment. The classic image of Zapata has been reproduced many times since his death in 1919, usually as an illustration with a one-dimensionally positive connotation. One exception is its incorporation in a photo realized by photojournalist Elsa Medina, who integrated it into a photograph of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994) in such a way as to offer a dense reading, which is also a critique of the party dictatorship that has been a persistent legacy of the Revolution (fig. 2). Medina knows how to capture spontaneous action and, moreover, has the ability to provoke reactions in her subjects; Salinas was known among photojournalists to be particularly playful with them. The collaboration between Medina and Salinas produced an image in which he makes a grotesque gesture in front of a painting based on the icon, in the middle of a meeting that essentially eliminated with any further agrarian reform.

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Fig. 2: Elsa Medina: Presidente Carlos Salinas in a meeting with campesino organizations to reform Article 27 of the Constitution; presidential residence Los Pinos, Mexico City, 1991. Digital copy from a 35mm negative. Courtesy of Elsa Medina.

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Photography is always a dialectic between photographer and subject. As seen from Medina’s side of the camera, it is a penetrating critique of the use that the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) has made of the revolutionary heritage – incar­ nated in the gigantic portrait – that has served to legitimate its rule, but which it has not respected. This contradiction was particularly pronounced in the case of Salinas: according to Samuel Brunk, his “administration frequently employed the figure of Zapata, both visually and verbally, in pushing its reforms.”13 Although Medina pil­ loried Salinas, the image is also nonetheless an accurate representation of that president’s position in relation to the revolution: his neoliberalism broke fundamen­ tally with the ideology of a paternalistic ‘revolutionary nationalism’.

Adelita-the-Soldadera The image of the woman who grips the handrails of a train car, and leans forward to peer intently up the tracks, has been recruited to serve as the personification of the soldadera (camp follower) in the Mexican Revolution (fig. 3). The photograph was probably taken by Gerónimo Hernández in April of 1912, at the Buenavista station, where the woman was standing on the platform of a military train heading north to put down the rebellion of Pascual Orozco, who had risen against President Madero.14 Its iconic history began there on the front page of the Maderista newspaper Nueva Era, and from her first appearance the woman was designated a soldadera, because the cutline proclaimed, “I will defend my Juan.”15 The image disappeared for some thirty years until it reappeared in the Historia gráfica de la Revolución, published by Gustavo Casasola in 1942, where he affirmed, “This soldadera has seen all of Mexico, crossing from border to border.”16 In all its subsequent publications, the young woman has always been a camp follower, for example, on the cover of the book by Elena Ponia­ towska about those women.17 For one author she is “[t]he paradigmatic image of the soldadera, the Mexican soldier’s faithful companion,” and her picture has circulated throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia.18 Without identifications that ‘anchor’ photographs to their reality, their aesthetic force generates myths, decontextualized symbols that disfigure our understanding of the past. For example, the series Historia gráfica de México provided the following cutline for this image: “Adelita-the-soldadera, a photo taken by Agustín V. Casasola

13 Brunk 2008, p. 2. 14 See Morales 2006, pp. 68–75. As the photograph had been published in the first and all successive Casasola historias gráficas, authorship had been assigned by default to Agustín Víctor. 15 Nueva Era, 8 April 1912, front page. 16 Casasola 1942, p. 664. 17 Poniatowska 1999, cover. 18 Rodríguez Lapuente 1987, p. 74.

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Fig. 3: Gerónimo Hernández: Soldaderas (or food sellers or ?) on a train platform in the Buenavista station; Mexico City, April 1912. Digital copy from a glass plate negative. Inv. 5670, Fondo Casasola, SINAFO-Fototeca Nacional del INAH.

in 1910, which would very soon become one of the emblems of the revolution, just like the famous song with almost the same name, La Adelita.”19 This can only be described as a condensed comedy of errors. We now know that the photo was taken in 1912, but even without that information it should have been clear that the photo was not taken in 1910, because there were few troop movements in that year. We also know who the photographer was, and it was not Agustín Víctor; although the editors of Historia gráfica de México did not have that information, they could have assig­ ned authorship to the Casasola Archive. The idea that “it would very soon become one of the emblems of the revolution,” is simply not true, as it had been missing for thirty years until Gustavo Casasola rescued it. Finally, it appears to have been the very editors of Historia gráfica de México who named this woman “Adelita,” and this was

19 This was the caption used in the original fascicle, Aguilar Camín / Meyer 1987, pp. 100–101. In the series published the next year, the cutline was changed to read, “In the lens of Agustín V. Casasola, women were incorporated in the revolutionary disorder,” Aguilar Camín et al. 1988, vol. 7, pp. 100–101.

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almost certainly derived precisely from the corrido entitled La Adelita, the best-known of the songs celebrating soldaderas.20 The editors followed the usual practice of cropping the negative in which Adelita appears, removing the right half of the image. That part of the glass plate is broken in the original negative, but we can still see a group of women standing on the platform of the train car. When we ask who Adelita was, her location in the train may provide an important clue. Soldaderas of the rank and file usually traveled on top of, or under­ neath, the cars.21 The women who were inside the cars were probably the privileged followers of federal officers.22 In an early attempt to demystify the image and contex­ tualize it, I ventured the suggestion that “it is possible that they were prostitutes.”23 Miguel Ángel Morales was perhaps correct – if not terribly generous – in thinking my affirmation was “reckless and erroneous.”24 Nonetheless, one of the most interesting uses that have has been made of this image was in the posters that independent sex workers contributed to the celebration of the Grito de Independencia on 15 Septem­ ber 2008. At this point, I do not believe that the women were prostitutes or soldaderas but Mexico City food vendors who attended the soldiers before the train began its trip.25 Perhaps “Adelita” was eagerly searching for her son or little sister, who helped her to prepare and sell food. Or maybe she was following her Juan along revolutionary paths, as a soldadera who, like many in the north – where soldiers found themselves at great distances from their homes and without quartermaster corps –, lived from the soldiers’ pay (la soldada), fed them, cured their wounds, took care of their children, provided social lubrication and entertainment, and sometimes grabbed weapons to defend themselves.26 Analyzed as a whole, the image could contribute to our historical knowledge about life during the armed struggle, for it provides ‘leads’ about the living conditions of some women. The cropped version of “Adelita” only serves as another revolutio­ nary myth, because the vitality evinced by this woman makes her a repository for, and symbol of, the attributes of the legendary camp followers. A woman journalist described the Adelita legend as being the “feminine version of the Revolutionary

20 No reference is made to the name “Adelita” in any other historia gráfica, though this photo is inva­ riably reproduced. However, journalists had employed this name previously in referring to soldaderas, and coverage of Morales’s discovery makes it clear that it has stuck to this image: see Jiménez 2007, p. 4, and Haw 2007, p. 6. 21 Salas 1990, p. 43. 22 For the photo of a better-dressed woman serving alcohol to federal officers in a train car, see Jefes, heroes y caudillos, p. 47. 23 Mraz 2000, p. 213. 24 Morales 2006, p. 72. 25 This observation was made by Alfonso Morales. 26 See Cano 1997, p. 1358.

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hero,” in which women were portrayed as embodying “the attitude of indiscrimi­ nately following their men, whether they were right or not”; she asked whether it might not be preferable for women to develop their own criteria, thus “abolishing the ‘sublime’ concepts of Adelita and the soldadera, as well as the never sufficiently praised ‘values’ that are attributed to them.”27 In spite of the efforts to demystify this image, and the myth of the soldadera that it incarnates, new versions continue to pop up. I would bet that every researcher in Mexican photography has, at one time or another, heard of a little old lady living in a far-off and often inaccessible place who insists that she is “Adelita”; she offers as evidence a copy of the photo on her wall  – amplified, blurry, and over-contrasted from being re-photographed by the Bazaar Casasola. It is, in the end, an image with profound roots in the national consciousness, as can be seen in the photo by José Hernández-Claire, which he titles “The Look,” but which could be called “Adelita aged” (fig. 4).28

Fig. 4: José Hernández-Claire: La mirada (The Look). 1990. Digital copy from a 35 mm negative. Courtesy of José Hernández-Claire.

27 Alegría 1975, p. 34. 28 Hernández-Claire commented to me, “Obviously, I didn’t make the photo of the old lady thinking about the one from the revolution, but there are images that stay in your head without you being con­ scious of them,” personal communication, 2000.

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Villa Galloping Toward the Camera Miguel Ángel Berumen states categorically, “All the versions of the Villa myth can be related to the same photograph” – that of the centaur who seems to share his mount’s wildness (fig. 5).29 This icon was born thanks to the 1914 contract Villa signed with the Mutual Film Corporation that gave the motion picture conglomerate, in exchange for 25,000 dollars, the exclusive rights to film his battles and executions. John David­ son Wheelan took the picture as a publicity still for Mutual, while they were filming Villa and his troops prior to the Battle of Ojinaga in January 1914. At that moment, the caudillo was receiving support from the U.S. government and businessmen, who were impressed by the discipline he maintained over his forces; even the reactio­ nary periodicals of William Randolph Hearst backed him during this brief period. He was also the darling of leftists such as John Reed, for whom he was the personifica­ tion of the social revolution. Reed’s reports had won Villa the sympathy of President Woodrow Wilson and liberals; moreover, they “gave the revolutionary a legitimacy he had not possessed before.”30 Hence, he was shown in a positive light, and his natural charisma enabled him to project himself to U.S. audiences as a Robin Hood. The icon first appeared in a photo exhibition that accompanied the private showing of the premiere of the documentary on Villa made by the Mutual Film Cor­ poration, 22 January 1914.31 Shortly after that, it was published in the U.S. magazine Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, where they noted that “Pancho Villa has added a new laurel to his crown by taking cineastes under his protection and making them part of his army.”32 Other U.S. periodicals quickly followed. Collier’s published it two days after Leslie’s, and, in May, it appeared in Real Life, where the questions asked by the movie magazine indicated the ambivalence about the caudillo at that point: “Is Villa a bandit or soldier, a Jesse James or a George Washington, a Robin Hood or a Napoleon, a robber and a ruffian or a patriot and a hero?”33 The answer was provided by the company’s cinematographers: “Mutual cameramen, who have spent weeks in the field and who have come to know him well declare that he is a misunderstood and much maligned man.”34 As Villa began to lose battles to the Constitutionalists, w ­ ho were recognized by the U.S. as the legitimate government, he tightened the screws on U.S. interests. After his attack on Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916, his personage was relegated to that of a bandit and, rather than ambiguity, the ad that appeared in The Moving Picture

29 Berumen 2005, p. 55. 30 Katz 1998, p. 321. 31 Berumen 2005, p. 56. 32 Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, 5 February 1914. 33 Real Life, May of 1914. 34 Ibid.

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Fig. 5: John Davidson Wheelan: Pancho Villa on horseback, Las Mulas, January of 1914. Digital copy from a glass plate negative. Inv. 287647, Fondo Casasola, SINAFO-Fototeca Nacional del INAH.

World for the film, Villa – Dead or Alive, asserted that Woodrow Wilson had made the classical Western call to do away with brigands – dead or alive – and the public was convoked with nationalism: “See your flag cross the border to punish those who have insulted it.”35 Without doubt, this is the photograph that circulated the most during the revolu­ tion. The Illustrated London News was the publication that followed the U.S. periodi­ cals, publishing the photo in April 1914. The Germans were the next to print the icon, in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, during May 1914; the following month, it appeared in Le Miroir (Paris) as well as the Spanish periodical Mundo Gráfico (where it was credited to Hugelmann). It was not published in Mexico until Victoriano Huerta’s fall, when it appeared in La Semana Ilustrada, 21 July 1914. Despite the recognition that Villa received during a short period of the armed struggle, he was generally ignored (ninguneado) by the capital’s press and the government until the 1960s; one example of his exclusion might be the absence of this icon in the first version of the Historia

35 The Moving Picture World, April of 1916.

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gráfica de la Revolución, published in 1942.36 Gustavo Casasola did include it in the large, oficialista exposition, La historia gráfica de la Revolución, mounted in 1946, perhaps because Anita Brenner, always a sharp judge of the aesthetic, had placed it in The Wind that Swept Mexico.37 Today, you can acquire the image on a t-shirt at the Chihuahua city airport.

Villa and Zapata and the Presidential Chair Like the image of Villa on horseback, this icon has enjoyed both contemporary impor­ tance and historical transcendence. Friedrich Katz asserts that, “Villa jokingly sat down in the presidential chair for a moment, with Zapata at his side. A photographer recorded the scene, and the picture was soon disseminated worldwide, giving additional proof in the eyes of many observers that Villa had become the real strongman and ruler of Mexico.”38 José de la Colina testified: “Rarely has a photograph obtained such a parallel fixation in history and mythology.”39 Paco Ignacio Taibo II relates the icon to presiden­ tialism: “This photo contributed to the growth of the legend around ‘The presidential chair’. From that chair arises the referent that will accompany Mexicans during the next 100 years: the idea that the battle is for the chair, the image of the chair as the country’s center, as the cupola of the pyramid, as the center of power.”40 However, the icon of Villa in the presidential chair next to Zapata has the peculiarity of being depicted on three different photos made very near in time and space by three photographers. One photo was made by the experienced Antonio Garduño, a photographer who was known as “the master of the masters in photography” (fig. 6).41 According to the cutline in the magazine, Garduño’s image was “a special ‘pose’ for La Ilustra­ ción Semanal,” the place it appeared on 7 December 1914, one day after the event.42 Garduño’s treatment of the scene is in the style of studio photography. The subjects are very conscious of participating in a photograph: all are posing, and most look at the camera. After appearing in that periodical, Garduño’s photo was published in the first version of Historia gráfica de la Revolución in 1942 and, the following year, in Anita Brenner’s book.43 This version was also utilized by Arnold Belkin in his mural commissioned by the Museo Nacional de Historia, La llegada de los generales Zapata

36 On the ninguneo of Villa and his popular acceptance, see O’Malley 1986, pp. 95, 97, 111, 112. 37 See photos of the exhibit in del Castillo Troncoso 2010, p. 101; Brenner 1943, number 86. 38 Katz 1998, p. 437. Unfortunately, Katz does not document the international circulation of the icon, which would have given us some leads to follow. 39 De la Colina 2000, p. 12. 40 Taibo 2006, p. 454. 41 Larrain 1953, p. 63. 42 La Ilustración Semanal, 7 December 1914. 43 Casasola 1942, p. 875; Brenner 1943, number 108.

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y Villa al Palacio Nacional (“The arrival of generals Zapata and Villa at the National Palace,” 1979). More recently, the neo-Zapatista movement incorporated Garduño’s image in a poster, advertising their Convention of Aguascalientes in Chiapas in 1994: Zapata’s visage is replaced by that of Subcomandante Marcos, while the figure of Villa is supplanted by that of Superbarrio Gómez, formerly a professional wrestler and now an urban social activist, who appears in the wrestling outfit he wears in his public appearances.

Fig. 6: Antonio Garduño: Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata in the National Palace, 6 December 6, 1914. Digital copy from a glass plate negative. Inv. 33536, Fondo Casasola, SINAFO-Fototeca Nacional del INAH.

The other photos belong more to the genre of photojournalism. One was made by the dean of Mexico’s graphic reporters, Manuel Ramos; the author of the other may have been Agustín Víctor Casasola.44 These photos are more spontaneous shots, and most of the people are not looking at the camera: Villa and Zapata appear to be talking, while their followers gaze at the leaders. One or the other was first published in El Monitor, 7 December 1914, without commentary. However, El Pueblo in Veracruz (where Carranza’s forces held power) had something to say about Garduño’s photo when they published it on page three, perhaps because of the international noto­ riety it had acquired. The newspaper felt that to understand Villa, one would have to apply “the paleontology of the amoral,” because he was “a barbarian who defends his cavern.”45 The writer seemed to find inspiration in the photograph: The vanity of the primitive dominates Villa in the photo that accompanies these lines. You see a man that, with no premeditation but simply at the impulse of his instinctive passi­ ons, always desires to be first among those who are around him. He sits between Zapata and Urbina, in nothing less than the Presidential chair in the palace where the Supreme authority has been exercised by men made eminent by their virtue, talent, and valor, self-denial and

44 See the photo signed by Ramos in Berumen 2009, p. 364; see the other one – signed by Casasola – in Mraz 2012, p. 253. 45 Ortíz 1915, p. 3.

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even martyrdom. There is no gold, no happiness, no satisfaction on earth that Villa would change for this moment in which he finds himself in a situation that is the perfect antithe­ sis of that offered by the highest expression of virtue in the world: Christ nailed on Calvary, between two criminals. Villa, amoral, the bandit triumphant and smiling, sits between two brigands, amazed at a triumph that unites the three in the same second of arrogance.46

The photos were taken at the acme of the revolution, the day that 50,000 troops under Villa and Zapata made a triumphal entry into Mexico City, and paraded through the Zócalo (main plaza) for six hours. Villa came from Tacuba with the Divi­ sión del Norte, and Zapata from Xochimilco with the Ejército Libertador. Arriving at the National Palace, they went out on the presidential balcony to watch the event and receive ovations from the crowd. Gustavo Casasola remembered, “Since the parade of numerous contingents was long and tedious, at an opportune moment generals Villa and Zapata went inside, where Villa sat in the presidential chair.”47 Taibo recounts that an old Villista offered a different vision: “Villa said, ‘I’m going to be president for a bit,’ and sat in the chair.”48 The PRI attempted to incorporate the icon into Agustín Víctor Casasola’s myth in their panegyric on the photojournalist by narrating the following scene: Another anecdote that they tell about Casasola is when Villa arrived in Mexico City and sat in the presidential chair. Finding the room of the National Palace full of photographers, he directed himself to Agustín Casasola, and asked him, “So, have you been working hard?” Upon being told by Casasola that he had been, in fact, very busy, Villa directed himself to all present, saying, “Be very careful. We don’t want a bunch of dead photographers here.” In less than a cock’s crow, the room in the National Palace was completely empty.49

Although the story is part of PRI mythology and Casasola family lore, it is difficult to imagine that Villa would have been moved to address Agustín Víctor, who had been associated with El Imparcial, and must have represented the more conservative ele­ ments of the capital’s press corps. It is even more problematic to think of Villa threat­ ening wholesale the assembled journalists, given his consciousness of the power wielded by the media. Moreover, although I am no fan of psychological readings of photographs, there is no evidence in the images that Villa is somehow upset  – he seems to be enjoying his moment in the sun, smiling and relaxed, “as if he were the owner of the place, the lord of the castle.”50 The Hermanos Mayo are the most prolific collective of photojournalists in the history of Latin America, yet they have not been incorporated into the oficialista

46 Ibid. 47 Casasola 1960–1973, p. 941. 48 Taibo 2006, p. 452. 49 Agustín Víctor Casasola, p. 13. 50 De la Colina 2000, p. 12.

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identity as have the revolutionary icons.51 In fact, their archive of some five million negatives could well offer the possibility of constructing a different, perhaps dissi­ dent, identity. Since 1939, this collective of photojournalists has played a pivotal role in redefining Mexico’s graphic reportage, but their story began in a country about to explode into one of the modern world’s great conflagrations: the Spanish Civil War. There, on the eve of so many hopes and such disappointment, the Mayo Brot­ hers established their link with the underdogs that has lasted to the present day. The pseudonym Mayo, which the five ‘brothers’ – Francisco (Paco), Faustino, Julio, Cándido, and Pablo – have used is a nombre de guerra which reflects their commit­ ment to the working class; it also resulted from the difficulties that can accompany such an allegiance.52 On 13 June 1939, three of the Hermanos Mayo – Paco, Faustino, and Cándido – landed in Veracruz aboard the ship Sinaia. Establishing themselves in the New World, they quickly re-constituted their collective, Foto Hermanos Mayo. Since then they have worked for more than forty magazines and newspapers, including El popular, La prensa, Hoy, Mañana, Siempre!, Tiempo, Sucesos, Time and Life. More importantly, they have participated in the founding of magazines and newspapers that reflect their commitment to democratic forces in Mexico, from the short-lived Tricolor and Más to the venerable El día. Perhaps they can be considered the first ‘democratizing’ photojournalists in Mexico, a country where mass publications have historically been controlled by the government and the class interests of their owners.53 Clearly, the experiences they had in Europe were instrumental in providing them with a different perspective from their Mexican colleagues. The Soviet Revolution had an evident and overwhelming impact on Paco, the ideologue of the Mayo Brothers, and one imagines that the beginnings of critical photojournalism in Weimar Germany must have had its effect on him as well. Although there is no evidence of a Spanish movement equivalent to the proliferation of film and photo leagues in other countries – and both Julio and Faustino deny that it existed – the creation of these leftist cultural collectives did have some consequences. Cristina Zelich has written of Spanish photography that “[d]uring this period more than any other, photographs appeared [...] with a clear and obvious ideological basis

51 On the Hermanos Mayo, see Mraz / Vélez 1996. 52 In the course of its history, the collective has been made up of five men from two different families: Francisco (Paco) Souza Fernández (12 August 1912–26 September 1949), Cándido Souza Fernández (23 April 1922–11 November 1985), Julio Souza Fernández (18 October 1917), Faustino del Castillo Cu­ billo (8 October 1913–28 October 1996), and Pablo del Castillo Cubillo (6 June 1922). See Mraz 1992. 53 Tina Modotti was almost certainly the first critical photojournalist in Mexico, having published some ten photographs during the 1920s in El Machete, the newspaper of the Mexican Communist Party.

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(such as those produced by the Arbeiter Fotografie in Germany or later by the Film and Photo League in the United States).”54 Nonetheless, whatever the effects of other influences, their participation in the Spanish Civil War was unquestionably the pivotal factor in the Mayo’s development. It has been said that this war constituted the genesis of modern photojournalism – at least in Spain – in the sense of requiring graphic reporters to become participants, take sides, and enter into the very midst of the action.55 This idea was perhaps best condensed in the phrase of Robert Capa, the most famous of the Civil War photogra­ phers: “If your photos aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.”56 The insistence on “getting close enough” must be understood in terms of both political commitment and technological developments. The Mayo Brothers’ decision to fight on the side of the forces defending democracy in Spain placed them in a very different camp than the supposed objectivity – but de facto pro-official line – which had characterized prior Mexican photojournalism. For example, their political stance was far from the Positivist eulogies for Porfirian progress that were typical of Manuel Ramos, or the unconditional acceptance of the post-revolutionary rulers that can be seen in Enrique Díaz’s work.57 As a result of their experiences in Spain, the Her­ manos Mayos developed a different way of seeing and focusing on reality; they had something new to offer to Mexican photojournalism.

54 Zelich 1985, p. 161. 55 See Gómez Mompart 1990, p. 131. Gómez Mompart argues that the Spanish Civil War marks the be­ ginning of modern photojournalism in the world. Although he introduces a technical element in em­ phasizing the importance of the small-format camera, his position is based largely on the article of Furio Colombo (Colombo 1976), who affirms that, “The Civil War marks the birth of the visual communication of events” and, moreover, that the war is the beginning of a committed photojournalism where the sub­ jectivity of the ‘author’ is apparent. While the Colombo–Gómez Mompart argument is provocative, it does not fully encompass the various aspects which make up modern photojournalism. In my opinion, modern photojournalism is defined by several elements: the photographs are spontaneous rather than posed; they have been taken in the midst of action and with a small camera that makes the photographer less exposed to enemy fire; the imagery often contains movement within the frame, either because that actually occurred or because the photographer created it by moving the camera slightly or by leaving the diaphragm open longer than necessary; and the photojournalists are committed to one side rather than being neutral observers. Defined in these terms, it appears that the combat photography of Jimmy Hare may well mark the onset of modern photojournalism; he covered the Cuban–Spanish–American War (1898), the Russo-Japanese War (1905), and the Mexican Revolution (1911, 1914), utilizing a small camera of his own manufacture, was often in the middle of action, captured movement, and was com­ mitted to particular sides in those struggles. Also, the idea that committed photojournalism or the visual communications of events begins with the Spanish Civil War disregards the photography of the Mexican Revolution, as well as the work of such well-known photographers as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. On the participation of the Mayos in the Spanish Civil War, see García 1992, pp. 35–42, 65–76. 56 Whelan 1985, p. 211. 57 On Ramos, see Morales 2011; on Díaz, see Monroy Nasr 2003.

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How many of their photos documenting struggle and repression the Hermanos Mayo have been able to publish is yet to be established; given the number of newspa­ pers and magazines in which they have worked, such research would be long and difficult. However, their impact is undeniable, as can be seen in what is arguably their most powerful photo, that of a mother crying over the body of her dead son – a young student and member of the Communist Youth killed by an undercover policeman, Carlos Salazar Puebla, when he attempted to join the 1952 May Day March (fig. 7).58 The great muralist, David Alfaro Siqueiros, was so moved by the photo that he repro­ duced it in a mural.59 Its remarkable visual force notwithstanding, this photo never appeared in coverage of the event by the magazine Mañana. More ambiguous images taken by the Mayos were published, such as that of workers restraining the badlybeaten Salazar Puebla, who they hauled in front of the president, shouting, “Here is

Fig. 7: Julio Mayo: Mother grieving for dissident worker killed in May Day battle, Mexico City, May 1, 1952. Digital copy from a 35mm negative. Fondo Mayo, Chronological Section, 3959, Archivo General de la Nación.

58 Salazar Puebla was identified as the assassin by Rivera Ortiz 1997, pp. 53–64. 59 The mural where Siqueiros painted this image is in the Jorge Negrete Theatre. Siqueiros was com­ missioned to paint it by the National Union of Actors (ANDA) in 1959, but the mural provoked such controversy among the union members that he was not able to finish it, and it was covered by a wall. In 1966, the ANDA leader had the mural uncovered and Siqueiros completed it. See Rodríguez 1969, pp. 407–408, where photographs of the mural are reproduced in plates 221, 222, and 223; see a photo of Siqueiros painting the figures in Mraz / Vélez 2005, p. 37.

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your assassin, asshole.”60 However, the magazine transfigured this scene from one of worker solidarity into an anti-Communist lesson for critics of the party dictatorship: A group of senseless anti-patriotic provocateurs attempted to lessen the force of the Mexican workers’ formidable and vigorous unity with the Government of the Republic presided over by Miguel Alemán, causing fratricidal violence in a battle with the May Day parade marchers in front of [the Palacio de] Bellas Artes. This photograph of tremendous drama reveals the instant in which one of the communist pistoleros is detained by the inflamed multitude.61

The photo of the grieving mother, however, would not allow for the transformation of this image’s significance through a misleading cutline. It is too powerful and speaks too much for itself; for that reason, it could not be published; at any rate, it could not be included in the reportage on May Day 1952. However, with the passage of time, this photo could be recontextualized and, thus tamed, it appeared in a 1955 photo essay on the “Most Journalistic Mayo Photos.”62 There, the image was ripped out of its real matrix and, with a cynicism which relied on the ambiguity of even the most powerful photos, was assigned a fabricated significance, transforming an historical instance of the struggle against oficialista unionism into a timeless and recurrent phenomenon of daily life: Who is she? Who is he? Their simple names, from the pueblos, are condensed in this brief elo­ quence: mother and son. The mother destroyed by pain, the son taken by death. The scene: the Cruz Verde some day in 1950. Any day in which drama can occur. The moment which Julio Mayo etched cannot be more moving.63

Another contribution of the Mayo collective was perhaps more concrete: they intro­ duced Mexican photojournalists to Leica cameras, which they had bought in Spain and carried throughout the Civil War. Invented in Germany in 1924, the Leica was small and light, compared to the bulkier box cameras; it radically increased reporters’ mobility, allowing them to move about freely and get into the center of events without being too conspicuous. This was quite a different situation than that of having to stand in one spot, either weighed down by a heavy camera or even more inconveni­ enced by a tripod, and being immediately identifiable to the forces of repression. The technological innovation of the 35mm camera resulted in a new aesthetic of photo­ journalism, something apparent in images taken from within the very vortexes of struggles. The Mayo collective played essentially the same innovator’s role in Mexico

60 “Aqui está tu asesino, cabrón,” Rivera Ortiz 1997, p. 62. See the photo in Mraz / Vélez 2005, p. 38. 61 See Mañana, 10 May 1952, pp. 4a and 10a. 62 “13 instantáneas,” Mañana, 3 September 1955, p. 105. 63 I once questioned Julio Mayo about the manipulation of this image’s meaning. Although he is usu­ ally passionate and outspoken, he just shrugged and indicated that this was so common as to make commentary unnecessary.

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that other European emigrants – for example, Erich Salomon, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Capa – did in U.S. and British publications.64 Toward the end of the 1970s, the Mayos began to think about selling their archive and retiring.65 They were offered substantial sums from university archives in the United States, but wanted their images to stay in Mexico and, moreover, felt that they owed it to the country that had saved their lives. Then-president José López Portillo aped his predecessor, Luis Echeverría (who had bought the Casasola Archive), and purchased the Mayo archive in 1982, incorporating it into the AGN rather than the Fototeca Nacional. The Mayos thought they had their retirement assured, but one of the great economic crises in Mexican history took place in 1982, and by the time they were paid, the Mexican currency had been so devalued that their payment was worth very little.66 It is fortunate for Mexican researchers that the Mayo archive remained in their country, for it offers the possibility of constructing a critical visual history of the recent past. For example, the watershed event in modern Mexican history is the October 2nd massacre at the Tlatelolco Plaza that ended the 1968 student movement in a blood­ bath that still haunts the country. The cold-blooded execution of unarmed civilians had to be hidden from view, so government agents were sent to all the periodicals and agencies with orders to confiscate all images revealing the atrocities, as well as any that could be useful in identifying participants in the movement. The Mayo Brot­ hers were not exempt from this sweep, and many of their negatives of the Tlatelolco were seized. One of the surviving Mayo pictures offers an intriguing reflection on the history of Mexico. In a photo taken on October 3, we look down from an apartment (the Chihuahua building) high above the Tlatelolco Plaza, where, the night before, the greatest massacre of unarmed civilians in modern Mexico had taken place.67 However, the picture is not full of blood and bodies. In fact, no human figures appear: it is instead a metaphor for the role of violence in forging the nation. From the window onto the Tlatelolco, also known as the Plaza of Three Cultures, we see three distinct societies represented: the pyramids of the Aztecs, where they made their last stand against the Spanish conquest; the colonial church, religious arm of the often barba­ rous colonizing process; and the modern apartment buildings which surround the plaza, constructed as a sop for the working class. In the foreground, and framing the scene, we are confronted with the holes made by the soldiers’ bullets in the window through which we look, graphic evidence of the brutality unchained by the govern­ ment. In another photo taken that same day, Mayo visually asserted that the massacre would be a legacy for Mexicans yet unborn. A couple stands in front of a plate glass

64 On the European emigration and the introduction of the small-format camera, see Fulton 1988. 65 This paragraph is based on conversations with Julio Mayo. 66 Inflation reached such levels that it was necessary to take three zeros off the currency. 67 Mraz / Vélez 1996, p. 77.

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window perforated by bullet holes: they hold one another for comfort in the face of an incomprehensible horror.68 The woman is clearly pregnant and carries within her the seed of a Mexico that will always be marked by that moment in which the party dictatorship was capable of mortgaging the country’s future by killing younger gene­ rations in order to keep itself in power. Although Mayo photos of crucial social struggles provide important documen­ tation for visual historians to reconstruct those narratives, it is an almost certainly unpublished (until its appearance here) image of Mexico that could well be an icon of the present (fig. 8). Shot from an accentuated high-angle, a little girl dressed with the traditional rebozo sits upon the steps of the subway entrance, hoping to sell penny candies to passengers. She is trapped within the walls of concrete, just as she is trapped in a marginal existence from which she will almost certainly never escape, due to the massive unemployment and underemployment that puts children to work rather than in schools. In sum, the two enormous Mexican photographic archives would seem to provide distinct narratives of visual history and national identity. Certainly, the photos in the Fototeca Nacional – especially the revolutionary icons – have often been emplo­

Fig. 8: Hermanos Mayo: Young girl selling candies at subway entrance, Mexico City, c. 1960. Digital copy from a 35mm negative. Fondo Mayo, Imágenes de la ciudad, Archivo General de la Nación.

68 Mraz / Vélez 2005, p. 36.

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yed in historias gráficas with an oficialista approach. The Mayo archive in the AGN appears to offer other possibilities but, in fact, the collective photographed almost everything from newsworthy events to slices of everyday life. For example, the image of the little girl is found in a section of 500,000 negatives described only as “Imáge­ nes de la ciudad” (Images of the city), photographs that the Mayo took while going to and coming from assignments, when their autonomy as imagemakers placed them in the category of documentary photographers rather than graphic reporters.69 The idea that photographic archives have an inherent bias is an important consideration that I only began to think about after an exchange with Elizabeth Edwards at the 2011 confe­ rence.70 However, photographs are semantically weak: they are ambiguous slices and polysemic traces of the visible world that can be made to say almost anything – as the example of the Mayo photo of the grieving mother demonstrates. While it is important to know the biases of photo archives, I suspect that the contexts within which archival images circulate  – above all, when they come out of huge collections  – may be an even more crucial consideration.

Bibliography Aguilar Camín / Meyer 1987: Héctor Aguilar Camín / Lorenzo Meyer, Siglo XX, number 7, Mexico City 1987. Aguilar Camín et al. 1988: Héctor Aguilar Camín et al., Historia gráfica de México, 10 vols., Mexico City 1988. Agustín Víctor Casasola: Agustín Víctor Casasola, Mexico City 1988. Alegría 1975: Juana Armanda Alegría, “Pero, ¿existió La Adelita? Reconsideraciones del mito,” in: Siempre!, 26 February 1975, pp. 34–36. Arnal 1998: Ariel Arnal, “Construyendo símbolos – fotografía política en México: 1865–1911,” in: “Cultura visual en América Latina,” Special Issue, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 9 (1), 1998, pp. 55–73. Arnal 2010: Ariel Arnal, Atila de tinta y plata. Fotografía del zapatismo en la prensa de la ciudad de México entre 1910 y 1915, Mexico City 2010. Arnal 2011: Ariel Arnal, “El río que cambia,” unpublished manuscript, 2011.

69 I have reflected on the different genres of photojournalism in terms of a hierarchy of functions in relation to the autonomy and authorial control enjoyed as to the conception, realization, and editing (and ownership) of photographs and their uses to tell a story; Mraz 2003, pp. 16–21. I would argue that the order, from less control to greater autonomy, would be the following: press photographer, photo­ journalist, photo-essayist, documentary photographer. Hence, the role being played at the moment of the photographic act that would provide the most autonomy and control is that of documentary photographers, as the Mayo were in the sense that they owned their negatives and could explore their own interests. 70 In fact, I was so moved by our discussion to explore the question that I later did so in a conference presentation, “Bias in Some Photographic Archives of the Mexican Revolution,” at the 2013 meeting of the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies.

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Berumen 2005: Miguel Ángel Berumen, Pancho Villa: la construcción del mito, Mexico City / Ciudad Juárez 2005. Berumen 2009: Miguel Ángel Berumen (ed.), México: fotografía y revolución, Mexico City 2009. Brehme 2004: Dennis Brehme, “Hugo Brehme. Una vida entre la tradición y la modernidad,” in: Michael Nungesser (ed.), Hugo Brehme. Fotograf-Fotógrafo, Berlin 2004, pp. 13–27. Brenner 1943: Anita Brenner, The Wind that Swept Mexico: The History of the Mexican Revolution 1910–1942, New York (NY) 1943. Brunk 2008: Samuel Brunk, The Posthumous Career of Emiliano Zapata: Myth, Memory, and Mexico’s Twentieth Century, Austin (TX) 2008. Cano 1997: Gabriela Cano, “Soldaderas and Coronelas,” in: Michael S. Werner (ed.), Encyclopedia of Mexico: History, Society & Culture, Chicago (IL) 1997, pp. 1357–1360. Casasola 1921 : Agustín Víctor Casasola, Albúm histórico gráfico: contiene los principales sucesos acaecidos durante las épocas de Díaz, de la Barra, Madero, Huerta y Obregón, Mexico City 1921. Casasola 1942: Gustavo Casasola, Historia gráfica de la Revolución, 1900–1940, Mexico City 1942. Casasola 1960–1973: Gustavo Casasola, Historia gráfica de la Revolución Mexicana, 10 vols., Mexico City 1960–1973. Casasola 1962–1989: Gustavo Casasola, Seis siglos de historia gráfica en México, 14 vols., Mexico City 1962–1989. Casasola 1994: Gustavo Casasola, Hechos y hombres de México. Gral. Emiliano Zapata, Mexico City 1994. Colombo 1976: Furio Colombo, “Para la muestra fotográfica sobre la guerra de España,” in: Fotografía e información de guerra. España 1936–1939, Barcelona 1977, pp. 17–35. De la Colina 2000: José De la Colina,”Breve lectura de la fotografía ‘Villa en la silla presidencial,’” in: Alquimia, 9, 2000, pp. 12–13. Del Castillo Troncoso 2010: Alberto del Castillo Troncoso, Isidro Fabela. Una mirada en torno a la Revolución Mexicana, Mexico State 2010. Fulton 1988: Marianne Fulton, “Bearing Witness: The 1930s to the 1950s,” in: Eyes of Time: Photojournalism in America, New York (NY) 1988, pp. 105–172. García 1992: Manuel García (ed.), Foto Hnos Mayo, Valencia 1992. Gómez Mompart 1990: Josep Lluis Gómez Mompart, “El fotoperiodisme: l’origen de la comunicació visual de masses (1936–1939),” in: Anàlisi 13, 1990, pp. 130–138. Guevara 2010: Arturo Guevara Escobar, “En busca del fotógrafo de Zapata,” parts I, II, and III. [24.02.2014] Haw 2007: Dora Luz Haw, “Prueba que ‘Adelita’ no es de Casasola,” in: Reforma, 16 February 2007, Section Cultura, p. 6. Jefes, heroes y caudillos: Jefes, heroes y caudillos: Archivo Casasola, Mexico City 1986. Jiménez 2007: Arturo Jiménez, “Identifican al verdadero autor de la fotografía de la Adelita,” in: La Jornada, 16 February 2007, p. 4A. Katz 1998: Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa, Palo Alto (CA) 1998. Larrain 1953: Marcos G. Larrain, “Historia de la fotografía de prensa,” in: Mañana, 19 September 1953, pp. 57–70. Mendoza Avilés 2009: Mayra Mendoza Avilés, “El Zapata de Brehme: análisis de un caso,” in: Alquimia, 36, 2009, pp. 83–84. Monroy Nasr 2003: Rebeca Monroy Nasr, Historias para ver: Enrique Díaz, fotorreportero. Mexico City 2003. Morales 2006: Miguel Ángel Morales, “La celebre fotografía de Jerónimo Hernández,” in: Alquimia, 27, 2006, pp. 68–75.

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Morales 2011: Alfonso Morales Carrillo, Manuel Ramos. Fervores y epifanías en el México moderno, Mexico City 2011. Mraz 1992: John Mraz, “Close-up: An Interview with the Hermanos Mayo, Spanish-Mexican photojournalists (1930s–present),” in: Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, 11, 1992, pp. 195–218. Mraz 2000: John Mraz, “El Archivo Casasola: historia de un mito,” in: Jaime Bailón Corres / Carlos Martínez Assad / Pablo Serrano Álvarez (eds.), El siglo de la Revolución mexicana, vol. 2, Mexico City 2000, 207–214. Mraz 2003: John Mraz, Nacho López: Mexican Photographer, Minneapolis 2003. Mraz 2009: John Mraz, Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity, Durham (NC) 2009. Mraz 2012: John Mraz, Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments, Testimonies, Icons, Austin (TX) 2012. Mraz / Vélez 1996: John Mraz / Jaime Vélez Storey, Uprooted: Braceros in the Hermanos Mayo Lens, Houston (TX) 1996. Mraz / Vélez 2005: John Mraz / Jaime Vélez Storey, Trasterrados: braceros vistos por los Hermanos Mayo, Mexico City 2005. O’Malley 1986: Ilene O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution: Hero Cults and the Institutionalization of the Mexican State, 1920–1940, New York (NY) 1986. Ortíz 1915: José Ortíz, “Villa jugando a la presidencia,” in: El Pueblo, 14 March 1915, p. 3. Poniatowska 1999: Elena Poniatowska, Las soldaderas, Mexico City 1999. Rivera Ortiz 2003: Mario Rivera Ortiz, Columnas contra cordones: 1º de mayo de 1952, Mexico City 1997. Rodríguez 1969: Antonio Rodríguez, A History of Mexican Mural Paintings, London 1969. Rodríguez Lapuente 1987: Manuel Rodríguez Lapuente, Breve historia gráfica de la Revolución Mexicana, Mexico City 1987. Ruiz 1995: Blanca Ruiz, “Brehme, autor del Zapata de Casasola,” in: Reforma, 4 October 1995, p. 12. Salas 1990: Elizabeth Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History, Austin (TX) 1990. Taibo 2006: Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Pancho Villa, una biografía narrativa, Mexico City 2006. Whelan 1985: Richard Whelan, Robert Capa: A Biography, New York (NY) 1985. Zelich 1985: Cristina Zelich, “Portraiture, Social Documentation and Photojournalism,” in: Ideas & Chaos: Trends in Spanish Photography, 1920–1945, Madrid 1985, pp. 161–162.

Photo Archives as Construction

Holly Edwards

“You need not take a camel …”: The Archive of the Afghan Tourist Organization Imagine the archive of the Afghan Tourist Organization in the 1970s. A collection of brochures, guidebooks, glossy calendars and other publications, much of it funded by the Civil Aviation and Tourism Authority, this assemblage would reflect the visua­ lized aspirations of a young nation as global culture was metastasizing by image. Pho­ tographs were chosen to present the country in transnationally legible terms, even as they encapsulated that which was local, particular, or peculiar about the extra­ ordinary history, natural beauty and cultural diversity of this Central Asian state. Such an archive would document Afghanistan’s overt engagement with the burgeo­ ning culture of tourism, an enterprising agenda of self-fashioning. That archive may or may not exist anywhere in totality, but a handful of its remnants in a private collection is enough to explore the poignant sedimentations of Afghanistan’s past. That these materials warrant study is prompted by what one colorful brochure (fig.  1) claims to offer: “comprehensive tourist information on Afghanistan to the travelling public and agents alike,” couched with the assurance that “you need not take a camel” to see the sights (fig. 2). Indeed, there are plentiful pictures included, advertising diverse excursion tours, hotel accommodations, handi­ crafts, shopping and food experiences. While the encoded ‘image’ of Afghanistan will be addressed below, it is worthwhile acknowledging at the outset that the ‘truth’ (the perennially cited power associated with the medium itself) of these photographs is complex, and even dissonant with contemporary experience. Afghan visual culture of the 20th century, after all, is bookended by episodes of considerable resistance to image-making  – in the 1920s when King Amanullah and Queen Soraya challenged traditional canons of visual propriety,1 and, decades later, under the Taliban. Within this parenthetical envelope, however, a high point of engagement with transnational modes of visuality was reached under the auspices of the Afghan Tourist Organization during a single decade that encompassed momentous changes: Daoud Khan’s over­ throw of King Zahir Shah in 1973 and his declaration of a democratic state inaugura­ ted a short-lived era of independent republican aspiration. By the end of the 1970s, however, internal conflicts and Cold War rivalries were leading the country towards civil war, and ultimately to Taliban power. Even this minimal political contextualization dramatizes the archive’s overall importance as an index of nationhood and self-fashioning, but consideration of individual images therein also point to morphing canons of visual propriety. Particu­ larly noteworthy in this fragmentary archive are photos conjoining heritage sites

1 Edwards 2006.

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Fig. 1: Brochure cover, Afghanistan Tourist Information, produced by Civil Aviation and Tourism Authority, Kabul, 1977. Private collection.

Fig. 2: Overleaf, Afghanistan Tourist Information, produced by Civil Aviation and Tourism Authority, Kabul, 1977. Private collection.

and women dressed in “ethnic costume.” Such promotional choices demonstrate a willingness to deploy pictures, monuments and people as flattering attributes of a nation desirous of a credible and distinct identity in the global arena. Emblematic of this marketing campaign is the prominent exhibition of Bamiyan, a telling foil for sustained controversies surrounding the monuments that the Taliban destroyed in 2001. Clearly, there are many issues encoded in these materials; my intention here is simply to explore how the nascent republic of Afghanistan represented itself to outside audiences. I begin by positioning this vestigial archive in a larger category of images that document, manifest, translate or traverse the spaces between cultures towards diverse ends. Of course, all images are mundanely mobile in the digital age, but in earlier phases of photography’s history, some were fundamentally imbricated (or intentionally deployed) in the interstices between societies. This imagined category – capacious, variegated and endlessly morphing  – would include colonial ethnogra­

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phies, myriad forms of photojournalism, documentation of diplomatic missions, and many other visual manifestations of escalating globalization. Such materials epito­ mize and capitalize on the seemingly universal legibility of photographs, irrespective of the diverse and even conflicting meanings that might be attributed to them among different or localized audiences. For those who seek to use photography proactively in the spaces between cultures, fluency in that visual lingua franca is critical. Images in the service of the tourism industry, in particular, must speak across cultural diffe­ rence in order to be invitationally effective. In general, Afghanistan offers a relatively bounded narrative of self-fashioning by image, initially undertaken at a geographical and political distance from major centers of transnational power. Because the twentieth-century was also punctuated periodically by changes in government, the Afghan archive can serve as a useful point of reference for seemingly, or even radically, disparate issues. Elsewhere I have traced the arc and stakes of image-making (no image, image, not image) that transpired in the first three decades of the twentieth century for Afghanistan, a storyline that resonates with larger questions about monotheistic visualities.2 That same era also affords insight into the multi-valent connotations that individual images carry as they traverse the boundaries between different centers of political and cultural gravity – contemporaneous British, Turkish and Afghan readings of the same photographs sustain quite disparate interpretations. In these instances, peripatetic photographs effectively convene new communities, serving as hubs of meaning-making and reco­ gnition among people who may be separated by distance or cultural difference. Such are the processes of visual globalization transpiring over space and time, entailing thorny questions about self / other, individual / community, and culture / nation.3 For present purposes, materials conceived to lure visitors to Afghanistan from elsewhere, guide them during their stay, or remind them of their experiences after they have left are obviously useful for the burgeoning discipline of tourism studies, but they also shed light on the theorization of nationhood and other issues. In effect, these materials are the photo-ops and sound-bites by which countries create and project themselves to outside audiences, and their synoptic character demands the close-reading undertaken below. By way of preface, however, some of the strategies and challenges that are common to the tourism industries more generally deserve comment (I reserve for later some culturally specific notions of ‘heritage’). Promo­ tional campaigns aimed at curious and enterprising travelers are often predicated on a reverence for the past (a kind of intentional nostalgia) and / or preservation of the exotic – the peculiarities of a distinctive locale. In order to package a particular culture effectively, however, the entrepreneur must broaden horizons and expand understanding in manageable increments. Cultural difference, after all, is intriguing

2 Ibid. 3 Edwards 2013.

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for newcomers, and invites further exploration; culture shock, on the other hand, borne of unmediated or radical difference, may be seriously counterproductive, and deter sustained engagement. Facing these realities, a nation’s tourism industry may be prone to self-orientalizing as it contrives a saleable ‘image’ with reference to the expectations and comfort levels of others.4 In the case of Afghanistan, an iconic animal such as the camel, for example, might be leveraged to grant touristic access to a simpler past and / or a more colorful present, but balancing tourists’ tastes and authenticity is problematic. Afghantour’s invitation to ride the bus instead of the beast (you can see camels here, but you need not ride them if you don’t want to!) left room for the traveler of the 1970s to choose, but it also truncated and even implicitly demeaned indigenous lifestyles. What responses this brochure may have genera­ ted in the moment is not my point, however; indeed, the line between exotic experience and reductionist caricature may be a matter of individual perspective, socio-cultural predispo­ sition or even diachronic distance. Consider, for example, the Mobius-strip of expectations and ruminations among twenty-first-century Afghan communities – thinking backwards to mid-century and then forwards, to a once-imagined future for Afghanistan where tourists were numerous and profits plentiful. That particular future and that projected ‘nation’ have never come to pass. Later in this paper, I will consider some of the implications of such a retrospect, but first, I will interrogate a few of these artifacts in greater detail. My hope in so doing is to explore the aesthetics and agency of tourist publications in the spaces between nations, with reference to both content and intent. My argument begins with the acknowledgement that there were some antecedents to the full-fledged tourism industry in Afghanistan, though they served different political agendas. In this admittedly ephemeral category I would include, for example, a glossy magazine pub­ lished by the Government Printing Press in Kabul in 1961, Afghanistan.5 It offers “A picto­ rial representation of Afghanistan’s developments in educational, technical, industrial and social fields” and the language is English. These terms of nation-building were congruent with promotional campaigns elsewhere that foregrounded advances in industry, education and airlines on behalf of mid-century modernizers as the Cold War escalated. This magazine is itself an archive in miniature, replete with claims to national enter­ prise and legitimacy asserted forcefully with photographs accompanied by short laudatory paragraphs. The majority of images are black and white and they document diverse sites of self-congratulation  – teachers, students, highways, airlines and newsworthy events; notably, three full pages are dedicated to “Women and Work.” While the layout deploys blocks of color to silhouette these pictures and enliven individual pages, there are few full color reproductions. These are strategically placed: the front cover is a dramatic landscape image, while the back cover is graced with two women in knee-length dresses, captioned thus: “The beautiful products of high-quality cloth made at the Gulbahar mills of the Afghan

4 See Yan / Santos 2009. 5 Edwards 2014, fig. 4.

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Textile Co, has nation-wide admirers. (Advertisement).” In the body of the magazine, images of “Beautiful Paghman,” the valley of Istalif, the Blue Mosque of Mazar, and Darra (“a highly sought after picnic area”) are reproduced in color. A detailed analysis of the images and ideology of this Soviet-influenced publica­ tion are beyond the scope of this article, but some general – perhaps self-evident – observations are warranted. The visual presentation is necessarily reductionist; the conjunction of synoptic image with brief caption was the morphemic unit around which the whole publication was conceived. Each page is vivid, self-contained and immediately legible. Beyond that, a few key themes comprise the bulk of imagery – beautiful countryside, local crafts and women. There were clearly no qualms about the visibility of women, or the promotional potential of such pictures in the wider world. Finally, entrepreneurial strategies are a relatively innocent preamble to more coy mar­ keting strategies of the future. The back cover ‘advertisement’ claiming “nation-wide admirers” of Gulbahar cloth entices primarily by comparatively rich color rather than deftly wrought prose. While such strategies seem bluntly wielded in 1961, production values and rhe­ torical finesse had improved considerably by the 1970s, due in part to international funding and technological advances, not to mention greater sophistication in the advertising industry. Moreover, in the interim, tourism had emerged as a national prio­ rity, fueled in part by the activities of archeologists and anthropologists; much of this enthusiasm was formalized under the bureaucratic umbrella of the Afghan Tourist Organization.6 Such vigorous sponsorship generated a range of guidebooks and other colorful publications. So what can be said of Afghanistan’s ‘image’ at that time? I return now to the brochure mentioned above; it was produced in 1977. With its color cover, extensive photography and brief descriptions, this booklet was intended “For Free Distribution” and offers insight into the tools and variables by which Afgha­ nistan was increasingly commodified. It is both informative and concise. There is an index, “general information” about geography and history encapsulated on one page, maps and distances, hotel information etc. Thereafter, two-page spreads present key sites with color photographs and short introductions; among the highlights are indi­ vidual cities (such as Kabul, Ghazni, Kandahar, and Herat) and places of topographic or historical significance (such as Bande Amir, Minaret of Jam, and Nuristan). Pages are also dedicated to activities available to enterprising travelers (for example fishing, hunting, mountaineering, and trekking) and the requisite focus on Buzkashi, a sport that is “exclusively Afghan.” Emblematic of this marketing mélange is the recurrence of Bamiyan as a destina­ tion site. In its first appearance midway through the brochure (pp. 22–23), the valley as a whole is given a two-page spread with six color photographs (fig. 3). The left-hand page describes Bamiyan thus: “with its archeological remains, [it] is the most cons­

6  [07.04.2014]; the organization was founded in 1958.

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Fig. 3: Bamiyan spread, Afghanistan Tourist Information, produced by Civil Aviation and Tourism Authority, Kabul, 1977. Private collection.

picuous tourist site of Afghanistan […] [and] attracts thousands of visitors annually.” In addition, the area epitomizes “the magnificence and serenity of nature.” These glowing comments are followed by a short paragraph of historical information about Buddhism in the area, and accompanied by one photograph of the whole valley, one close-up of the main Buddha figure, and a picture of a smiling young girl wearing a coin-studded headdress. The facing page focuses on two Islamic-period archeological sites in the area, both of which fell victim to the Mongols. The last of the three images on this page shows the Ajar Valley – a “beautiful lush green valley embraced by pictu­ resque mountains of fascinating formations and glooming [sic] ever changing colours […] breathtaking chasm […] an unforgetable [sic] site for every visitor.” Towards the end of the brochure (pp. 31–45), numerous advertisements appear for airlines, hotels and shopping opportunities. In that context, the Bamiyan Hotel is heralded as a place where guests recline on lounge chairs and occupy individual yurts (fig.  4). Photographs accompanying these advertisements show travelers wearing shorts, enjoying swimming pools and disembarking from planes. Locally produced crafts and souvenirs and well-stocked supermarkets (including imported goods) are trumpeted. The beautiful terrain, the crafts, and the rich traditions figure prominently in the overall campaign to showcase Afghanistan to the cosmopolitan, well-heeled traveler. The promotional idiom that suffuses the booklet is also manifest in six glossy calendars (an admittedly random sample) which were produced between 1972 and 1977. All of the calendars share the same paper quality and cover design, and have a spiral-bound, glossy format; they were meant to be hung vertically on the wall. The top half of each month’s spread is given over to a single color photograph, while the bottom half is devoted to the familiar chart of days and weeks. Considerable care and expense went into the quality of the images, and each calendar has an overall

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theme, such as flowers, landscapes, or crafts. Individual photographs appear in more than one calendar, and in some cases, photographers are credited (both Afghan and foreign names feature). That there is a mélange of languages, subjects and perspectives manifest in these calendars deserves further scrutiny. For example, one calendar for 1975 is entitled “Afghans and their Crafts” and subtitled with a dedication to “The Craftsmen of Afgha­ nistan who perpetuate the skills of our heritage” (fig. 5); similarly, a calendar for 1977 is entitled “Afghanistan, Haven of Peace and Tranquility.” Clearly, these are souvenir products, mundanely congruent with the visual language of the emerging transnatio­ nal culture / heritage industry – striking landscapes, interesting monuments, beautiful products. These two calendars reflect the most straightforward projection of ‘self’ for the benefit of ‘other’ – the most readily consumed ‘image’ of Afghanistan for outsiders who speak English, value ‘heritage’ and operate according to the Gregorian calendar. Other calendars in the archive, however, point to greater complexities. Any arti­ fact that pictures and orders the passage of time is (inevitably) culturally specific to some degree; it reveals the operative increments of daily life and the anticipated shape of the future. Medieval, Hindu, Mughal or Mayan modes of rendering time might

Fig. 4: Advertisement for Bamiyan Hotel, Afghanistan Tourist Information, produced by Civil Aviation and Tourism Authority, Kabul, 1977. Private collection.

Fig. 5: “Afghans and their Crafts,” calendar cover, produced by Ariana Afghan Airlines, Afghan Tourist Organization and Bakhtar Afghan Airlines, 1975. Private collection.

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offer interesting foils by which to appreciate the deeper shape of the Afghan world view, but some aspects are immediately obvious. The choice of a national calendrical system, for example, is central. While most countries currently operate according to the Gregorian calendar, Iran and Afghanistan adhere internally to a Solar Hijri (SH) calendar, calibrated from the year of the Prophet Mohammed’s hijra and the vernal equinox (as a result, the Gregorian calendar beginning 1 January 1977 overlaps with the year 1356 in the SH calendar but is not coterminous with it because the SH year begins on 21 March). A third calendrical system, used concurrently with the Gregorian calendar in many Muslim countries, takes as its starting point the Prophet’s hijra and follows the lunar rather than the solar cycle. Maintaining both hijra-based systems simultaneously enables the calculation of important religious rituals and holidays throughout the year even as regional specificity is affirmed. Indeed, three worldviews might be incorporated into one ‘picture’ of the year to come and the boundaries that exist among the relevant political entities are metaphorically transcended. This multi-valent temporality is evident in another of the calendars in question; there, individual pages foreground SH dates, but Gregorian and Islamic notations appear in ancillary positions and smaller typefaces, suggesting that the intended audience was Afghan. This particular calendar, entitled Behest-i sulh wa Aramish, invites comparison with another in the archive; its near twin (mentioned above), bears the same title, albeit Anglicized, “Afghanistan, Haven of Peace and Tranqui­ lity,” and includes only Gregorian dates and calendar blocks. The same cycle of pho­ tographs complements the calendar pages in the same order in the two calendars. Clearly, the producers perceived commonalities between the tourist market and a certain demographic within Afghan society and operated accordingly. It is not my aim to characterize that socio-cultural overlap in detail here, but two photographs are especially telling – an image of “in-flight service personnel” (fig. 6), who are dressed in colorful uniforms modeled on local attire, and a view of a chai-khana or tea house patronized by mixed company (fig. 7). While the airline picture is staged, somewhat credibly, on the tarmac in front of a plane, the contrived tea-drinking performance suggests an international hotel rather than a Kabul bazaar. Airlines and hotels exem­ plify the spaces in which local constituencies and incoming travelers would have naturally converged, at a time when Afghanistan was actively seeking to participate in the global arena. For such groups, operative social boundaries between public and private were stretching to encompass broader social options, and in such arenas, women enjoyed greater visibility, mobility and even professional agency. That women might be pictured working in public is vividly manifest in another calendar. This one foregrounds the SH calendar but includes Islamic and Gregorian systems in secondary positions, suggesting that it was intended for indigenous or regi­ onal use. The cycle of photographs is particularly striking. Beginning with the first month of the SH calendar (Hamal 1352), each page is topped by an image of a female figure in ethnically specific dress posed before the regionally appropriate monument or provincial landscape. Here, the familiar terms of commodification for the tourist / heri­

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Fig. 6: “In-flight Service Personnel,” April 1977, calendar produced by Ariana Afghan Airlines, Afghan Tourist Organization and Bakhtar Afghan Airlines, 1977. Private collection.

Fig. 7: “Chai-Khana,” June 1977, calendar produced by Ariana Afghan Airlines, Afghan Tourist Organization and Bakhtar Afghan Airlines, 1977. Private collection.

tage industry – landscape, culture, women – are conflated in a synoptic, though fabri­ cated, ‘Afghanistan’. The pictures are notable for their artificiality  – striking poses, pristine garments, and improbable framings bear no relationship to life as it might actually be lived. The scenes do not depict normative behavior or craft practices. Rather, the women are fashion models wearing ‘ethnic dresses’ in picturesque places. The page for Mizhan (September / October) is not atypical, but particularly provo­ cative in retrospect (fig.  8). The focal point is a woman in elaborate velvet garb wearing an ornamented headdress covered with an embroidered shawl. Behind her is a panorama of the entire valley of Bamiyan, with the large Buddha deftly positioned

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to anchor the left half of the composition. The conjunction of a paradigmatic heritage site and a female model is congruent with globalized marketing strategies of the era. One might comment at greater length on the implications of gendering ‘heritage’ in this manner, but I would rather note simply that the calendar is emblematic of a parti­ cular time, place and sensibility. It is clear evidence of an indigenous cohort actively choosing transnational notions of heritage and norms of visual culture, and it is simultaneously commemorative of a particular ‘Afghanistan’ that had no real future. In closing then, I would return to inevitably unfolding ‘time’, for if calendars picture it, photography certainly interrupts, extends and complicates it. By its very nature, this picturing medium holds time still, even as time passes; it serves to freeze

Fig. 8: “Embroidered dress of Bamiyan,” Mizhan 1352 (September / October 1973), calendar produced by Ariana Afghan Airlines, Afghan Tourist Organization and Bakhtar Afghan Airlines, 1977. Private collection.

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ephemeral moments for repeated viewing thereafter. Such image permanence may carry ambivalent significance for one-time fashion models, but as digitization advan­ ced over subsequent decades, the tourist brochure of 1977 enjoyed a rebirth of sorts online, thanks to a website copyrighted in 2007, www.koolsolutions.com. The origi­ nal text is currently accessible (if not credibly current) as primary content for Afghan Tour, the wing of the Ministry of Information and Culture that advertises travel oppor­ tunities into Afghanistan in the early years of the new millennium.7 Following yet again the recurring rubric “Afghanistan” on the digital menu, I encountered a paragraph summarizing recent history as “a story of war and civil unrest,” and citing the Soviet invasion, the civil wars, Taliban control, 9 / 11, Hamid Karzai’s election in 2004, and the anticipated National Assembly elections “tenta­ tively scheduled for April 2005.” The honest (though now dated) history lesson aside, the tourist-friendly rhetoric follows, working to entice travelers to the “remote, majes­ tic” land that is “now safely accessible.” A reassuring hand of welcome is extended with the requisite exoticism, mystery and adventure: We bring along the expertise to turn your trip into memorable & unique adventures. We will bring you to destinations around Afghanistan that have made history, and to a time when Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great and the first Mogul Emperor Babur left their mark in this epic land. A country unseen by many with stories and mysteries that have been locked up for many travelers. Come and discover with us a world of adventure you never knew existed. We are your way around Afghanistan.8

In this updated and technologically assisted promotional campaign, drop-down menus for key places  – such as Kabul and Balkh  – consist of verbatim quotations from the earlier pamphlet, presented along with the original images. Even coverage of Bamiyan remains textually unchanged, though it is visually revised – a picture of a different Buddha replaces the one that was destroyed, and the photo of the smiling girl is left out entirely. In this iteration of self-fashioning, the land and the monuments are acceptable terrain, but the ‘heritage’ is intact and women are off limits. Thus the past is refreshed and re-purposed. Elsewhere on the website, the rhetoric has been calibrated specifically for twenty-first-century audiences, acknowledging topical issues and capitalizing on digital options. Clickable descriptions of tailor-made tours include explicit reference to the complex events of recent history: Day 06: Panjshir This morning we will be up at first light drive back up into the Panjshir Valley, the legendary stronghold of Commander Ahmed Shah Massoud. When Afghanistan was on the tourist trail, Panjshir’s proximity to Kabul combined with its astonishing natural beauty made it most people’s first destination in the country. It was also conveniently accessed from Pakistan by journalists

7 Ibid. 8  [04. 07. 2014].

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covering the Russian and Taliban wars when its geographical situation, and the brilliance of its mujahideen commander, the great Ahmed Shah Massoud, made it unconquerable. Massoud defeated the Russians here fifteen times, and so comprehensively that they stopped trying to capture it. Most of the television footage of the war shown in the West was shot here. The river has a narrow and extremely fertile flood plain and is famous for its fruit. However the sides are steep mountains, which is why it is so defensible. In the spring, watered by the melting snow these mountainsides are dark green giving an impression of overwhelming fertility. We will visit Massoud’s grave and his headquarters at Astana returning to Kabul late afternoon over night.9

Contextualizing this ‘Afghanistan’ and its promotional (and palimpsestic) website, sponsored by a Toyota dealership and implicitly aligned with particular political contingents in the aftermath of Massoud’s death, would be yet another project. For present purposes, however, the simple fact that canons of visual propriety and gender norms have morphed clearly and radically in Afghanistan dramatizes the importance of the archives. Such visual materials are incontrovertible insurance against unwar­ ranted stereotypes, anachronistic generalizations and presumptions of linear ‘pro­ gress’ towards modernity or Western-style sophistication. And the story is still not over. So far, I have used the language of ‘self-fashioning’ and image-making in reference to the tourism industry of Afghanistan in the midtwentieth century. Such terminology seems apt to describe promotional campaigns deployed by and intended for elite, transnational audiences during the era of Daoud Khan, but different analytical strategies may lead to different insights. As the corpus of calendars shows, ‘heritage’10 might be a potent touchstone of collective or projec­ ted identity for a certain demographic in Afghan society at a particular moment in time, but convictions about what is valuable, beautiful or importantly old in Afgha­ nistan are complicated by ethnographic and religious diversity. Taliban ‘time’, for example, has been characterized as “ethical-centripetal, not chronological-linear,”11 the expression of a mindset that holds salient implications for notions of beauty, ‘art’ and belief. Value accrues if the material remains are firmly tied to ongoing reli­ gious praxis, but if sites and artifacts are unrelated to communal belief or need in the moment, their worth is limited. The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, by extension, carries divergent connotations for Taliban activists and American museum directors. It would be a mistake, moreover, to attribute such attitudes to a monolithic Islam. As I write this, the projected bulldozing of the Prophet’s birthplace in Mecca is generating considerable controversy among believers. For some, the plan is a disres­ pectful development that would obliterate sites important to many pious pilgrims; for others, it will allow more pilgrims to be accommodated and curtail potential idolatry.

9 Ibid. 10 Gillman 2010, pp. 9–40 and passim. 11 Bernbeck 2010, pp. 45–46.

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In the face of contemporary complexities, and in conclusion, I return to the real subject of this paper – a fragmentary archive of the Afghan Tourist Organization – to underscore the multi-facetted importance of this collection. Though modest in size, it affords prismatic insight into a particular era and a particular nation even as it sustains broader inquiries about time, heritage, interstitial aesthetics, and the proces­ ses of globalization. In tracking such photographs from production to reception and from past to present – across the full spectrum of visuality – the power of ‘image’ and images seems quite endless.

Bibliography Bernbeck 2010: Reinhard Bernbeck, “Heritage Politics: Learning from Mullah Omar?” in: Ran Boytner / Lynn Swartz Dodd / Bradley J. Parker (eds.), Controlling the Past, Owning the Future: the Political Uses of Archeaelogy in the Middle East, Tucson (AZ) 2010, pp. 27–54. Edwards 2010: Holly Edwards, “Unruly Images: Photography in / of Afghanistan,” in: Artibus Asiae, LXVI (2), 2006, pp. 111–136. Edwards 2013: Holly Edwards, “Photography and Afghan Diplomacy in the early 20th century,” in: Ars Orientalis, 43, 2013, pp. 47–65. Edwards 2014: Holly Edwards, “Glancing Blows, Crossing Boundaries: From Local to Global in the Company of Afghan Women,” in: Muqarnas, 2014 (forthcoming). Gillman 2010: Derek Gillman, The Idea of Cultural Heritage, revised edition, New York 2010. Yan / Santos 2009: Grace Yan / Carla Almeida Santos, “‘China Forever’ Tourism Discourse and Self-Orientalism,” in: Annals of Tourism Research, 36 (2), 2009, pp. 295–315.

Patricia Hayes

Compound Nation: Migrant Worker Portraits in the Politics and Photography of 1980s Namibia Introduction: Compounded Portraits On Sunday 7 October 2011 a dramatic photograph appeared in the Windhoek Obser­ ver, of a man pointing his arm straight at the silvery portrait on a big digital screen of someone from another age. The man had identified his deceased father in a portrait taken 27 years before in 1984 (Figs. 1 and 2). The disembodied screen was in the busy Wernhil shopping mall, a favourite shopping destination in Namibia’s capital city on a Saturday morning. The giant screen is a new feature in Windhoek, signalling a move from the old visual field idea that Dag Henrichsen developed regarding billboards from German colonial times,1 into something more approaching Virilio’s virtual screen of recent times – where the public image starts to replace the public space.2 The occasion was the Windhoek Month of Photography, a new initiative led by the Goethe Institute and the FrancoNamibian Cultural Centre. I mention all these things because they mark aspects of a sort of photography complex,3 elements that help to explain this electric moment of connection, with its doubling up of spaces and times. The photographer John Liebenberg had chosen this moment of the 2011 Month of Photography to bring out and exhibit a selection of portrait photographs of migrant workers for the first time. The photographs were taken in 1984, in a Namibian com­ pound referred to simply as Okombone in Windhoek.4 As an institution since the 1880s, the compound signifies the harshest site of labour concentration and control in southern Africa’s colonial past, where migrant workers were channelled and isolated from their surroundings. Compounds were intended to control workers in both space and time, the one enhancing the other. Compounds are a key feature in the landscape of labour and social historiography, and represent one of the founding arguments about the “mineral revolution” in the subcontinent, with implications in turn for emancipation in twentieth-century labour and political struggles. In southern Africa, therefore, the compound is a centrepiece,

1 Henrichsen 2009. 2 Virilio 1994, p. 64. 3 Hevia 2009. 4 The accounts of how the compound portraits were produced derive from interviews with John Lie­ benberg in Johannesburg in 2009 and 2010. I am grateful to colleagues who have made suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper, especially G. Arunima, Dag Henrichsen, Marion Wallace, Ciraj Rassool and Jeremy Silvester. I am grateful to Werner Hillebrecht of the National Archives of Namibia for his generous assistance.

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empirically and epistemologically, in the analysis and debates over industrialisation, proletarianisation, modernisation, trade unionisation, and nationalist politicisa­ tion – and their limits. In Namibia, the contract labour system with its compound infrastructure is credi­ ted with producing the nationalist momentum of the twentieth century that brought the country to independence in 1990.5 Besides several major studies on the labour migration system, some piecemeal research exists on the effects of migrant labour on family life.6 This literature touches on the cost of long separations of working men from their patrilocal residences in the north of the country, from their wives, and from their children, who grew up not knowing their fathers. Certainly family life was rende­ red extremely difficult, with workers caught between the demands of capital, colonial administration, local intermediaries such as headmen, and their family dependents.7 For the contract labour system, the motif is separation; for the compound, isolation. Much visual and photographic writing dwells on the immediate affective dimen­ sion of pictures. In the launching of these personal portraits from 1984 into public spaces in Windhoek in 2011, the dramatic moment of the breaking down of these forces of separation and isolation was indeed caught by a journalist present at the Wernhil shopping centre, who took the photograph of the observer recognising his father.8 All these elements present challenges as to what model of analysis to pursue in the case of what I call here “compound portraits”: portraits compounded by a number of very tangled questions. These include the subjects of the photographs, the pho­ tographer himself, the photographic economy into which he did not insert these images in the 1980s and into which he did insert them in 2011. For in terms of the photographer’s known oeuvre, these portraits were kept quiet, obscure, and isolated from the rest of his more ostensibly political photographs. The personal photographic archive of John Liebenberg relating to his work in Namibia from 1984 to 1992 is coming to represent the most comprehensive documen­ tation of the national liberation struggle in that country against South African colo­ nial occupation. Aside from images published in the press at the time, Liebenberg deposited 250 pictures in the National Archives of Namibia in 1990, when the country gained its independence from South African colonial rule. More recently Liebenberg and I produced the book Bush of Ghosts,9 and he conducted a speaking tour connected to his war and political photographs in Namibia, thus putting a more complex archive into motion. The newly-constructed Museum of the National Liberation Struggle in the centre of Windhoek, designed by North Koreans, makes use of numerous images

5 Hayes et al. 1998; Nujoma 2001. 6 Banghart 1969; Moorsom 1977; Moorsom 1996; Bauer 1998; and Peltola 1995. 7 Voipio 1981; Hishongwa 1992. 8 The photographer was Christine Skowski. 9 Liebenberg / Hayes 2010.

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Fig. 1: John Liebenberg: Portrait of resident in Okombone Labour Compound, Windhoek. Photograph, laser archival print, 1984. Photograph: 42 × 59.4 cm. Collection John Liebenberg.

Fig. 2: Christine Skowski: “The power of photography.” Photomechanical reproduction in: Windhoek Observer, 7 October 2011.

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 Patricia Hayes

held in Windhoek, and the Military Museum in Johannesburg has done the same with selected photographs of South African battalions leaving Angola in 1988. Thus there was an element of surprise in September–October 2011 when Lieben­ berg showed his portraits of migrant or ‘contract’ workers taken in 1984, before he became the documentarist of the Namibian struggle for liberation. These few hundred photographs of men living in the highly-controlled workers’ compound in the town­ ship of Katutura have therefore previously not had a place in the press or the photogra­ phic discourses publicly espoused by the progressive community to which Liebenberg affiliated himself, as a leftist, and a member of the photographic collective Afrapix.10 The connection that we see in the newspaper image is therefore made possible by the disclosure of a hitherto neglected or even suppressed part of the private archive of a photographer known much better for his work on political struggle and war. This paper therefore explores the conundrum of a national liberation struggle that was apparently built on individual self-sacrifice, the submergence of the subject in the collective and the social, and the loss of the personal at the behest of political mobi­ lisation. The place of the portrait and its repertoires in these various dynamics is ulti­ mately an enigmatic but palpable one – and suggests that the subject is far from lost. There are also issues of inserting these portraits now, in postcolonial neoliberal times, which might have their own stake in the notion of an African subject – or hypersubject. This is because the representation of such ‘subjectivity’ has been argued to redeem the continent from the negative tropes of mainstream photojournalism that highlight suffering, famine, and war. The African subject who exercises agency in having his or her portrait taken is thus counterposed to the ‘passive’ victim in such Afro-pessimistic photographs. In postcolonial Namibia, where public culture is pro­ duced with the financial support of foreign ‘partnership’ or cultural aid, this question about the triumphal narrative of the African subject certainly arises, just as it does in diasporic and metropolitan art discourses, which go to the other extreme of sociopolitical documentary by elevating and disaggregating aestheticised portraits from any socially documented embeddedness.11 Ironically, one of the pivotal subjects in the rise of social documentary photogra­ phy in southern Africa historically was precisely the compound. This is most evident in the work of Leon Levson from the 1940s, followed by numerous others.12 But what I wish to do here is to explore not only how these portraits are ‘compounded’, but also how they compound, or perhaps confound, the usual histories of both nation and photography. The photograph on the Wernhil screen was taken in 1984. The content of the image, the subject that confronts the viewer, has hitherto not been apparent except to the original subject and the tiny circle to whom it might have been shown. It

10 Hayes 2012. 11 See, for example: Keita / Magnin 1997; or Enwezor 2010. 12 Minkley / Rassool 2005; Newbury 2009.

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is a largely unacknowledged part of a very long story about people, mobilities, struc­ tures, a labour system, and politics. Within this story is the originally more private nature of this photograph and the affective and informal bonds that produced it, which are normally outside the discursive domains of history. As already stated, the term ‘compound’ is notorious in southern Africa. It ori­ ginated in the diamond mines of Kimberley, which opened in 1867. Part of the logic was an attempt to prevent the theft of diamond stones and their escape into extralegal markets by De Beers Consolidated and other mining companies as they came to amalgamate many small independent operations into a few major corporations and monopolies.13 The accent is on controlled access, male-only dormitories, communal cooking and bathroom facilities, invasive body searches, quarantine rooms, policing, and, to some extent, medicalisation. A near-total control of the body of the African male worker is implied, and it is the most regulated attempt at creating a biopolitical space for labour in southern Africa. The compound template was extended and applied to the prison-like con­ trolled residence camps of the gold mines around Johannesburg in the 1880s, and then further afield in the mines of Zimbabwe, Namibia, the Zambian Copperbelt and Katanga in the Belgian Congo in the twentieth century. The institution that historians trace back to Kimberley, and which was refined on the Witwatersrand, is argued to be only one of three parallel and related developments. The first is the move to go deep underground, the second corporate consolidation, and the third the rise of the com­ pound to contain and reproduce labour under very controlled conditions.14 A fascinating issue in this master narrative of the mining revolution and the place of the compound is that the latter emerged out of colonial weakness, before the state became strong. Industrial capitalism is a precolonial development in many ways. Similarly, the liberalisation of the prison-like compound and its transmutation into municipal and other ‘hostels’ by the 1970s was spearheaded by corporations such as Anglo American and was later adopted by a state engaged in social engineering and laundering.15 This is part of a much larger set of debates around apartheid’s moderni­ sation and colonialism, which are greatly under-researched phenomena. The purpose of the hostel or the compound located in the bigger segregated zone of the black township Katutura, which translates as ‘the place we do not want to be’, was isolation.16 That is, the isolation of migrant men from other permanent residents of the urban township and, by inference, from political and other influence. As I shall try to explore, isolation is another distinctive feature of these compound portraits: their isolation from the rest of public culture at the time, whose features include – if I

13 Turrell 1987. 14 Ibid.; Smalberger 1974. 15 James 1992. 16 Pendleton 1974.

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 Patricia Hayes

may put it in very broad strokes – nationalism, and what is glossed as the documen­ tary mode of photographing. This should perhaps be explained on two levels. One is the photographic genre in demand for public consumption at the time when Lie­ benberg was becoming a photographer in the 1980s, which was a time of heightened political mobilisation against apartheid, not only in South Africa and Namibia but internationally. This in many ways precluded the personal. The other is the obscurity of the informal, secretive modes of bucking the compound system and ‘covering’ for each other in which workers engaged beyond the purview of officials. It was into this world that Liebenberg was drawn on his weekends in 1984–1985. All this is part of the parallel and dual compounding: the privatisation of the migrant worker by the state and capital through this form of isolation, and the total invasion of his private person through the invasive forms of control and physical orde­ ring, thus rendering him ‘open’ to scrutiny, compounding his disempowerment. But, by the same token, the compound portraits that were originally for personal and indi­ vidual use actually subvert this dehumanising system. The photographs and their later archiving are riddled with the contradictions of this intense space.

Fig. 3: John Liebenberg: Ovambohostel in Katurura, Windhoek. Photograph, laser archival print, 1984. Photograph: 59.4 × 42 cm. Collection John Liebenberg.

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Studio in the Compound According to Liebenberg, the photographic sessions in the compound happened in the following way. He worked at the Post Office technical yard in south Windhoek, and started to chat with contract workers employed in maintenance and cable digging work.17 From other work situations involving a mix of ‘unskilled’ contract labour, cle­ rical staff and white employees, it is clear that black workers became very good at reading the white man. The latter had to be watched in any case because of their authority and unpredictability, but could also be turned into patrons or provide useful services.18 It is from these fellow-workers that Liebenberg says he first learned of the impact of the liberation war in the north on people’s lives. He started to visit them illegally in the compound, and has some early photographs to attest to this. One colleague then set him up to take portraits on weekends, because, as he said, men in the compound had a demand for pictures. Liebenberg was not yet a photographer, but he was trying to become one. The compound portraits are exploratory, but also an attempt at serious photographic work, as suggested by the use of black and white film that he developed and printed himself at home. They are also revelatory. Nothing is more suggestive here than the field research of anthropologist Robert Gordon in the 1970s, who acted as a Personnel Officer on a mine near Windhoek in

Fig. 4: John Liebenberg: Portrait of resident in Okombone labour compound, Windhoek. Photograph, laser archival print, 1984. Photograph: 42 × 59.4 cm. Collection John Liebenberg.

17 Biographical notes appear in Liebenberg/Hayes 2010. 18 Gordon 1977, p. 71.

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order to covertly study the workings of compound life. His office was the interface between black contract miners and the management. The mine becomes the micro­ cosm where it is possible to study the fixated, petty and self-reinforcing racist atti­ tudes of whites, on the one side, and the peculiar position of migrants, on the other, who were obliged to become “phenomenologists of the everyday life of whites”19 because the latter’s power permitted them an unpredictable degree of caprice. Gordon, however, portrays the compound as the site of an alternative world created by the migrants. To put it more precisely, he argues that on this mine he came to understand that blacks occupied two worlds, the less visible one being “in the inter­ stices of the formal world of the mine, centred on the compound.”20 Moreover, the migrants had their own code of brotherhood that was not apparent to most observers. Among themselves, says Gordon, there was an undeniable “emphasis on respect, trust, consultation and dignity.”21

Fig. 5: John Liebenberg: Portrait of resident and visitors in Okombone labour compound, Windhoek. Photograph, laser archival print, 1984. Photograph: 42 × 59.4 cm. Collection John Liebenberg.

19 Ibid., p. 101. 20 Ibid., p. 82. 21 Ibid., p. 102.

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Fig. 6: John Liebenberg: Portrait of resident in Okombone labour compound, Windhoek. Photograph, laser archival print, 1984. Photograph: 59.4 × 42 cm. Collection John Liebenberg.

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 Patricia Hayes

As stated, it was illegal for unauthorised persons to enter the compound, inclu ding – or especially – white persons. But as in all compounds, there are ways round the system. The Ovambohostel or Okombone in Windhoek seems to have been pre­ cisely that interstitial place where migrants engaged a variety of informal activities, especially at the weekends. In fact one portrait depicts a man displaying clothes that he is probably selling to fellow-residents (fig. 3). All of them dress for the p ­ hotographic occasion, but the weekend was the time generally for putting on neat clothes and pre­ senting a different appearance from the working week with its overalls and workplace subordinations, given that contract workers occupied the lowest level in the hierarchy of labour in Namibia. What was then called “resistance,” and might now be called ‘corruption,’ operated here in the Namibian diamond mines and elsewhere.22 White employers and management, as indeed the whole colonial edifice, were seen to have no legitimacy. Smuggling goods and people was common, as the photographs suggest when it comes to women and children, who are also present in this space and have their portraits taken. The photographic sessions occurred at weekends over the course of about thir­ teen months in 1984–85. Clients paid a small deposit of R2 and then collected their prints the next week, paying off the remainder of R6.50. The sum involved was consi­ derable given the low salaries and would have required some saving or borrowing on the part of the purchasers. Liebenberg’s assistant, who handled the negotiations, was Moses Mureimi. A neat invoice book records all transactions, but does not attach the names to the numbers of the negatives. Liebenberg married in late 1984 and says that he took along a tablecloth or a sheet from home and pinned it up against a wall. Sometimes it was in shade, some­ times in sunlight, but the latter proved very harsh. The edges of the cloth are often visible in the full-length photographs. In fact the entire construction of the backdrop as a studio effect is often self-evident and demystifies the whole process. Liebenberg also states that there was nothing isolated or silent about these por­ trait occasions. As mentioned, the subjects were usually dressed up for the shoot, and they had an audience and passers-by behind the photographer making com­ ments and jokes. While there is a great seriousness in the expression of many of the older men being photographed, the social and even witty character of the event and its ambience is something that Liebenberg highlights. This is a different emphasis from Enwezor’s approach towards African portraits in Events of the Self (2010), which accentuates the individual and the artist in a more encapsulated way. The vast majority of these portraits show men in an urban milieu, in formal or less formal apparel depending on age, but generally smart, that is, well-dressed. There is only one portrait that emphasises the connection between the north and the city, and

22 These comments arise from my own doctoral fieldwork interviews in 1989–1990 in northern Nami­ bia with migrant workers returning from the diamond mines.

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Fig. 7: John Liebenberg: Portrait of resident in Okombone labour compound [Photographer´s caption: “Jesus of Ombalantu”], Windhoek. Photograph, laser archival print, 1984. Photograph: 59.4 × 42 cm. Collection John Liebenberg.

Fig. 8: John Liebenberg: Portrait of resident in Okombone labour compound, Windhoek. Photograph, laser archival print, 1984. Photograph: 42 × 59.4 cm. Collection John Liebenberg.

that is the one that Liebenberg himself has dubbed “Jesus of Ombalantu” (fig. 7). It is probably the boldest self-presentation of this entire compound archive. While working in his negative and contact sheet folders preparing the co-autho­ red Bush of Ghosts, Liebenberg and I discussed the stretched lives of migrant workers

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extensively. Liebenberg has a lyrical notion of the “voyages of necessity” that these men have had to make since as far back as the 1890s. Liebenberg’s immediate capti­ oning of this photograph as Jesus of Ombalantu connects it to both healing and war. Of course, the demographic group that fed into the migrant labour system was the same as that feeding into exile and the armed struggle against South African colo­ nial and military rule. Ombalantu in western Owambo (now named Outapi region) was one of the worst districts of the war zone, where Liebenberg later photographed (among other things) mass graves, civilian life under military occupation, soldiers – both black and white – in the South African Defence Force, and, especially, counterinsurgency atrocities and paraded ‘trophies’ of the bodies of guerrilla fighters from the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia.23 Ombalantu is a point of great density in the “bush of ghosts” on the northern border. In saying this, I am cross-referencing an archive that is multi-layered and multi-temporal in terms of the signifiers it carries beyond Liebenberg’s original motivations. Jesus of Ombalantu, whose name we have not yet established from among the customer list, stages a dramatic appearance that carefully articulates and combines objects from the northern forests and floodplain and from the industrial workplace. The artefacts from the rural north include a dagger, a snuff box, medicine containers, and a bow and arrows. Such objects are associated with either elderly or less educa­ ted (but nonetheless admired) persons who remain connected to, and ­knowledgeable about, the more forested environment. ‘Jesus’ brings the tools of a machinist or mecha­ nic or mineworker (or all of these) into the mix, and places these around his working body in the same way as a hunter wears his weapons and protective talismans. He is the worker–hunter, the colonial and the precolonial, fusing historical and subjec­ tive disjunctures within the frame of the tablecloth-backdrop, which is then further framed by the lens and the rest of the compound apparatus that is the camera. The photographic framing has a little slippage that the subject himself seems to avoid, as there is some untidiness in the corner of the mise-en-scène. ‘Jesus’ carries over older meanings of manhood into this masculine urban environment, where instead of the exploitation, abjection and compensations of the contract worker, he is armed with the tools of labour and the tools of his roots. It is an extraordinary tableau given that the preference is for a gentlemanly self-contained presence (as far as possible), brot­ herly attachment, educated youthful challenge, coolness, hipness or playfulness, to cite some possibilities in the other portraits. What is also remarkable is that, contrary to most situations, ‘Jesus’ actually dis­ plays amulets and other objects normally concealed, in particular from white eyes. In the compounds that he studied, Gordon observes that amulets were never shown.24 This is probably part of their potency. It is phenomenal that this worker chose to

23 See: Liebenberg/Hayes 2010. 24 Gordon 1977, p. 124.

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display myriad signs equating different professions, histories and spaces. It is also unlikely that he was the official owner of all the tools he displays. It is not the “visi­ bility of modernity” (as the cliché of so much writing on African photography puts it) that he chooses. It is the visibility of everything, pointing to a need to understand what this very visibility might mean, for whom, and for what purposes. The point seems to be the fusion of tools and objects around his torso, the combination of manufactured and home-made clothing, and the arresting stance here rather than the projection of any romanticised ‘modern’ figure. It is more confrontational than the other portraits. Alongside the literal tools of work so graphically presented by ‘Jesus’, we could also suggest an industrial metaphor or photographic homology in the near-uniformi­ ties of the background and modes of shooting for many of the compound portraits, especially the close-cropped series that approaches near-industrial repetition. This sameness only enhances individual particulars as the subjects look into the camera in a seemingly tense understanding, or even apprehension, that they will get themselves back in some form from this moment. Conventional understandings of posing are very serious with the older genera­ tion. Stillness and a lack of expression – a certain opaqueness – are often apparent. Among northerners the expression of emotion is avowedly disapproved of, especially for men, and among older generations is said to have been discouraged in the raising of children generally. This suggests that facial expressions and poses are deeply nuanced and locally inflected, which should caution us against the generalisations and assumptions that sometimes appear in the more celebratory curating and writing about African portraits. Posing aside, and with much research still to be done on those Liebenberg calls the “gentlemen of the Okombone,” these portraits form part of a particular photo­ graphy complex in the 1980s that is not immediately very obvious. First, it must be said that Liebenberg was not the only photographer to take portraits of migrant men, as the Nitzsche-Reiter commercial studio archives demonstrate overwhelmingly.25 Secondly, the compound studio of temporary art was part of a nexus that included the post office where Liebenberg and his helpers worked, and which received and sent letters which migrants wrote home to their families in the north. These would at times presumably include portraits of the men, unless the latter waited until their return to bring them home. The postal system had grown exponentially with the investment in

25 According to Werner Hillebrecht of the National Archives of Namibia, Ottilie Nitzsche-Reiter was born in 1902 in Windhoek, and did an apprenticeship with the photographer Franz Fiedler in Dresden. In 1934 she returned to Namibia, where she married Johann Joseph Reiter, who gave up farming and joined her in establishing the ‘Ottilie Nitzsche – Joseph Reiter’ firm, which combined a photo studio with an art gallery. The firm, which took on several employees over time, took thousands of passport and advertisement photos, but also extensively documented the social life of Windhoek, as well as the landscapes and buildings of other parts of Namibia. The firm’s voluminous archives were purchased after Nitzsche-Reiter’s death in March 1990 by the National Archives in Windhoek.

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Fig. 9: John Liebenberg: Portrait of resident in Okombone labour compound, Windhoek. Photograph, laser archival print, 1984. Photograph: 42 × 59.4 cm. Collection John Liebenberg.

Fig. 10: John Liebenberg: Portrait of resident in Okombone labour compound, Windhoek. Photograph, laser archival print, 1984. Photograph: 42 × 59.4 cm. Collection John Liebenberg.

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homeland or Bantustan areas as part of apartheid modernisation from the late 1960s and early 1970s. In fact by the mid-1970s Ovamboland (the main migrant ‘sending area’) had eight post offices and six postal agencies.26 It can be argued that the institu­ tion of the post office provided some counterpoint to the oft-dehumanising institution of the compound and the migrant labour system more generally, helping to maintain connection in the face of separation and isolation.

The Inter-Connections between Portraiture and Documentary One of the features of photography that is so remarkable is its capacity to disaggregate histories and lives, removing a fragment of space and time, and then to re-aggregate or reassemble this material or digital thing with other parts later in time. The entry of the compound portraits into public circulation in postcolonial Namibia and beyond, 27 years after they were taken, throws open many questions because it creates new lines of connection between the past and the present, between absence and presence. Specifically, it throws into relief the alignment of three institutions: the post office, the compound and the photographer’s archive.27 The archive in the case of the com­ pound portraits has acted as a kind of limbo or even ‘dead time’, while the market of photography sought something else. This has affected the timing of the release (or not) of the pictures into the public domain; they have needed a new kind of value that welcomes home the portrait of the migrant worker. In the 1980s, two things dictated the release or non-release of pictures. The first was the agenda to expose South African colonial and military rule in the face of repres­ sion and state discourses about upliftment and progress.28 The second was a kind of internal policing mechanism on the left, through which the tensions between the personal and the political were often regulated. For many activists, supporters and the economy around them, ‘beauty’ and ‘the personal’ were often publicly deemed less important than ‘the political’, though it is revealing that many photographers quietly continued with their so-called personal projects throughout this era. Thus in Liebenberg’s case, such portraits were kept in abeyance. It is the shift away from the political to the personal in post-apartheid art discourses and markets that has created an opening for this work to come out, not for commercial gallery and international art purposes, but for a photography festival with more public connections and critical publication, the Windhoek Month of Photography. The exhibition was entitled ‘Week­ ends at the Okomboni’ and the venue was the old kitchen area in the remains of the

26 Gordon 1977, p. 32. 27 I do not include here the personal archives of the migrant workers who purchased portrait photo­ graphs, as this requires much further research. 28 Liebenberg / Hayes 2010.

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compound in Katutura, now known as the John Muafangejo Art Gallery. Thus there is a belated sense of intensity around these portraits. But politics and art, the political and the personal, are in fact so perpetually entangled that it is necessary not to leave it at that, but to probe more deeply into their relationship and ask further questions about the ways they have been deliberately held apart. In several recent articles I have raised the problem of the striking dichotomy between politics and aesthetics in South Africa,29 one of those “brutal antitheses of the ‘either-or’.”30 Part of the dynamic lies in another disciplinary reflex, and that is of course the separation of photographs into the discrete genres (broadly derived from art history and criticism) of ‘the documentary photograph’ and ‘the portrait’. Here the recent critiques of art discourse made by Ariella Azoulay are pertinent.31 This schism diminishes our ability to see the intermingling and co-presences of both at the same time, albeit in different gradations. In southern Africa during the 1980s and the antiapartheid struggle, politics was more valorised than aesthetics, and after apartheid, it has been inverted. This also has to do with the economies underpinning these photo­ graphic discourses, and the shift from the page to the wall, from the press and various public spaces to the gallery in a wider global shift. These dynamics also affect archi­ val activity (or inactivity) very profoundly. Thus we find many documentary photo­ graphers from the earlier period in a position where their privately-held archives are languishing, some of them still holding undeveloped rolls of film today.32 As we worked on the publication Bush of Ghosts, Liebenberg occasionally menti­ oned the men he photographed in the compound to a few friends. But working through the big tide of negatives that Liebenberg finally pulled out of his old metal cupboard and that I suggested we scan immediately so that we could look at all of them, effected a kind of visual reorientation in my own perception of his broader archive of Nami­ bian photographs. It sensitised the eye to the presence of the portrait – and the valori­ sation of individuals – scattered through his main archive of photographs of political mobilisation, war and everyday life. Indeed, it became apparent that the portrait is instrumentalised by politics, and not only by the photographer. It was then very inte­ resting to see on what terms the individual emerges and is portraitised. There are two striking examples that are worth discussion here.

29 Hayes 2009; Hayes 2011a; Hayes 2011b. 30 Warburg 1918 / 2011, p. 108. 31 Azoulay 2012. 32 There is no central archival institution in South Africa that is deemed suitable to hold such archi­ ves derived from these photographers’ careers, especially former members of Afrapix, though the Uni­ versity of Cape Town Library and the ‘Curating the Archive’ project under Paul Weinberg’s direction are attracting an increasing number of partial deposits. Many photographers – often from negative experience of newspaper control or agency fluctuations – prefer to keep their work in their own pos­ session for safekeeping in the hope that one day it might be of value.

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The first and probably most obvious concerns the political leader. The emergence of the face of the president of the liberation movement SWAPO, Sam Nujoma, who returned to Namibian soil in 1989 after 27 years of exile, was heralded by the descent of his two portraits from the presidential plane that touched down from Angola, before he stepped out himself. One portrait is of Nujoma at the time of his depar­ ture from Namibian soil (and thus recognisable to many Namibians); the other shows Nujoma as he was in April 1989 a few months earlier (and thus needing to become recognisable). It is symptomatic of the collapsing of genre distinctions that Lieben­ berg not only took the photograph of Nujoma’s portraits descending the steps of the aeroplane,33 but also many portraits of the exiled leader in Luanda in a special photo­ graphy session in late April 1989. The SWAPO president’s face then came to dominate the political landscape through the process of decolonisation, with banners, posters and T-shirts emblazoned with his image. The phenomenon continued into the nationbuilding process in independent Namibia as Nujoma’s official presidential portrait was installed in every government building in the country. Nothing could be more indicative of the carrying over of the notion of ‘the sovereign’ from centuries ago,

Fig. 11: John Liebenberg: The SWAPO president’s portrait emerges from the plane during the arrival of Andimba ya Toivo, David Merero, Hage Geingob and others from Angola, 11 September 1989. 35 mm black and white negative, published in John Liebenberg / Patricia Hayes, Bush of Ghosts: Life and War in Namibia, 1986–1990, Cape Town 2010, p. 187. Collection John Liebenberg.

33 Liebenberg / Hayes 2010, p. 187.

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whose presence is made tangible to his or her subjects through the painted portrait, now translated into the modern sovereignty of a newly-launched African nation.34 The second example of a portrait inhabiting documentary is more problematic and less triumphal. It concerns a young man called Agab Hendricks, a student acti­ vist in the Namibian National Students’ Organisation (NANSO) who appears in a very famous photograph of the 1988 Cassinga Day student march one year before indepen­ dence.35 Agab Hendricks had been detained by South African Security Police shortly before this march, and Liebenberg visited his home in Katutura after his release to take some portrait photographs of him.36 These were published in the progressive newspaper The Namibian and marked the young activist as someone who had survi­ ved colonial detention. A few months later Hendricks left Windhoek and crossed the border to join the liberation movement in exile in Angola. He was never seen again. It is believed he was detained and was disappeared after interrogation by the security apparatus of the liberation movement that was in the vortex of a murderous paranoia about spies, espe­ cially with regard to young educated southerners. Because Hendricks’ face appears in the photograph of the march, and because his portrait had been in the newspaper after his release from South African detention, with the publication of Bush of Ghosts in 2010 his portrait began recirculating in Namibia and was re-valorised (especially in social media) as friends and family mourned his loss, again. Because portraiture and documentary – genres that are usually held apart – are here so intermingled, it seems that underpinning the abyss between politics and aes­ thetics in southern Africa and elsewhere is a genre separation or boundary that has been constructed and largely sustained.37 In fact, if we return to the compound photo­ graphs, we see they sometimes also spring leaks and show the process of such const­ ruction. The backcloth that Liebenberg uses is sometimes insufficient to blank out the brick walls and environment that would constitute a focal part of a social documen­ tary photograph. The uniform sheet also references earlier genres of anthro­pological and typologising photography.38 Genre separation appears to seep into public culture to affect practices of circulation, publication, curating and archiving. It has its paral­ lel in the separation between the collective and the individual, the political and the personal, not to mention the medium and the discipline. Such processes of sanita­ tion, even purification, obscure mutual contaminations and cross-references, even co-productions and co-existence. As the processes through which genres are reprodu­ ced become more visible, perhaps it will become possible to waive some of the more

34 Woodall 1997. 35 Liebenberg  / Hayes 2010, p. 167. 36 Ibid., p. 166. 37 Rancière 2006. 38 Pinney 1992; Pinney 2011.

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Fig. 12: John Liebenberg: Portrait of NANSO activist Agab Hendricks, Windhoek, 26 July 1988. 35 mm black and white negative, published in John Liebenberg / Patricia Hayes, Bush of Ghosts: Life and War in Namibia, 1986–1990, Cape Town 2010, p 166. Collection John Liebenberg.

normative distinctions and develop new languages around personhood, photogra­ phy, and the social worlds in which they are located. There is another separation going on, of course, which was enforced between migrants and their families and even their fellows in the township, through the insti­ tution of the compound. But the compound with its intense proximities, and the need for its own ground rules to lessen the alienation of a racialised and exploitative labour system, also facilitates the making of an alternative world. Through solidarities, nego­ tiation and ‘covering’ for one another, migrants created other opportunities for them­ selves and, indeed, became experts at reading the interstices of a “white-imposed social order.”39 They introduced Liebenberg to their informal world when leisure time allowed them to be more who they wanted to be. Photographic and business trans­ actions took place. The “gentlemen of the Okombone” took away their prints, while Liebenberg continued to try and take photographs that would get him the recognition he needed to change profession. It was photographs of rallies and police repression that convinced the editor of the newly-launched newspaper The Namibian to employ him as a photographer in 1985. These early portraits have many qualities, from awk­

39 Gordon 1977, p. 106.

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wardness and playfulness to an arresting and luminous beauty, but such indulgence had no place in the public fight against apartheid at the time. The impulse to separate genre might also obscure how foundational these com­ pound portraits were for the photographer, and how they shaped his subsequent methodology. The first lesson was crossing the line at a workplace and communi­ cating with migrants, who then helped Liebenberg to go behind the wire into a flou­ rishing informal world. The possibility of such relationships and the space of informa­ lity within the ossified world of colonial apartheid Namibia is what made it possible for Liebenberg to go further, penetrating military lines or visiting war-affected civi­ lian homes with a supporting cast of many Namibians helping along the way because such activities were regarded as bucking the system. It also prepared him to take por­ traits of public figures in the midst of photojournalism, such as General ‘Sterk’ Hans Dreyer, who commanded the fearsome counter-insurgency unit Koevoet.40 In effect, the photographer of the national liberation struggle underwent his initiation in the compound.

Bibliography Azoulay 2012: Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination. A Political Ontology of Photography, London 2012. Banghart 1969: Peter D. Banghart, A Study of Migrant Labour in South West Africa, unpublished MA thesis, University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch 1969. Bauer 1998: Gretchen Bauer, Labour and Democracy in Namibia, 1971–1996, Athens (OH) 1998. Enwezor 2010: Okwui Enwezor (ed.), Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity, Munich 2010. Gordon 1977: Robert J. Gordon, Mines, Masters and Migrants: Life in a Namibian Compound, Johannesburg 1977. Hayes 2009: Patricia Hayes, “Santu Mofokeng, Photographs: ‘The Violence is in the Knowing,’” in: History & Theory, Special Issue on History & Photography, 48, 2009, pp. 34–51. Hayes 2011a: Patricia Hayes, “Seeing and Being Seen: Politics, Art and the Everyday in the Durban Photography of Omar Badsha, 1960s–1980s,” in: Africa, 81 / 4, 2011, pp. 1–23. Hayes 2011b: Patricia Hayes, “The Form of the Norm: Shades of Gender in South African Photography of the 1980s,” in: Social Dynamics, 37 / 2, June 2011, pp. 263–277. Hayes 2012: Patricia Hayes, “Unity & Struggle,” in: Okwui Enwezor / Rory Bester (eds.), The Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, Exhibition Catalogue, New York 2012. Hayes et al. 1998: Patricia Hayes et al. (eds.), Namibia Under South African Rule: Mobility and Containment, Cape Town 1998. Henrichsen 2009: Dag Henrichsen, “‘Lees!’ Historical Photography, Public Reading Sites and Visuals,” in: Giorgio Miescher et al. (eds.), Posters in Action, Basel 2009. Hevia 2009: James L. Hevia, “The Photography Complex,” in: Rosalind Morris (ed.), Photographies East, Durham (NC) 2009. Hishongwa 1992: Ndeutala Selma Hishongwa, The Contract Labour System and Its Effects on Family and Social Life in Namibia, Windhoek 1992.

40 Liebenberg / Hayes 2010, p. 202.

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James 1992: Wilmot G. James, Our Precious Metal: African Labour in South Africa’s Gold Industry, 1970–1990, Cape Town 1992. Keita / Magnin 1997: Seydou Keita / Andre Magnin, Seydou Keita – African Photographer, Zurich 1997. Liebenberg / Hayes 2010: John Liebenberg / Patricia Hayes, Bush of Ghosts: Life and War in Namibia, 1986–1990, Cape Town 2010. Minkley / Rassool 2005: Gary Minkley / Ciraj Rassool, “Photography with a Difference: Leon Levson’s Camera Studies and Photographic Exhibitions of Native Life in South Africa, 1947–1950 ” in: Kronos: Journal of Cape History, 31, 2005, pp. 184–213. Moorsom 1977: Richard Moorsom, Labour Consciousness and the 1971–72: Contract Workers’ Strike in Namibia, The Hague 1977. Moorsom 1996: Richard Moorsom, Underdevelopment and Labour Migration: the Contract Labour System in Namibia, Windhoek 1996. Newbury 2009: Darren Newbury, Defiant Images, Pretoria 2009. Nujoma 2001: Sam Nujoma, Where Others Wavered: The Autobiography of Sam Nujoma, London 2001. Peltola 1995: Pekka Peltola, The Lost May Day: Namibian Workers’ Struggle for Independence, Helsinki 1995. Pendleton 1974: Wade C. Pendleton, Katutura, San Diego (CA) 1974. Pinney 1992: Christopher Pinney, “The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography,” in: Elizabeth Edwards (ed.), Anthropology and Photography, New Haven (CT) 1992. Pinney 2011: Christopher Pinney, Photography and Anthropology, London 2011. Rancière 2006: Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: the Distribution of the Sensible. London 2006. Smalberger 1974: John M. Smalberger, “I.D.B. and the Mining Compound System in the 1880s,” in: The South African Journal of Economics, 42, 4, 1974, pp. 247–258. Turrell 1987: Robert Vicat Turrell, Capital and Labour on the Kimberley Diamond Fields, 1871–1890, Cambridge 1987. Virilio 1994: Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, Bloomington 1994. Voipio 1981: Rauha Voipio, “Contract Work through Ovambo eyes,” in: Reginald H. Green et al. (eds.), Namibia: The Last Colony, Harlow 1981, pp. 112–131. Warburg 1918 / 2011: Aby Warburg, “Das Problem liegt in der Mitte,” in: Gesammelte Schriften 1, 1–2, [1918], New Edition, Berlin 1998, pp. 613–14, translated and quoted in: Georges Didi-Huberman (ed.), Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back, Madrid 2011. Woodall 1997: Joanna Woodall (ed.), Portraiture: Facing the Subject, Manchester 1997.

Lucie Ryzova

Nostalgia for the Modern: Archive Fever in Egypt in the Age of Post-Photography The past decade in Egypt has seen mounting interest in vintage photographs among a wide range of cultural institutions, artists, and middle-class publics writ large. New archiving initiatives have sprung up both locally and in the wider region. Some are entirely supported by foreign funds, others only in part, and yet others struggle with small local funds combined with the volunteer work of a few enthusiasts. Some of these initiatives focus purely on old photographs of diverse genres, others collect photographs together with a wide range of printed vintage artifacts, such as cinema posters, popular magazines, advertising, and popular culture ephemera. Numerous public institutions are undergoing massive digitization projects of their holdings; others feverishly ‘collect’ images yet unclaimed. Historical photographs and other kinds of images are then either showcased on their websites, or sold on CD-ROMS (though the capacity of any single owner to retain ownership of images appears incre­ asingly doomed). Old notable families with private collections incorporate themsel­ ves as non-governmental organizations, consolidating, cataloguing and digitizing their holdings in search of new publics and purposes. Regional artists and curators have drawn on vintage photographs in a never-ending series of artistic projects. Pub­ lishers have been mining the same artifacts for coffee table books  – though more recently, the assured commercial success of such books of vintage photographs has been overshadowed by the hype surrounding revolutionary graffiti. Both genres, it ought to be said, work primarily through exploiting affect attached to these cultu­ ral forms loaded with meaning as they are simultaneously deprived of that meaning and aestheticized. Unsurprisingly, the price of vintage photographs in the private market  – both in upscale antiquarian shops and in downscale markets with used paper – has been sky-rocketing. Ordinary middle-class families are becoming more aware of their own private family photographs that had long been forgotten, stowed away in drawers, shoeboxes and attics (the local version of which is the sandara – a compartment built above a doorway). Many have become more protective of such family heirlooms, making potential archives less vulnerable to loss and destruction but more inaccessible. Yet others have gone in the opposite direction, putting pho­ tographs up on the web through personal blogs or Facebook pages (in Egypt, all too often called “archives”), making their own family photographs, or prized finds they bought in flea markets (or a combination of both), widely available to the public. There is no doubt that there has been in Egypt (and the region more widely) a kind of ‘archive fever’ widely perceptible through these diverse acts. Old photographs are becoming increasingly valorized, though this valorization remains uneven and often departs widely from where the hopes and expectations of trained archivists and historians would like it to lead. Among the most salient aspects of this archive fever

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is the conflation between photographs (or other cultural artifacts) as material objects and their digital copies, leading sometimes to market valuations of digital scans of historical photographs on a par with that of their material referents. Copyright (both authorship and / or ownership) and the basic provenance of any single photograph, its material properties and historical and social contexts, are widely ignored among the vast majority of those who currently engage in the collecting, preserving, archi­ ving and hiding – or, conversely, the sharing – of old photographs in Egypt. Instead of social and cultural objects whose meaning, and thus value as a historical source, depends on their provenance, on the context of their circulation and on social usage – and, indeed whose meanings might have always been multiple, shifting, contested and socially contingent – photographs in contemporary Egypt are understood as mere visual ‘documents’, as mechanical imprints of things that were once in front of the camera. While the ways in which newly emerging collecting and archiving initiatives in the region understand historical photographs vary to some degree, most notably between approaching photographs as ‘art’, as ‘truth documents’ or as mere ‘data’, they all share these common characteristics. Hence excessive demands are placed on photographs as visual documents, an attitude which, coupled with the increasing value of vintage photographic objects in local and global markets, often leads to an exceedingly protective attitude by their holders.1 But while the rising value of vintage photographs in local markets leads to exces­ sive control and the inaccessibility of many private collections in the country, and to the transfer of some to private collections abroad, the effect of this archive fever (the increased attention to historical photographs among publics not primarily interested in either selling or buying) has also led to the ‘freeing’ of old photographs from the oblivion of dusty and long-forgotten family albums, and their wider, and rapidly acce­ lerating, availability in public culture – especially on the Internet. I will focus here on one aspect of the recent interest in vintage photographs among Egyptian publics: their online circulation on blogs and Facebook pages. Dozens of such pages exist, uniquely dedicated to the posting and sharing of histo­ rical photographs of Egypt. They have many thousands of followers; but the practice of posting and sharing old photographs (ranging from one’s own private family snaps to some “pretty old pictures” one has seen somewhere and then reposted) is much wider than anything that can be empirically counted by the numbers of pages, followers, or “likes.” There has been extensive debate among photography scholars as to the nature of photographs in the new digital environment. The field of photographic history has recently gone through a material turn, whereby photographs can only be under­ stood as material objects entangled in social relationships, “collaged, overpainted, cropped, framed and reframed, placed in albums, hung on walls, kept in secret

1 Ryzova 2014.

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places, written on, exchanged, and sometimes destroyed or defaced,” objects that gain meaning through practices and affective acts that involve much more than just vision, being “sung to, danced with, [or] paraded.”2 From this perspective, digital photographs are not really photographs, but rather digital images, deprived of that essential quality: materiality. Hence the age of digital imaging has come to be known as the “post-photographic” age.3 More recently, scholars have defended the status of digital images as ‘photographs’, because no matter what image-making techno­ logy is used to produce them, such images remain located within what photography scholars alternately call a “photographic desire,” “photographic impulse,” “photo­ graphic culture,” or “photographic economy.”4 Indeed, some have argued that the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ represent two different, but comparable and mutually consti­ tutive, environments.5 Moreover, from a purely ethnographic perspective, digitized old photographs continue to be understood precisely as photographs by those who really matter: their everyday users – and, especially, the Egyptian publics discussed here. Regardless of their medium, digitized photographs uphold their essential pho­ tographic quality: their indexicality, or the ‘reality effect’. They are images created by the reflection of reality by mechanical means, whether analogue or digital, uniquely associated with photographs. Not only are they understood, circulated, shared, and consumed precisely as photographs, but – at least in the Egyptian context – their new ‘virtual materiality’ is definitely perceived as a bonus. Old digitized photographs not only continue to be put to work as photographs, but there are increased hopes and demands placed on them precisely as digitized photographs freed from the confines of their pre-digital materiality. Implicitly, in the specific Egyptian context, this ‘old’ materiality may even be perceived as an obstacle. Egypt’s dismal record in archiving and caring for cultural heritage is widely recog­ nized. Large segments of educated middle class publics  – those who enjoy access to the Internet, use social media, have family photographs and scanners or phone cameras, and who, by virtue of their education and social position, perceive themsel­ ves as national subjects as well as subjects of politics, and hence as rightful partici­ pants in public debates – have long held a negative view of the state’s role in caring for their shared national ‘culture’. The state’s failure to preserve Egypt’s cultural ins­ titutions and public museums was widely criticized long before January 2011; it was eclipsed only by the state’s more pronounced and more publicly debated failures in the spheres of education, healthcare, and other vital public services.6 This negative

2 Edwards 2012, p. 225. 3 Mitchell 1992. 4 Batchen 2002; Lister 2007; Hevia 2009. 5 Boellstorff 2008. 6 The state’s perceived failure in vital public services was the result of conscious and coherent p ­ olicy choices by the Mubarak regime through the 1990s and 2000s, resulting from neoliberal ‘reforms’ and structural adjustment policies jointly embraced by the International Monetary Fund and Egypt’s

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legacy amplifies a widespread belief in the redemptive power of digital technology. Newly emerging cultural institutions, such as the Library of Alexandria, only ambi­ guously affiliated with state bureaucracy, offer new models for heritage display and consumption through cutting-edge high-tech projects, promoting digitally processed museology and virtual tourism to both domestic and international publics.7 It is within this broader context that we ought to understand the recent infatuation with ‘finding’, ‘salvaging’, digitizing and sharing vintage photographs by large segments of the Egyptian Internet-savvy public. In such a context, photographic materiality  – photographs’ uniqueness as objects – can be entirely dispensed with. Materiality is what caused the photograph’s loss, its closure, its silence. Freed from the limitations of uniqueness that was the curse of the photograph, digital images can multiply freely and endlessly in the virtual environment, or even re-materialize in endless forms and incarnations as calendars, postcards, posters, books, or banners. Stripped of their provenance, of any contextual information that would preserve their original meaning as socially embedded photo­ graphic objects, digitized vintage photographs are made to speak loudly. They might be ‘silenced’ as historical sources for historians and researchers, but for their con­ temporary users in Egypt, and for Egyptians across the world, such de-materialised digital photographs are, in fact, ‘liberated’. As they are orphaned and de-signified, they are simultaneously re-signified with new meanings that were already there waiting. The more severed they are from their original contexts, the more ‘free’ they become to perform new kinds of cultural work. This is but one instance of local digital vernacularity in the post-photographic age. In this essay, I will describe how, in contemporary Egypt (and to a lesser degree, among Egyptians abroad), newly digitized vintage photographs are called on to matter in new ways, to help make sense of the here and now. What kinds of memory work are these ‘freed’ or ‘liberated’ images, at once de-signified and re-signified, asked to perform? What kinds of cultural memory are they are asked to activate, and what new meanings, including new imaginations of place and the national community, are they assigned in their new digital incarnation?

closely intertwined political and business elites. By contrast, culture was, paradoxically, among the administrative branches least touched by neoliberal restructuring (Pahwa / Winegar 2012), though in­ efficiency and neglect was, and remains, rampant. 7 For a more detailed discussion, see Ryzova 2014.

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Sites of Re-Signification Over the past few years pages dedicated to old photographs of Egypt have prolifera­ ted on Facebook. Most of them are in Arabic, but some of their users use both Arabic and English interchangeably. Among the most popular (those with most “likes” and followers, and most widely shared on Facebook) include Masr Ayyam Zaman (“Egypt then” / “Egypt in the Olden days”), Ahl Masr Zaman (“Egypt’s People in the Olden Days”), al-Safha al-Raswiyya li Mawqui΄ al-Malik Faruq al-Awwal – Faruq Masr (“The Official King Faruq Page”), Suwar Qadima li Masr (“Old images of Egypt”), Al-Qahira al-Tarikhiyya (“Historic Cairo”), Suwar Masr Qadima (“Old images of Egypt”), Kla­ sikiyyat al-Zaman (“Classics of the Olden Days”), Fotografiyya Masr (“Photographs of Egypt”), Suwar Masr Zaman (“Images of Old Egypt”), Egyptian Streets, and, most recently, Foto Masr (“Photo Egypt”). Some of these pages have a ‘small’ following, no more than a few thousand. Others boast hundreds of thousands of members (the King Faruq page has well over a million), and their popularity is on the rise. Among those, Masr al-An wa Zaman (“Egypt now and then”) stands out. Formerly known as Ahl Masr Zaman (“Egyptian people in the olden days”), Masr al-An wa Zaman has more recently expanded its title to assert its primacy in the virtual landscape, adding “First page for rare photographs on Facebook.” This page now has an awkwardly long and convoluted title: Masr al-An wa Zaman / Ahl Masr Zaman – Awwal Safha li-l-Suwar al-Nadira 3 Fais Buk (“Egypt Now and Then / Egypt’s People in the Olden Days – First Page for Rare Photographs on Facebook”). The raison d’être for all of these pages is to post and circulate images that depict aspects of life in Egypt zaman. Zaman might be translated simply as “back then”, but it is more accurately translated as “in the olden days” because it carries a particular nostalgic quality and a positive value judgment attached to “back then.” Also, the word “image” is porous in Arabic (sura means both ‘image’ and ‘photograph’, but it also – and rather significantly – means ‘copy’); more importantly, it is porous in the understanding of the page owners and patrons. Some of these pages focus uniquely on digitized old photographs of multiple genres (street scenes originally circulated as postcards, family photographs made in studios or as home snapshots, and last but not least, staged photographs of ancient monuments and ‘types’ known as “orienta­ list photographs”) (fig. 1). Others are more eclectic and include advertising and other diverse popular culture ephemera. Some other pages (such as Egyptian Streets) post historical pho­ tographs together with contemporary news in a curious conflation of ‘archive’ with ‘contemporary reporting’, a coupling of functions that appears odd only at first sight; as I will argue below, the meanings that vintage photographs assume in this context are acutely contemporary. While here I will focus primarily on the pages dedicated to vintage photographs, it should be stressed that the phenomenon of posting and sharing “old photos” online is much wider than the sum of these pages.

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Fig. 1: Unknown photographers: “Album” of Timeline photos. Posted on Masr al-an wa zaman [17.03.2014].

Free-floating Images Egypt in 1900’s was a different place: it was a place of liberal spirits, unhampered by secta­ rian and ethnic prejudices, and the rights of men, women and children were championed. Click below to take a glimpse at Egypt’s ‘golden years’ and to remember the Egypt that you might have forgotten ever existed.8

Thus states the administrator’s caption on Egyptian Streets, introducing an album of 23 vintage images entitled “Egypt’s Golden Years.” The link leads to the Egyptian Streets blog on Tumblr, which features two dozen vintage images, including advertising pho­ tographs, magazine reportage photos, and drawings. The title image (fig. 2), shows the actress Miriam Fakhreddin posing with a Vespa in front of the Cairo Citadel. Originally a colorized photograph, this is a late 1950s advertisement for Vespa motorscooters, which was printed in a popular magazine. As transpired in a brief online skirmish with a com­ petitor blog (one of those brief and undocumentable ‘action’ moments on Facebook), these images were ‘stolen’ verbatim from a competitor blog, Vintage Egypt, itself a sister blog to the renowned urban activist venture Cairobserver. The founder and adminis­ trator of Cairobserver, a young Egyptian with a doctorate in architecture and urban planning from New York University, complained about Egyptian Street’s “theft” of “his” album on his Facebook wall. The matter was presumably resolved since the posting on the Egyptian Streets blog now includes a provenance notice: “These photographs [sic] are available thanks to Vintage Egypt.” But going back to their ‘original’ place of posting on Vintage Egypt, these images (only some of which are actually photographs, the majority being drawings) appear there as already orphaned images.9 All originate as scans from mid-century Egyptian popular magazines, but no single publication date

8 Published 5 April on . 9  [20.08.2014].

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Fig. 2: Unknown photographer: Egypt’s Golden Years. Advertisement for Vespa motorscooters. c. late 1950s. Posted on Egyptian Streets Facebook page on April 5, 2014 [05.04.2014].

and name of source (the actual magazine) is given. A new notion of ‘ownership’ emerges here, in which the person who first digitized and posted a cultural artifact becomes, in effect, its ‘owner’ – and certainly the only ‘source’ that now matters. These digital images now stand for themselves, without referents. On Vintage Egypt they appear as “beautiful vintage images,” and in their reposting by Egyptian Streets they become illustrations of visible truths. A vintage advertising photograph of a model posing on a motorbike thus ‘proves’ that Egypt once had women’s rights, progress and modernity. Such meanings are eagerly developed by the users. “Imagine a woman driving a motorbike in Cairo today!” This post (with 593 “likes” and 890 shares in the first 20 hours after posting) has sparked a long debate deploring the decline of the present, the reason for which is most commonly identified as religion or nationalism (i.e. ‘Abd al-Nasser). Occasionally a dissenting opinion pops up objecting to presenting a swimsuit contest as an ‘achievement’ and a measure of civilization, but ends up being overwhelmed by an outpouring of reactions lecturing about the tolerance and multiculturalism evident in such images. Masr al-An wa Zaman specializes in posting vintage photographs from diverse genres. Founded in March 2012, it had 250,000 followers two years later and by far the largest number of photographs on any of these pages: it boasts over a hundred thematic “albums,” each containing between a dozen to over a hundred photographs. Also here, the twin characteristics of orphaning (denying analogue referent and pro­ venance) and re-signification within a broad ethos of nostalgia for the “olden days” pervades the captions and readers’ comments. A street view of the ‘Abbas mosque in Heliopolis (originally a photo postcard), captioned as “approximately in the 1930s,” elicits – besides the usual “God, this is beautiful” – the following commentary from a female user: “Guys, have you noticed one thing: there are no big houses here and the people [pictured] are clearly of modest means, but the streets are so clean!! Truly we were once a respectable nation.” An aerial view of Heliopolis (visibly scanned from a magazine or a book where it was printed as a double-spread) receives a similar res­ ponse: “what a pity, now we live in trash [zibala].”

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The notion of zibala occurs repeatedly in users’ comments, as the most approp­ riate shorthand for the poor state of Egypt’s urban environment. It signifies both the physical presence of uncollected trash and the more permanent piles of old bric-abrac on rooftops that characterizes the metropolis, as well as, more metaphorically, the poor state of urban services generally, such as the notorious traffic and pollu­ tion. Zaman emerges as the one-time opposite of the zibala of today. Unsurprisingly, users often express their wish to “have lived then,” or that “those days” would “come back.” A judgment on Egypt’s recent history is always implicit, and often explicit: “All other nations / countries advance while we go backward.” Nostalgia – the yearning for an ideal past, a Golden Age – is predicated on the loss (or denial) of meaning;10 indeed, nostalgia needs an absence of context and ori­ ginal meaning in order to work. Vintage photographs lend themselves particularly well to nostalgia, because of their unique indexical quality as photographs: they are called on to provide visual ‘proofs’ that the cultural claims put forward by nostalgia are indeed true. Such proofs are necessary because nostalgia is, on one hand, always amnesiac; and on the other hand, always an implicit commentary on the present. Users believe no context is necessary: as photographs, the images speak for them­ selves, in this case ‘proving’ that Egypt was once civilized and beautiful. The new meanings are already there in the act of sharing them; they predate the act of posting. These images are just “filling in the content” for a particular cultural project. Regardless of the intentions of Facebook page administrators, meaning is pro­ duced collectively by users, and sometimes quite literally imposed. A street view of Alexandria’s central area (fig.  3) comes with the administrator’s uplifting caption: “The Raml Station in Alexandria in 1945 whose enchanting beauty is still there today.” But the page users did not like that. “Shame on you man,” contends an unhappy user with polite rebuttal: “today it is a trashcan [mazbala, but misspelled] because of the people there, the neglect, and the traffic chaos.” This is not to say that the intentions or motivations of page owners are all the same. Administrators’ intentions (the purpose of their pages, and the direction and meaning they want it to give) speak first and foremost through the selection of photo­ graphs posted, and through the captions given to posted material. Frequently recur­ ring terms, such as sura nadira (“rare photo”), betray the fact that such photographs (common as they may be to a historian) come as a discovery to the middle-class Face­ book user, coupled with a generic impulse to present almost any new material in sensational terms to boost its own importance in an environment where posting and sharing means being. But beyond the surface, diverse motives emerge, evident both across different pages and as different signals sent to different publics within single pages. Some posts (especially on Masr al-An wa Zaman) betray a self-professed goal to aid the country by supporting tourism, such as when photographs of historical monu­

10 Stewart 1993.

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Fig. 3: Unknown photographer: Raml station in Alexandria. Posted on Masr al-an wa zaman on March 11, 2014 [18.03.2014].

ments come with captions “Share to encourage tourism!” (Unshur li da ‘m al-siyaha). This is a distinctly post-revolution concern. The promotion of tourism was traditio­ nally seen as the state’s job and dividend; but with years of instability the decline in tourism has become a public concern, especially for revolution-weary middle-class publics keen on “restarting the wheels of production.” Posting vintage photographs for the purpose of encouraging both domestic and international tourism brings up the notion of public service, which has been observed by scholars studying social practices and meanings on internet blogs.11 This “public service impulse” (including, importantly, a service to oneself, within a community of one’s like-minded peers), while unquestionably present (and here coupled with the very need to constantly ‘share’ in order to exist within the ephemeral and tran­ sient world of Facebook), works differently for different publics. It is present not just through encouraging tourism, but more importantly and more widely, through a shared construction of Egypt as “our past,” or Cairo as “our city.” These notions – often problematic or contested in actual offline lives in both late Mubarak and postrevolution Egypt – work here as potent symbols of collective identity. Vintage pho­ tographs are particularly successful conductors for collective identity, given their indexical quality as visual proofs that given identity claims are indeed true. Vintage photographs in social media work through the combination of their indexicality and iconicity, as they always stand for more than their referent. Four years into the revolu­ tionary process in Egypt, these photographs serve as signposts to navigate a difficult, unresolved and often confusing present.12

11 See Van House 2011. 12 I develop this angle in Ryzova 2015.

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Some postings of vintage photographs appeal especially to Egyptians living abroad, as becomes evident from the comments. Here the nostalgia carried and encouraged by vintage photographs has a clear purpose, and so does the self-criticism or presenthating described above. Nostalgia here both constructs a shared identity of Egyptian­ ness and justifies complex personal histories of estrangement. A beautiful past const­ ructs and cements our shared past; it imbues us with authenticity and pride alike – as much as the ugliness of the present justifies our departure and continued life in exile.

Archives of Middle Class Modernity Other pages are distinctly local. Foto Masr (“Photo Egypt”) was founded recently by a Cairo-based female visual artist with a degree from Goldsmiths. In the first week of its existence, it had accumulated 6,000 “likes.” One week after launching her page, she reflected on the unprecedented response she had received from users. Not only her friends, but large numbers of unknown readers were volunteering their family pho­ tographs for posting on Foto Egypt, “as if people miss the feeling of the large family reunited to watch old photos,” she speculated. This enthusiastic response is entirely consistent with the growing infatuation with vintage photographs among Egyptian middle-class publics. Unlike the judgmental musings on the beauty, freedom and liberalism of the “olden days” compared to the failures of the present, her page tends to be more personal, more intimate – partly because it is better provenanced. Many of the photographs she posts come from families, and thus provide a modicum of context, such as “this is the father of X,” or “this is the aunt of Y at university in 1977.” Foto Masr is more about people asserting their own history publicly by sharing their family photographs within a community of like-minded peers, and by so doing, making sense of the present. The success of this page is predicated on the snowbal­ ling effect of making something public, in which nobody wants to remain outside what emerges here as a collective project of making an alternative national archive of Egypt’s middle-class modernity. In theory, the more of their historical context photographs are allowed to retain, the less prone they are to being misread, re-signified, and over-written with new meanings.13 But the nostalgic impulse among contemporary Egyptian publics – the need to create a personal archive of middle-class modernity implicitly or explicitly directed to indict the present – is more powerful than any provenance or context. Each time a photograph is shared, and thus distanced from its home on the Foto Masr page

13 It should be stressed here that searching for an “original” or “true” meaning is futile; photographs have always been fluid, appropriated, repurposed and recordable (Edwards 2012). See Pinney 2005 for an extensive critique of the search for an “original” meaning. There is, however, a historical context (or contexts) in which they have been previously circulated and understood that matters to historians.

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Fig: 4: Studio Venus, Cairo: A 1960 portrait of an unknown young woman circulating on Facebook. Posted on Foto Masr Facebook page on March 7, 2014 [07.03.2014].

(its “owner”), where the context of other family photographs provides a safe haven of historical meaning of sorts, the nostalgic impulse gets stronger. Thus a passport-sized photograph of a young woman, with studio lighting enhancing her hair and youth­ ful features, and making her look glamorous, once reposted on somebody’s wall, stops being a masterpiece of commercial studio work and becomes, once again, an indictment of the present: “A passport photo in the Olden Days. Here’s to modernity and what we took from it!” (fig. 4). On some occasions, users doubt the very authen­ ticity of vintage photographs; it is not unusual to find comments doubting whether these glamorous and modern people of the “olden days” truly “are Egyptians.” The archives of national modernity emerge here as uncertain, and even those who engage in making them sometimes find themselves in doubt. Leaving Facebook pages and blogs dedicated to vintage photographs and looking at the wider phenomenon of sharing one’s family photos online, we get more of the same longing for “personal-past-as-long-lost-national-modernity.” When individuals (including intellectuals, and even historians!) post photographs of their parents they might refrain from commenting, but meaning is soon imposed on them collectively by others, their friends. A middle-aged Egyptian history professor shares a studio por­ trait of his mother, clad in a cheerful 1960s knee-length sleeveless summer dress, and sitting on a chair in the company of her four young children (fig. 5). His caption reads: This lady is my mother; she was pregnant with my late brother ‘Abdo, she is carrying my younger sister Sawsan, the boy on the left that’s me, embraced by my older sister Sana’, on the right that’s my older sister Sabah; this is a picture of a middle class Egyptian family living in Shubra in the late 1960s; in these difficult times I long for those beautiful olden days.

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Fig. 5: Unknown photographer: Family photograph, late 1960s. Re-photographed with a mobile phone camera and posted on a personal Facebook page. Printed with kind permission of the owner. Posted on April 28, 2014 [28.04.2014].

A nostalgic inflection is encouraged here because of the grim political situation in Egypt (we are in the winter of 2013). Further nostalgia does not fail to come from his Facebook friends. This photo, bad quality because it is a mobile-phone snapshot, received 202 “likes” from friends and 40+ comments in the first 19 hours after posting (though, interestingly, no shares, as the amount of context – i.e. the lady’s identity as somebody’s actual mother – seems to elicit respect for privacy, itself an intriguing concept on Facebook). Some comments merely hail the lady’s and / or the photograph’s “beauty.” Others are more epic: This photo reminds me of the spirit of the family in those days, which was the source of light and joy […]. I long with you for those beautiful times, our lost Egypt […] [lost] because of the stupidity of some of its sons, brought up over the past 80 years at the hands of British and American secret services.14

Photographs, even such seemingly simple, ordinary, and private images as family pho­ tographs usually are, can be perceived by their contemporary Egyptian online users as harboring deeper meanings, becoming much more than just family photographs. This is not incidental, as this is why they are shared in the first place. In the particular context of the online sharing of vintage photographs, they are always already imbued with pre-existing meanings. What they all share is the idea that something went badly wrong – though they differ widely over what it was exactly, and when. Always taken at face value for their indexical quality, vintage photographs emerge as living proofs, testaments and occasions to mourn things gone. Most commonly ‘mourned’ through the sharing of old photographs online are culture and civilization, cleanliness, order, beauty, progress, good morals and virtues (such as family values)  – the long struggled-for prize of modernity. Whereas aca­ demics and public intellectuals both at home and abroad often debate the place of

14 This post brings up the issue of users’ politics, which I cannot develop here. Politics is crucial to many of these acts of posting, sharing, and commenting on vintage photographs, as I develop in a separate essay: Ryzova 2015.

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modernity in Egyptian history (Is it compatible with Islam? How? With the Arabs? etc.), and others conceptualize Egyptian history in terms of a passage towards moder­ nity and may debate its multiple manifestations (social, political, economic, and cul­ tural), for Egyptian middle-class publics modernity is decidedly something that we once had. We have a visual proof of it in our own family archives. Signs of incontesta­ ble modernity are evident in small everyday things: in a model’s posing on a Vespa, in a mother’s sleeveless dress, in the cleanliness and emptiness of a grand boulevard. This modernity is both proven by the mother of all proofs, the camera, and at the same time irretrievably gone. It is now unearthed – the archives are finally opened, their contents set free – in order to be mourned.

The Unbearable Lightness of Photographs Nostalgia always leaves too much untold. Liberated photographs, freed from their historical contexts, meanings and referents, are almost too easy to resignify. But their new meanings are also inherently unstable. For the historian of photography it is most curious to see the contemporary meanings middle-class Egyptians currently assign to that problematic body of old photographs of Egypt, produced, throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, by mostly foreign photographers catering to Western publics. Featuring idyllic landscapes, ancient monuments and social types, these photographs have now become almost anathema among Middle-East historians. They have been labeled, and dismissed, as “orientalist” for their complicity in the colonial project by portraying the region as stagnant, backward and passive, and thus ready to be ‘taken’ by the active-because-civilized colonizer, in a relationship that has been extensively gendered. What they show is less Egypt than a certain image of Egypt that was already there in the mindsets of those who came to take these photographs and then carried them home to another continent. Selective, staged, and demeaning they are, as we are careful to know. But this is far from how they are currently read when freed of their context, their historical baggage, and circulated on Egyptian Facebook pages. Thus a generic shot of a village on a Nile bank, showing the Pyramids in the background, is hailed by the administrator of Masr al-An wa Zaman in the following terms (fig.  6): “Hardly could we find a better picture from the olden days [zaman] to advertise our page. This picture was taken in 1880. If you appreciate our effort and care about the history of your country to reach the whole world, do share.” Seventy-one readers obliged, one commenting: “God bless those olden days, days of plenty [ayyam al-kheir al-wafir].” Another obviously staged photograph of an Arab café receives the following int­ roduction from the administrator at Fotografia Masr: “Egyptian Café … or an Egyp­ tian painting? Cairo in approximately 1907.” Again, the readers elaborate: “Where did this authenticity go?” And another: “Imagine if they only saw the youth of today.” A staged generic orientalist photograph is thus not only taken for a truthful representa­

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Fig. 6: Unknown photographer: Orientalist landscape, late nineteenth century, posted on Masr al-an on 3 April 2012 [25.05.2014].

tion of what Cairo looked like in 1907, but it is also imbued with authenticity and used to provide a positive counterpoint to the things gone wrong today – here presumably unruly, disrespectful youth. It is then unsurprising to find orientalist photographs of picturesque native neighborhoods, the very images mobilized in nineteenth-century Europe to prove the region’s backwardness and stagnancy (chosen with an imperialist eye to exclude and thus visually erase a burgeoning modern Cairo just a few hundred feet away), becoming here, in their present-day digital incarnations, testimonies of authenticity, and even something approaching civilization: a typical comment would be, “poor maybe, but clean, and orderly.” (“Look at the amazing cleanness! I wish we become like this again!” comments a user.) Photographs are not taken by cameras, but by people. Orientalist photographs were taken, in their majority, by people with a pre-existing idea of what they wanted to photograph. The same happens here with their new digital incarnations in online environments: old photographs are unearthed and circulated to provide yet again visual proof of an existing cultural and political project – an existing idea of Egyptian history which is all about the present. In this current project, colonialism has never happened. Instead, generic orientalist photographs are deployed to prove the authen­ ticity of the past, and postcards of the colonial metropolis are mobilized to prove a once-possessed modernity; all of them are then used to indict the present – such as the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood as it came to power through Egypt’s first ever free presidential election.15

15 The research for this essay was carried out during a period when Egyptian public life was / is deeply politicized (2013–14). On Facebook, this intense politicization is more often than not evident in user’s profile pictures, which proudly publicize their political allegiances to the world through symbols (such as the Rab ‘a sign) and / or photographs of Presidents Mursi or Sisi.

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A staged ‘generic type’ photo of a group of native women in traditional clothes with their faces covered with a burqa‘ (an early twentieth-century urban face veil) (fig. 7) gets the following treatment by readers. “This was niqab [facial veil] without unnecessary exaggeration,” writes a male reader, in an obvious attempt to distingu­ ish between a historical form of facial veil (the burqa‘) and its contemporary mani­ festation as propagated by the Islamist movements which, for all practical purpo­ ses, were now ruling the country, and whose form of Islam was widely perceived as incompatible with the majority of Egypt’s Muslim, but Muslim-Brotherhood-hating, middle-class population. His distinction between a historical form of a veil that was “just as much as needed, without excess” would justify the fact that his own grand­ mother very likely wore one (and thus something historically justifiable and possible to include in his own modernity and his own personal history), while also indicting the contemporary and clearly misplaced, or exaggerated, excess of it. But a female user jumped in, disagreeing: “this was not a niqab! It was ihtisham [female modesty, reticence].” Her project is not politically different from that of the male reader, but stems from a differently gendered premise. The notion of ihtisham is a Muslim-femi­ nist argument that sees facial veils as literal interpretations of what they see as a universally pious and trans-historical need for the maintenance of female modesty, and therefore something that accommodates both extensive veiling in history and present non-veiling (we might not wear the physical veil, but we are no less hono­ rable and pious female Muslims than anyone else). The notion of ihtisham (“the veil within”) thus provides a platform for relating to other women cross-historically and cross-culturally. An orientalist photograph was thus capable of provoking an instan­ taneous clash between a man and a woman who are otherwise united in their hate of the Muslim Brotherhood. Nostalgia needs the widest common denominator to work, and detail (context, specificity) is its enemy. There is a reason why it is precisely the photographs that are

Fig. 7: Unknown photographer: Orientalist photograph of native types, late nineteenth century, posted on Masr al-an on 1 April 2012 [01.07.2014].

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most distant – either orientalist ones or those of downtown Cairo (practically hated and symbolically claimed by publics who live elsewhere)16 – that are most popular. By contrast, when it comes to concrete personalities, or specific historical events, there is markedly less agreement to be found among users. A family snapshot of President Nasser with his wife (posted on Masr al-an) provokes such a heated debate between users who pour out insults against him and those who defend him as the champion of national liberation, that the administrator had to interfere on several occasions – less to end the debate as to fix the meaning of his photograph and add his authority to one or the other camp (he ended up cautiously defending Nasser). A posting of a rare snapshot of Sayyid Qutb being led to his execution in 1966 thus comes with an unusually careful and balanced caption, anticipating readers’ heated reactions. The administrator explains: Some maintain that his books contributed to the wave of terrorism that Egypt experienced until the 1990s [sic] […] others hail him as a martyr, who refused to treat ‘Abd al-Nasir as the new God as many had done, and that’s why Nasir had him executed.

The expected polarity among readers does not fail to come: “God give him mercy, he stood in the face of a tyrant and all he wanted was to implement God’s law.” And another: “Martyr? F**k you guys.” Just as the unearthing and sharing, or activating, of vintage photographs only works within the framework of commenting on the present, then by the same token saying too much about them – resignifying them beyond the lowest common deno­ minator of nostalgia – becomes socially dangerous or compromising for the person who engages in it. There is too much at stake here. The very act of designification and resignification is both inherently unstable (as far as photographs go) and socially dangerous (as far as humans using old photographs for their present projects goes.)

Conclusion From one angle, this is not about photographs at all. Vintage photographs activated here as part of a bottom-up archive of Egyptian national modernity are used as con­ ductors to make statements about recent Egyptian history and to navigate a difficult, uncertain, and often confusing present. They are, in fact, used as icons, pointing well beyond their own photographic indexicality. But it is also all about the photographs: they are unearthed and called on to provide new kinds of cultural work precisely as

16 For the symbolic, and much contested, meaning of Cairo’s colonial downtown, see: El Kadi / El Kerdany 2006; Denis 2006; Abaza 2011. See Ryzova 2015 on the contemporary usages of vintage pho­ tographs of downtown Cairo.

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photographs, as ‘visual documents’ or ‘proofs’ of visible truths. All this is not that surprising given that this is how nostalgia works, and how it marries particularly well with vintage photographs given the indexical quality always assigned to them, and even more so in the new digital environment where they enter as already designified, orphaned, deprived of referent and context. Though it is rarely mentioned here, the Egyptian revolution formed the back­ drop of my research and my analysis. The Egyptian archive fever, both online and offline, started before the revolution, but has intensified through the past three years of the revolutionary process, especially online. It coincides, to a large degree, with the opening of the public sphere to political debate and contestation that is, at once, the very manifestation of, and the most significant achievement of, the revolution – to put it simply, there now is a widely perceptible and vibrant public political sphere whereas there was barely one to speak of some five years ago. This is the background against which vintage photographs are currently activated, but they enter this sphere with necessarily unstable meanings. The same nostalgia for a Golden Age and its explicit indictment of the present is then used to both justify the need for the revolu­ tion, and to explain why it has (apparently) failed. Just like old photographs, a revolution can be at once very real and direct (a deep personal experience, like the reality effect of photographs) and highly symbolic (as a political goal and ideal, just like the portrait of one’s parents), but is always deeply personal. As such, it can generate deeply contradictory meanings and reactions. But one thing makes a revolution very different from the vintage photographs discussed here: its meanings – diverse, floating and unruly as they might be – are not separated from its very agents by either time or physical distance, a fact that opens orphaned vintage photographs to an infinite range of resignification. In the case of the revolu­ tion, the meanings are unfixed because of the absence of closure, because the revo­ lution is still ongoing.

Bibliography Abaza 2011: Mona Abaza, “Cairo’s Downtown Imagined: Dubaisation or Nostalgia?,” in: Urban Studies, 48 / 6, 2011, pp. 1075–1087. Batchen 2002: Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea, Cambridge (MA) 2002. Boellstorff 2008: Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human, Princeton (NJ) 2008. Denis 2006: Eric Denis, “Cairo as a Neo–Liberal Capital?,” in: Diane Singerman / Paul Amar (eds.), Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East, Cairo 2006, pp. 47–71. Edwards 2012: Elizabeth Edwards, “Objects of Affect: Photography Beyond the Image,” in: Annual Review of Anthropology, 41, 2012, pp. 221–234. El Kadi / El Kerdany 2006: Galila El Kadi / Dalila El Kerdany, “The Politics of Refurbishing the Downtown Business District,” in: Diane Singerman / Paul Amar (eds.), Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East, Cairo 2006, pp. 345–371.

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Hevia 2009: James Hevia, “The Photography Complex,” in: Rosalind Morris (ed.), Photographies East: Camera and its Histories in East and Southeast Asia, Durham 2009, pp. 79–119. Lister 2007: Martin Lister, “A Sack in the Sand: Photography in the Age of Information,” in: Convergence, 13 / 3, 2007, pp. 251–274. Mitchell 1992: William J Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, Cambridge 1992. Pahwa / Winegar 2012: Sonali Pahwa / Jessica Winegar, “Culture, State, and Revolution,” in: MERIP. Middle East Research and Information Project, 265, 2012, pp. 2–7. Pinney 2005: Christopher Pinney, “Things Happen: Or, From Which Moment Does That Object Come?,” in: Daniel Miller (ed.), Materiality, Durham 2005, pp. 256–272. Ryzova 2014: Lucie Ryzova, “Mourning the Archive in Cairo: Photographic Heritage between Neoliberalism and Digital Reproduction,” in: Comparative Studies in Society and History, 56 / 4, 2014, pp. 1–36. Ryzova 2015: Lucie Ryzova,“Unstable Icons, Contested Histories: Vintage Photographs and Neoliberal Memory in Contemporary Egypt,” in: Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2015 (forthcoming). Sims 2011: David Sims, Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City Out of Control, Cairo 2011. Stewart 1993: Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, and the Collection, Durham 1993. Van House 2011: Nancy Van House, “Personal Photography, Digital Technologies and the Uses of the Visual,” in: Visual Studies, 26, 2, 2011, pp. 125–134.

Afterword

Elizabeth Edwards

Photographs as Strong History?* In the early spring of 2014, during the emerging crisis in Ukraine, Crimea and Russia, a woman interviewed in the street somewhere in Crimea by a BBC news reporter commented that she supported Russia because it had “strong history,” whereas Ukraine had only “weak history.” Taken by the thought “how does one define strong history?”, I linked this comment in my mind to a point made by anthropologist Joshua Bell, who has worked in Papua New Guinea. He has talked about the ways in which photographs formed a crucial part of the salvaging of histories through which those communities could claim their rightful share of the royalties flowing from the ongoing and externally-owned resource-extraction projects in the region. Photographs were perceived to be part of a strong history, and communities which had photographs related to their past were believed to be in a more powerful position in asserting their identities, in negotiating their place in the modern world and in the complex intercommunity politics around local leadership and resource ownership.11 This raises several questions. Can photographs make histories seem strong, and, if they can, how do they do this? How, for groups of people who are culturally and/or geographically located – nations – do photographs constitute an internally mediated and externally understood sense of ‘strongness’ as a concept of nation expanded beyond the concept of the nation-state itself to include other ethnic and linguistic groupings? Arguably photographs became a dominant force in the visual politics of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, just as ideas of nation and national identity increasingly required a ‘strong history’ to legitimate, validate and authenticate them in a rapidly changing and connected world. I want to use this short afterword therefore to consider the ‘strongness’ of photo­ graphs in the rhetorics of nation. Writing of late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury literature, Alexander Welsh has used the phrase “strong representations.”2 While I hope I have not mangled his term beyond recognition, there are elements of his argument, drawn from the interface of legal and literary histories, about seen and unseen evidence, circumstance, audience and the moral affordances of evidence, that resonate with my argument here. As I have already suggested, it is possibly no coincidence that photography and new configurations of nationhood emerged at

* I am very grateful to Costanza Caraffa and Tiziana Serena for their invitation to contribute this after­word. It is part of a larger project on photography and history in which I am engaged. I am very grateful too to colleagues Uilleam Blacker, Gil Pasternak, Peter Rutland and Jennifer Tucker for their suggestions and for pointing me in the direction of much useful material, especially on contemporary nationalist movements. 1 Bell 2010, p. 356. 2 Welsh 1992.

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broadly the same historical moment. Indeed, significantly, according to Hobsbawm,3 the term “nationalism” first appeared in the final decade of the nineteenth century, exactly contemporary, we should note again, with the exponential expansion of the circulation of photographs. It is commonly recognised that a nation is defined through a series of imaginative and symbolic acts that constitute “what people believe about themselves” as much as it is territorially located.4 The ‘reality claims’ of photography solidify these imagi­ nings. Photographs, however, entangle the evidential, the moral and the affective. This is articulated through the powerful double consciousness of photography:5 the relationship between nation is revealed as tensioned between fact and imagination, evidence and magic, the critical and the mystical, and “naïve animism and hardheaded materialism.”6 It is through this sense of ambiguity and potential that photo­ graphs become ‘vital signs’7 of ‘strong representation’ and ‘strong history’. On the one hand, they operate emotionally to create a sense of identification and coherence; on the other, their reality effect is endowed with the weight of certainty. Consequently, since the nineteenth century, photography has been integral to the making of ‘strong history’. Through their reality effects, photographs form a consoli­ dated narrative. Photographs have been used to reinforce a sense of being, of posses­ sion, of identity and of belonging through the establishment of key tropes which have addressed both the physical reality and the imagined discourses of nation. These processes have been closely linked to claims of authenticity and loss, modernity and progress, for ideas of change invariably involve a model of authenticity – what a given society, and thus a nation, is ‘really’ like when it is stable. Photographs, with their temporal slippage between past and present, become part of that discourse of stabi­ lity and authenticity. If they look back at the past, they are very much in the service of the present and are primers for an idealised future. The sense of strongness is premised, of course, on the perception that photo­ graphs, with Rankean precision, show things as they ‘really’ were  – and, indeed, on the desire that they do so. As Barthes famously put it, the lure of photographs lies in their ‘power of authentification’, the emanation of a past reality and a present relevance.8 Social desire for evidence, actuality, authenticity and authority clusters around photographs. This realism, the possibility of the past being propelled into the present in its apparent entirety, and cohering as simultaneously a trace and an undeniable presence  – “it was there”  – acts as both an affirmation and metaphor

3 Hobsbawm 1992, p. 102. 4 Anderson 1983; Miller 1995, p. 18. 5 Mitchell 2005, pp. 7–8. 6 Ibid., p. 7. 7 Ibid., p. 6. 8 Barthes 1982, p. 88.

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of nation. The relationship between reality effect, authentication and affect makes photographs ‘strong history’. Indeed, it functions in the tensions between the accu­ mulation of material evidence, as discussed by Manikowska here, and performative strategies which embed images, as in the history books discussed by Jussen. It is in this symbiotic relationship between the instructive and the symbolic that we find what Homi Bhabha has called “the site of writing the nation.”9 These sites are not uncontested, nor are they static. While all the essays have a sense of an instrumental realist power that enables photographs to function, their fluidity also inscribes “the ambivalent and chiasmatic intersections of time and place that constitute the problematic ‘modern’ experience of the western nation.”10 The narrative is constructed variously through, on the one hand, honorific portraits of leaders and great men (usually), landscapes, antiquities, military campaigns (such as those described by Mancini and Poggi in this volume) and colonial efficacy and, on the other hand, the application of photographs of atrocity, violence and oppression as a forceful and reinforcing counter-narrative to a sense of nation – one united in suffe­ ring. They are also subject to counter-narratives, as ‘weak’ histories (in terms of global geo-politics) struggle to become ‘strong histories’. This is exactly the process exer­ cising the imaginations of the men of Purari Delta, Papua New Guinea, as described by Bell, which I referred to at the beginning of this afterword. The struggle over the image – the ownership of a photographically-inscribed past – has been at the centre of the struggles of indigenous and First Nations peoples over the last few decades, a process often referred to, tellingly in our contexts here, as the reclaiming of visual or photographic sovereignty and a time, now sometimes romantically perceived, when their people were ‘strong’.11 As will have become clear, the work of photographs within the authentic, emo­ tional, instructive or symbolic is premised on the power of the indexical trace – the ontological power of photographs, the sense of “it was there.” This overwhelming sense of what might be described as an ‘applied indexicality’ presents problems in terms of photographic theory where claims to verisimilitude entangle with the politics of representation. There is a very substantial body of critical theory from Jean Baudril­ lard to John Tagg12 that has argued that the indexical trace cannot or should not be privileged in this way, and another massive body of commentary on the concept of representation, and sometimes its impossibility. At the same time, much of the writing in photographic theory has over-determined the causal triangulation of ideo­ logy, producer and image. As Pinney has put it, while photography is “most certainly inflected by pre-existing practices and expectations, the manner in which the camera

9 Bhabha 1990, p. 297. 10 Ibid., p. 293. 11 Rickard 1995; Tsinnahjinnie 1998, p. 42; Bradley et al. 2014, p. 58. 12 Baudrillard 1994; Tagg 1988, 2009.

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is used and its consequences are never simply reducible to that cultural and social infrastructure.”13 I would argue that whatever the intellectual problems of the index and the trace, we have to acknowledge first their power in the realpolitik constitution of the nation – a visceral actuality of what people believe themselves to be about14 – and second how they might be accounted for and re-theorised. The “scorn for ‘realists’ who do not see that the photograph is always coded” is therefore misplaced here. Indeed Barthes sees it as ‘futile’: “nothing can prevent the photograph from being analogue.”15 The power of photographs is located in their social use and, as I have noted, in the way in which they are perceived as an authen­ tication of what people believe themselves to be. The question is not ‘real’ vs. ‘not real’ but how the trace functions in the space of the imagination. For, ultimately, the punctum, that visceral connection in the photograph’s content, always overwhelms the semiotic content of the image:16 that socially-required ‘realism’, the ontological scream of the medium, is the very basis for its social meaning. It is what people want photographs to do. This position moves the situation out of photographic and into cultural, social and political questions. Mitchell famously asks “what do pictures want?”17 Equally we need to ask “What do people want pictures to be? What do they need them to say?” My response to such questions is that people want a sense of presence, of con­ nectedness, which enables photographs to function as the connective tissue of nation  – a connectedness to people and a connectedness to place. Philosopher of history Eelco Runia has attempted to track the shifts in historiographical desire from meaning to experience. He argues that despite the search for meaning and the understanding of the mechanics of meaning (perhaps in the case of photographs, the fixation with linguistically-derived semiotic models), what is actually wanted is something else. This thing – passionately desired – is ‘presence’. As Runia puts it, “presence is being in touch, either literally or metaphorically with people, things, events and feelings that made you the person you are.” It is the “desire to share the awesome reality of people, things, events and feelings, coupled to a vertiginous urge to taste the fact that awesomely real people, things, events and feelings can awe­ somely suddenly cease to exist.”18 Thus, arguably what people, and by implication nations, want pictures to be is a reassuring presence: a sense of the presence of connection which intersects with the photograph’s realist insistence – that confirmation of “people, things, events and fee­

13 Pinney 2010, p. 162. 14 Miller 1995, p. 18. 15 Barthes 1982, p. 88. 16 Barthes 1982, pp. 88–89. 17 Mitchell 2005. 18 Runia 2006, p. 5.

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lings that made you the person you are” which makes photographs ‘strong history.’ And this desire cannot be confined to any particular kind of photograph. As Hayes’ chapter shows, the strength of many photographs in relation to nation lies in the way they ‘bleed’ across established or assumed categories of analysis. They become something else – strong history perhaps. And it is important to remember that these histories and their photographs exist not only in public spaces and in overtly instru­ mental relationships, but also, as these chapters show, in private spaces, consumed in albums, magazines, lantern slides, and even postcards – banal markers of wider public discourses. Their saturating presence constitutes both layered concepts and apprehensions of nation outside official narratives to which they are profoundly linked, and a counterpoint steeped in “desire, repulsion, nostalgia and euphoria.”19 Bhabha has commented on “the cultural construction of nation-ness as a form of social and textual affiliation.”20 As a number of chapters indicate (for instance, those by Mancini and Manikowska), patterns of association – and the sociability of photo­ graphic production and consumption – are part of the networks through which ideas and the visual rhetorics of nation flow. Of course these processes could be seen as – and might well be – a restatement and reproduction of a dominant historical narrative (as indicated here by both Sand­ weiss and Schwartz). But arguably this narrative is both an affective history and an effective history – a convincing history within a set of circumstances that works at both macro- and micro-level. What is striking is the tension between the local and the national, how micro-discourses of the regional and local  – expressed through photographic recording, archival strategies, and photographic rhetorics  – become foci, concretisations and strategies of the nation. As Cohen puts it, this is “an account of how people express their difference”; it is also an account of how this sense of distinctive­ness shapes their processes and actions.21 A recurrent theme throughout the volume is the definition of the material heri­ tage of the past – antiquities, old customs, landscape – as a construct of nation and as a claim to specificity. Photographs function as repeated tropes within a visual rhetoric and discourse; they form a convincingly connected narrative that coheres as a natio­ nal one.22 Such photographs constitute what Duncan Bell has described as a “myths­ cape,” the space in which myths of an historical imagination are forged, transmitted and constantly reconstructed, and in which they are defined through the ideological weight of historical space.23 If the histories of nationhood and photography weave together, the idea of cultural heritage is also largely an invention of the photographic

19 Barthes 1982, p. 21. 20 Bhabha 1990, p. 292. 21 Cohen 1994, p. 7. 22 Jäger 2003. 23 Bell 2003.

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age. And again this is no accident. The repetition, circulation and consistent recoding that photographs afford facilitate their transformation into national signs.24 What also comes out of the chapters is a sense of the iconographic unity of these endea­ vours, almost as if there were a trans-global way of representing ‘the nation.’ These ideas prompt other questions. Where does the sense of locating localness and nation reside? If local narratives become absorbed and refigured within the national, in what ways is the visual used to maintain the local within the voracious demands of the national? Are local/regional histories inevitably weak histories? At what point and under what conditions can they, or do they, become ‘strong’? What is the role of photography in this? One example here is Holly Edwards’ discussion of a process of “self-orientalising.” Paradoxically, this constitutes a moment of trans­ lation, and an emerging sense of ‘strong history’ as reductionist narratives of exter­ nal categorisation is internalised to constitute different and emerging narratives. As I have noted, there are competing processes within this, competing rhetorics of the image, as Mraz suggests in his chapter for example. Over time competing narratives and claims to the visual supersede and erase one another. Claims for photographs are claims to their strength or ‘strongness’, and these in turn are dependent on the efficient performance and management of their signs. The archive is a key site of translation, performance and consolidation, an articulation of, and statement of, a nation as a public culture held in common,25 and managed to those ends.26 As a multitude of commentators have noted (see Schwartz in this volume), the archive stabilises and reifies narratives. Here individual images soli­ dify into the canons of national narrative, absorbed into the rhetorics, functions and desires of a nation. They are not simply photographs of a nation but ‘national pho­ tographs’ seen as a constitutive part of the national narratives. The critical massing of images, of tropes and ideological filters in the archive create an archaeology of a nation’s discursive practices and their material manifestations. However, while the archive represents a certain type of strength, it is also, as the chapters here show, a space of negotiation and recoding. One only has to look at the archaeological layers of C0 106927 in the UK National Archives, for instance, to see the photographic shift in Britain’s colonial relations, from settlement and infrastructure to racial management and then decolonisation. They represent shifting rhetorics of what people believe about themselves in relation to others, as photographs slip in and out of discourses of the nation and identity.28 If the archive stabilises, shapes and reifies narratives, it stands for a very specific form of ‘strong history’ – institutiona­

24 Edwards 2012, p. 7. 25 Miller 1995, p. 25. 26 The archive is, of course, increasingly being dispersed and reformulated in digital environments. 27 The photographs which were part of the Colonial Office library in London (see Edwards 2014). 28 See Edwards / Mead 2013.

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lised through equally specific agendas. Although the archive represents a certain type of strength, it is also, as I have suggested, a space of negotiation and recoding. For all its cohesiveness and sense of a culture held in common, there remains a fragility and the possibility of disturbance. One of the recurring themes is that of ‘rediscovery’, or of forms of ‘re-recognition’, as the idea of nation is constantly renegotiated, both peacefully and through conflict (see Ryzova in this volume). Photographs are integral to these processes. The strongness of photographs and their reality effects constitute not only bald historicist statements of identity and cultural force but “potent symbolic and affec­ tive sources of cultural identity.”29 As such ‘strong representation’ and ‘strong history’ make an argument, set forward a narrative, and stir emotion, yet appear to pertain to facts. Indeed, this process actually subordinates facts to a conclusion.30 It is for this reason I have drawn, uncharacteristically, on Barthes’ over-quoted Camera Lucida. His fluid poetic on the nature of photography and its unstable meanings describes well the phenomenologically-inflected work to which photographs are put in the con­ texts of nation – constructing, rejecting, imagining, yearning, and feeling. In many ways singling out photography must remain a heuristic exercise so stron­ gly is it embedded in other discourses. While its archival management might point to a separate category prescribed by material needs and modes of apprehension, it is more productive to see photography as an integral, yet formative, actor in a wider debate bringing together, for instance, literature, geo-politics and archaeology in a network ­ ossible to of meaning. This prompt a further question: to what extent is it indeed p write about photography and the nation? Yet it is, as I argue here, through photogra­ phy and their reality effects that strong history can be both made visible and convin­ cing in the service of a nation. A key question is therefore, under what conditions does something become convincing? We are back with Welsh’s concept of “strong representation.” The indexical trace is photography’s claim to strong representation. Photography, as a mediator of nation, thus becomes a zone of “control or of aban­ donment, of recollection and of forgetting, of force or of dependence, of exclusive­ ness or of sharing.”31 This is borne out in the current circulation of historical images across the world as old photographs are made to have new meanings (see for example Caraffa and Serena’s introduction to this volume, Ryzova forthcoming) and applied to new forms of the politics of knowledge. It is particularly significant that as concepts of nation, nationhood and state become more fragile in the shifting, and indeed dis­ integrating, geo-politics of the twenty-first century, the claims made of photographs become more contested, more urgent and more strident. The battle over the flow of images and control of photographs and the ownership of history continues as a

29 Bhabha 1990, p. 292. 30 Welsh 1992, pp. 8–9. 31 Said 1989, pp. 225.

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multitude of sectional, separatist and nationalist groups repurpose historical photo­ graphs, online for instance, refiguring the tensions between perceptions of locality, regionality and nation.32 Photographs, with their ‘double consciousness’ of evidence and magic are used to conjure new narratives in unstable times. To paraphrase the Sontag quote given by Justin Carville here – people robbed of their past, or who per­ ceive themselves to have been robbed, are “the most fervent” picture users. This is “the mobilization of photography to project a unitary sense of national belonging and identity,”33 for “a nation’s visual presence is the effect of a narrative struggle.”34 Pho­ tographs are again shown as formative in the desire for, and demonstration of, ‘strong history’ grafted onto new narratives.

Bibliography Anderson 1983: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, London 1983. Barthes 1982: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard, London 1982. Baudrillard 1994: Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and simulation, trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor (MI) 1994. Bell 2003: Duncan Bell, “Mythscapes: memory, mythology and national identity,” in: British Journal of Sociology, 54 (1), 2003, pp. 63–81. Bell 2010: Joshua A. Bell, “Out of the Mouths of Crocodiles: Eliciting Histories in Photographs and String Figures,” in: History and Anthropology, 21 (4), 2010, pp. 351–373. Bhabha 1990: Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation,” in: id., Nation and Narrative, London 1990, pp. 291–322. Bradley et al. 2014: John Bradley / Philip Adgemis / Luka Haralampu, “‘Why Can’t They Put Their Names?’: Colonial Photography, Repatriation and Social Memory,” in: History and Anthropology, 25 (1), 2014, pp. 47–71. Cohen 1994: Anthony P. Cohen, Belonging: identity and social organisation in British rural cultures, Manchester 1994. Edwards 2012: Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, Durham (NC) 2012.

32 For a taste of these ‘debates’ and the role of photographs within them see for instance: the Russian nationalist website http://zavtra.ru; the Lontsky Street Prison Museum, L‘viv, run by Ukrainian nationa­ list historians, which has been accused of misusing photographs of the pogrom to tell a Ukrainian na­ tionalist story; for discussion and opinion see http://defendinghistory.com/tag/rudling-per-anders and http://ukraineanalysis.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/the-prison-on-lontskyi-street-memory-dialogue-ormemory-monologue/ [all last accessed 18 August 2014] and the controversy over Jan Gross’ book Golden Harvest (Gross 2012, pp. 3–4, 69–74), which uses a photograph as the starting point for a discussion of Polish complicity in the Holocaust. Many more such examples, from many other countries, could be cited. 33 Carville, this volume. 34 Bhabha 1990, p. 295.

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Edwards 2014: Elizabeth Edwards, “Photographic Uncertainties: Between Evidence and Reassurance,” in: History and Anthropology, 25 (2), 2014, pp. 171–188. Edwards / Mead 2013: Elizabeth Edwards / Matt Mead, “Absent Histories and Absent Images: Photographs, Museums and the Colonial Past,” in: Museums and Society, 11 (1), 2013, pp. 19–38. Gross 2012: Jan T. Gross with Irena Grudzińska Gross, Golden Harvest: events at the periphery of the Holocaust, Oxford 2012. Hobsbawm 1992: Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd edition, Cambridge 1992. Jäger 2003: Jens Jäger, “Picturing Nations: Landscape Photography and National Identity in Britain and Germany in the Nineteenth Century,” in: Joan M. Schwartz / James R. Ryan (eds.), Picturing Place: Photography and Geographical Imagination, London 2003, pp. 117–140. Miller 1995: David Miller, On Nationality, Oxford 1995. Mitchell 2005: W.J.T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago (IL) 2005. Pinney 2010: Christopher Pinney, “Camerawork as Technical Practice in Colonial India,” in: Tony Bennett / Patrick Joyce (eds.), Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn, London 2010, pp. 145–170. Rickard 1995: Jolene Rickard, “Sovereignty: A Line in the Sand,” in: Nancy Ackerman / Peggy Roalf (eds.), Strong Hearts: Native American Visions and Voices, New York (NY) 1995, pp. 51–61. Runia 2006: Eelco Runia, “Presence,” in: History and Theory, 45 (1), 2006, pp. 1–29. Ryzova (forthcoming): Ryzova, Lucie, “Unstable Icons, Contested Histories: Vintage Photographs and Neoliberal Memory in Contemporary Egypt,” in: Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. Said 1989: Edward W. Said, “Representing the Colonialized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” in: Critical Inquiry, 15 (2), 1989, pp. 205–25. Tagg 1988: John Tagg, The Burden of Representation, Basingstoke 1988. Tagg 2009: John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: photographic truths and the capture of meaning, Minneapolis (MN) 2009. Tsinhnahjinnie 1998: Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, “When is a photograph worth a thousand words?” in: Jane Allison (ed.), Native Nations: Journeys in American Photography, London 1998. Welsh 1992: Alexander Welsh, Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England, Baltimore (MA) 1992.

Contributors Martina Baleva is Assistant Professor for Cultural Topographies of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries at the Centre of Competence Cultural Topographies, University of Basel (Switzerland). Her research fields are art history and the visual history of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, and the history of photography in the Ottoman Empire and the post-Ottoman Balkans. Among her books is Bulgarien im Bild. Die Erfindung von Nationen auf dem Balkan in der Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts (Cologne et al. 2012). Joško Belamarić is Head of the Institute of Art History (Cvito Fisković Center) in Split and is a Professor at the Department of Art History, University of Split (Croatia). He was the director of the Regional Office for Monument Protection in Split from 1991–2009. He has published a number of books, studies and articles on the history of art, architecture and urbanism of Medieval and early modern Dalmatia. Costanza Caraffa has been Head of the Photothek at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut (Italy) since 2006. After studying European Baroque architecture and urban history she is now working on documentary photography and photographic archives, as well as Syracuse  /  Ortigia as a city-island. In 2009 she launched the international conference series Photo Archives. Among other publications she edited Fotografie als Instrument und Medium der Kunstgeschichte (2009) and Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History (2011). Justin Carville is Chair of the Photography Programme and teaches Historical and Theoretical Studies in Photography and Visual Culture Studies at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dun Laoghaire (Ireland). He has written extensively on the history of Irish photography. His books include Photography and Ireland (2011) and the edited volume Visualizing Dublin: Visual Culture, Modernity and Representation of Urban Space (2013). He is currently researching the relationships between photography, race and Ireland for a book to be titled The Ungovernable Eye: Photography, Race and Irish Identity. Elizabeth Edwards is a visual and historical anthropologist. She is Research Professor of Photographic History and Director of the Photographic History Research Centre of De Montfort University, Leicester (United Kingdom). She previously held academic and curatorial posts at Oxford and London and a fellowship at IAS, University of Durham. She works on the relationships between photography, anthropology and history, and their social and material practices. Her most recent monograph is The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination 1885–1912 (2012). Holly Edwards is Senior Lecturer at Williams College in Williamstown (U.S.A.), where she teaches the history of Islamic art and visual culture. Her publications encompass a broad array of topics including Afghan photography, American orientalism, commemorative architecture in the Indus Valley, architectural epigraphy, and contemporary painting. She has also curated diverse exhibitions, among them Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: American Orientalism 1870-1930 (2000) at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (2007, with Mark Reinhardt and Erina Duganne) at the Williams College Museum of Art.

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Patricia Hayes completed her PhD at Cambridge University and teaches African history at the University of the Western Cape (South Africa). Besides her work on colonial photography she has published on social documentary photography in Southern Africa. She is currently editing a volume of new work on photography and visibility in African history called Ambivalent, and is also co-editor of a new series with Bloomsbury Academic entitled Photography / History: History / Photography.  Bernhard Jussen is Professor of Medieval History at Goethe-University Frankfurt (Germany). His research focuses on political language in the Middle Ages, computational historical semantics, pre-modern kinship and modes of picturing history in modern scholarship. He was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2007 and is a member of the Advisory Board of the German Historical Institute in Washington DC and of the European Research Council. Roberto Mancini teaches the political and social history of the Islamic Mediterranean at C.V. StarrMiddlebury School in Florence (Italy). He has also taught in Venice (Università Iuav) and Albania (University of Shkodër), where he conducted extensive research. His numerous publications include I guardiani della voce. Lo statuto della parola e del silenzio nell’Occidente medievale e moderno (2003); Una nazione da inventare. Le guerre d’indipendenza alle origini della Fratellanza Militare (ed., 2011); Infedeli. Esperienze e forme del nemico nell’Europa moderna (2013). He is currently working on his next book entitled Il martire necessario. Guerra e sacrificio nell’Italia contemporanea. Ewa Manikowska completed her PhD in Warsaw and Venice and serves as Assistant Professor at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw (Poland). Her research interests focus on the history of collecting, survey photography, cultural heritage and art restitution at the time of the First World War. Currently, she is working on her new book entitled Photography and the Making of Eastern Europe: Conflicting Identities. Cultural Heritage (1859-1945) to be published by Bloomsbury Publishing (London) in 2016. John Mraz is Research Professor at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (Mexico) and National Researcher III. He has published five books and over 200 articles, book chapters, and essays on the uses of photography, cinema and video in recounting the histories of Mexico and Cuba, among them Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity. He has directed award-winning documentary videotapes, Innovating Nicaragua and Made on Rails: A History of the Mexican Railroad Workers, and has curated international photographic exhibitions in Europe, Latin America and the United States.  Isotta Poggi is a curator and photo-historian; she currently works at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), Los Angeles (U.S.A.). She studied at the Università di Ca’ Foscari in Venice, Italy, and at the University of California, Los Angeles. Focusing on various aspects of the GRI photography collections, Isotta’s current research projects include the study of the impact of photography on historical memory and representation, in particular the Italian Risorgimento, and the polarized photographic expressions in Cold War-era Eastern Europe.

Contributors 

 333

Lucie Ryzova is Lecturer in Middle East history at the University of Birmingham (United Kingdom). She is a social and cultural historian of modern Egypt, with a particular focus on popular culture and the history of vernacular photography. Her published work includes The Age of the Efendiyya: Passages to Modernity in National-Colonial Egypt (2014), and a number of articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Arab Studies Journal, and Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. She is the editor of a double special issue of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication titled “Critical Histories of Photography in the Middle East” (forthcoming, Spring 2015). Rolf Sachsse has been Professor of Design History and Design Theory at the Saar Academy of Fine Arts, Saarbruck (Germany), since 2004. He learned photography in Cologne and studied art history, communication research and literature in Munich and Bonn. He was Professor of Photography and Electronic Image Media at the Department of Design, Niederrhein University of Applied Science in Krefeld from 1985–2004. In 1994 / 95 he was a substitute for Hans Belting, and he has been Associate Professor at the Staatliche Hochschule fuer Gestaltung, Karlsruhe since 1995 (for his bibliography see: ). Martha A. Sandweiss is Professor of History at Princeton University (U.S.A.). She is the author of the prize-winning books Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (2009) and Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (2002), and the editor and author of numerous other works on American photography and western American history. Joan M. Schwartz teaches history of photography at the Department of Art History and Art Conservation, Queen’s University, Kingston (Canada). From 1977–2003 she was a specialist in Photography Acquisition and Research at the National Archives of Canada, Ottawa. A historical geographer with research interests in the power of archives and photographs to shape notions of place and identity, she is co-editor (with James R. Ryan) of Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination and (with Terry Cook) of Archives, Records, and Power, two double issues of Archival Science. Tiziana Serena is Associate Professor of History of Photography at the University of Florence (Italy). She has been Vice-President of the Italian Society of Studies on Photography (SISF) since 2011. In recent years she has published extensively on the topic of the photographic archive, and has been working on nineteenth-century Italian and French photography; her next book is tentatively entitled The project “L’Italie monumentale“ of Eugène Piot (Paris 2015). She is editor of several exhibition catalogues and books, three of them published by the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.

Index Abaza, Mona 316–317 Abd al-Nasir / Abd al-Nasser: see Nasser, Gamal Abdel Abdul Hamid II (Sultan) 229 Abdülaziz (Sultan) 234 Abid, Mehmed Efendi (Prince of Turkey) 126 Achilles 133 Adam, Robert 104, 106, 111 Adamson, Jeremy 5, 14 Adamson, Robert 37 Adelita 240, 244–247, 259–260 Agamben, Giorgio 182, 198 Aguilar Camín, Héctor 245, 259 Aird, Michael 62, 74 Airenti, Tommaso 179, 180, 181 Airenti, Giuseppe 179, 180, 181 Alačević, Josip 96 Albert (Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) 33 Alegría, Juana Armanda 247, 259 Alemán, Miguel 256 Alexander the Great 275 Algazi, Gadi 159, 164 Alì of Tepeleni 119 Alighieri, Dante 184–185 Alinari, Brothers 21, 189–190 Allshouse, Robert H. 5, 14 Alt, Jakob von 98, 117 Alt, Rudolf von 98, 117 Amanullah, Khan 265 Amar, Paul 317 Amici, Domenico 213, 218 Andersen, Hendrik Christian 106, 115 Anderson, Benedict 20, 23–24, 37–38, 61, 65, 71, 74, 182, 198, 322, 328 Anderson, T.K. 71, 74 Andreev, Vesselin 224, 238 Andrić, Vicko 101, 116 Andrović, Nikola 97 Annan, Thomas 26, 37 Arminius: see Hermann Armstrong, William 27–28 Arnal, Ariel 241, 259 Árpád (Grand Prince) 144 Aruffo, Alessandro 136 Aspinwall, Jane 45, 56 Asúnsolo, Manuel 242 Aubenas, Sylvie 184, 198, 207, 218

Auguste, Jules-Robert 134, 139 Avrutin, Eugene M. 22, 38 Azoulay, Ariella 294, 298   Baader, Hannah 13 Babur, Zahir-ud-din Muhammad 275 Baca, Murtha 203 Bacciarelli, Marcello 82, 84 Badsha, Omar 298 Bahr, Hermann 102–103, 110, 113–116 Bajardo 133 Baleva, Martina 12, 221, 233, 237, 331 Balfour, Arthur J. 68 Banghart, Peter D. 280, 298 Bann, Stephen 185, 198 Banti, Alberto M. 128, 133, 136, 182, 198 Bär, Adolf 148, 158, 164 Barleti, Marin 131, 136 Baron, Cristina 147, 164 Barthes, Roland 322, 324–325, 327–328 Bartlett, Richard A 44, 56 Baskar, Bojan 114–115 Batchen, Geoffrey 303, 317 Baudrillard, Jean 323, 328 Bauer, Gretchen 280, 298 Bebeziq 125 Becchetti, Piero 218 Beer, Alois 97 Beere, Daniel Manders 27–28 Beers, William George 34–38 Begozzi, Mauro 10, 15 Belamarić, Joško 12, 95, 104, 115, 331 Bell, Duncan 325, 328 Bell, Joshua A. 321, 323, 328 Benkovski, Antoni 221, 237 Benkovski, Georgi 221–224, 226–238 Benndorf, Otto 105 Benque, Francesco 123-124, 138 Bensdorp, Gerard 161–162 Berger, John 59, 74 Berlusconi, Silvio 197 Bernbeck, Reinhard 276–277 Bertani, Agostino 210–212, 214, 216–219 Bertaux, Émile 113 Bertelli, Carlo 194–195, 198 Bertillon, Alphonse 221–222, 237 Berumen Miguel, Ángel 248, 251, 260

336 

 Index

Bester, Rory 298 Bettini, Carlo Neopolo 121 Bhabha, Homi K. 14, 323, 325, 327–328 Biagini, Antonello 119, 121, 126, 136 Bigger, Francis Joseph 60–62, 68 Blacker, Uilleam 321 Blandina, Saint 156 Blouin, Francis X. 15, 40 Blunt, Alison 40 Boellstorff, Tom 303, 317 Boito, Camillo 191 Bollati, Giulio 128, 137, 180, 198 Bonačić Mandinić, Maja 97, 115 Bonamore, Augusto 135 Bongioannini, Francesco 188 Bonheur, Rosa 32 Bonifacio, Antoine 146–147, 149, 164 Bool, Alfred 26 Bool, John 26 Borchhardt, Jürgen 105, 115 Borzęcki, Jerzy 77, 93 Bossen, Howard 52, 56 Bottoni, Mario 203 Boyce, D. George 76 Bradley, John 277, 323, 328 Breathnach, Ciara 68, 74–75 Brehme, Dennis 241, 260 Brehme, Hugo 241–242, 260–261 Brenet, Albert 147, 164 Brenner, Anita 250, 260 Bridges, Georges W. 207–208, 218 Brill, Fritz 172, 176 Brogi, Giacomo 190 Brooker, Peter 91, 93 Bruck-Auffenberg, Natalie 107, 115 Brückler, Theodor 115 Bruhn, Matthias 153, 164 Brunk, Samuel 244, 260 Brunner, Otto 159, 164 Buddha 270, 273, 275, 276 Buelow, Ginny G. von 175–176 Bukovac, Vlaho 100 Bulić, Frane 96, 97, 107, 112, 115 Burato, Tomaso 97 Bush, Vannewar 169–170, 176 Bushatlliu, Kara Mahmud 119 Bushatlliu, Mehmet 119 Byron, George Gordon 133–134

Cadolini, Giovanni (?) 216 Caesar, Gaius Julius 156 Caetani, Michelangelo 208–209 Calandrelli, Alessandro 207, 210–211 Campbell, Albert A. 61, 75 Cano, Gabriela 246, 260 Capa, Robert 254, 257, 261 Caraffa, Costanza 3, 11, 14–15, 17, 21, 38, 93, 180, 185, 198, 200, 203, 321, 327, 331 Carracci, Annibale 31, 37 Carranza, Venustiano 240, 251 Cartwright, Joseph 134, 137 Carville, Justin 12, 59, 63–64, 66, 68–69, 75, 328, 331 Casasola, Agustín Víctor 239–242, 244–245, 247, 249, 251–252, 257, 259–261 Casasola, Gustavo 239–242, 244–245, 247, 249–252, 257, 260–261 Cassanelli, Roberto 183, 198 Castellani, Augusto 209 Castelnuovo, Enrico 182, 198–199 Catiline, Lucius Sergius 206 Cattaneo, Carlo 120 Centenari, Ambrogio 212, 216 Certeau, Michel de 136–137 Chabod, Federico 179–180, 198 Charlemagne / Karl der Große 12, 143–163, 165, 185 Charlemont, Hugo 100 Charles the Bald 155 Chauvin, Loȉc 138–139 Cheney, Edward 203–205, 207–209, 211–213, 218 Cheyne, Joseph 119, 137 Church, Frederic Edwin 32 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 206 Cid 133 Çika, Leon 128, 137 Ciuffa, Lavinia 203 Çizgen, Engin 233, 237 Clark, George 64 Cleary, Joe 63, 75 Clement XII (Pope, Lorenzo Corsini) 190 Closs, Adolf 152–153 Clovis I 156 Cohen, Andrew 17, 39 Cohen, Anthony 325, 328 Collareta, Marco 196

Index 

Collins, Timothy 68, 75 Colombo, Furio 254, 260 Constantine 205–206 Conway, Agnes Ethel 129, 137 Conze, Alexander 105 Cook, Terry 9, 11, 15, 17, 40 Ćorić, Franko 95, 101, 107, 113, 115–116 Costantini, Paolo 186, 198, 200 Covo, Lica 10, 15 Covo, Mario 10 Crisafulli Jones, Lilla Maria 137 Crispi, Francesco 179–180 Critelli, Maria Pia 121, 137, 184, 198, 203, 207, 210–211, 218 Cuevas Wolf, Cristina 203 Cuppis, Pompilio 212, 218 Curtis, Edward Sheriff 55 Czartoryska, Izabella 88 Czołowski, Aleksander 87   Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé 43 Dammacco, Gaetano 125, 137 Dandolo, Enrico 211, 214 Dante: see Alighieri, Dante Danesi, Michele 208, 212 Daverio, Francesco 211, 214 Daviau, Donald 102, 115 Davis, Keith F. 45, 56 De la Colina, José 250, 252, 260 De Martino, Leonardo 122 De Rada, Girolamo 120 De Simonis, Paolo 129, 137 Decamps, Alexandre Gabriel 134 Deda, Ndoc 132 Delacroix, Eugène 134 Delaroche, Paul 32 Del Castillo Cubillo, Faustino: see Mayo, Faustino Del Castillo Cubillo, Pablo: see Mayo, Pablo Del Castillo Troncoso, Alberto 250, 260 Delpino, Filippo 134–135, 137 Denis, Eric 316–317 Dercks, Ute 13 Derrida, Jacques 21 Destani, Bejtullah 120, 125, 129, 134, 137 Dewitz, Bodo von 218 Díaz, Enrique 254, 260 Díaz, Porfirio 240, 260 Didi-Huberman, Georges 299

 337

Diehl, Charles 106, 113 Dikovitskaya, Margaret 6, 14 Diocletian 97–98, 101, 104–107, 111–113 Dixon, Henry 26 Dodwell, Edward 134, 137 Dogo, Marco 120, 137 Doughty, Arthur G. 25, 39 Dreyer, Hans 298 Drishti, Ylli 128, 137 Du Moulin-Eckhart, Richard 149–150, 165 Duc de Luynes 25, 39 Dukajini, Alessandro 133 Dumas, Alexandre 206–207 Dupré, Louis 134, 137 Durand-Brager, Jean-Baptiste Henry 122 Dürer, Albrecht 146, 149, 154, 157, 158 Durham, Mary Edith 126, 129, 137 Dvořák, Max 107, 115, 116   Ebner, Theodor 150–153, 164 Echeverría, Luis 257 Eckner, Otto 171 Edwards, Elizabeth 9, 11, 13–15, 17, 68, 72, 73, 75–77, 191, 198, 259, 299, 303, 310, 317, 322, 326, 328–329, 331 Edwards, Holly 13, 265, 267–268, 277, 326, 331 Ehlers, Joachim 145 Eichinger, Ludwig M. 165 Eisenstaedt, Alfred 257 Eisler, Max 98 Eitelberger von Edelberg, Rudolf 98, 100–101, 104, 112, 115, 117 El Kadi, Galila 316–317 El Kerdany, Dalila 316–317 Elsie, Robert 120, 125, 129, 134, 137 Emiliani, Andrea 195, 197–199 Emma (Countess of Oxford and Asquith) 172 Enwezor, Okwui 282, 288, 298 Epaminondas 133 Eskildsen, Ute 177 Evans, Emyr Estyn 67–68, 75   Fahrmeir, Andreas 165 Fakhreddin, Miriam 306 Falloux, Frédéric de 204, 219 Falzone del Barbarò, Michele 218 Farnese, Girolamo 215 Farrakhan, Louis 22

338 

 Index

Faruq I (King of Egypt and the Sudan) 305 Favre, Thierry 147, 164 Ferdinand I (Emperor of Austria, former Archduke) 98 Ferdinand II (King of Naples)  208 Ferdinand Max (Archduke of Austria, later Maximilian I of Mexico) 113–114 Ferraris, Maurizio 180, 199 Fiedler, Franz 291 Filippin, Sara 186, 199 Fiorani, Caterina 203, 209 Fiorelli, Giuseppe 192 Fisher, George Thomas Jun. 25, 39 Fishta, Gjergj 135 Fochessati, Matteo 137 Foliot, Philippe 25, 39 Folnesics, Hans 107 Förster, Max 112 Foscolo, Ugo 120 Foster, John Wilson 60, 75 Foucault, Michel 21 Fowler, Don D. 45, 56 Fracassi, Claudio 204, 209, 213, 218 France, Anatole 113 François, Etienne 145, 164 Franz Joseph I (Emperor of Austria) 97 Franz Ferdinand (Archduke of Austria) 101, 113, 115 Frashëri, Naim 133, 137 Frashëri, Sami 128 Frecot, Janos 172, 176 Frederick William I (King in Prussia) 150 Freeborn, John 209 Freeman, Edward Augustus 104 Freund, Giséle 172 Frey, Dagobert 107 Fried, Johannes 165 Friedrich Barbarossa 159–160 Frizot, Michel 38–39 Fulford, Francis 31 Fuller, Margaret 206, 218 Fulton, Marianne 257, 260 Fumagalli, Giuseppe 191   Garanina, Svetlana 5, 15 García, Manuel 254, 260 Garduño, Antonio 250–251 Garibaldi Jallet, Annita 203, 214

Garibaldi, Giuseppe 186–187, 200, 203, 205–206, 208, 210–212, 215–216, 218–219 Garrigan, Shelley 92–93 Gatrell, Peter 80, 93 Geffcken, Katherine A. 215, 218 Geingob, Hage 295 Genghis Khan 275 George V (King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions) 64 Gernsheim, Helmut 194 Gérôme, Jean Léon 134 Gigord, Pierre de 235 Gillman, Derek 276–277 Ginzbourg, Carlo 182, 198 Giordano, Luca 32 Giotto di Bondone 184–186, 199 Giudici, Corinna 15, 194, 199–200 Gjeçov, Costantino 133 Gjoka, Lola 127 Glavinić, Mihovil 96 Glenn, James R. 44, 56 Glück, Leonard 129, 137 Goetz, Walter 157 Goetzmann, William H. 44, 56 Goldhahn, Almuth 13 Goldman, Norma 218 Goldstein, Giuseppe 97 Gómez Mompart, Josep Lluis 254, 260 Gordon, Robert J. 285–286, 290, 293, 297–298 Gorini, Carlo 216 Gottwald, Klement 174 Graham, Brian J. 66, 74–75 Gray, Michael 218 Grčević, Nada 98, 115 Green, Reginald H. 299 Green, William Alfred 62-67, 70-74 Gresleri, Giuliano 106, 115 Grimes, Julia 203 Grocholski, Ludgar 89, 93–94 Gropius, Walter 171–173 Gross, Irene Grudzinska 328–329 Gross, Jan T. 328, 329 Grujov, Gavril: see Benkovski, Georgi Guastalla, Enrico 216 Guatelli, Tiziana 187 Guesnet, Louis 148 Guevara, Arturo 241, 260 Guha-Thakurta, Tapati 92–93

Index 

Gurakuqi, Luigj 125, 137–138 Gurlitt, Cornelius 95, 106, 109, 111–113, 115–117 Haddon, Alfred Cort 69, 73, 75–76 Hadrian 205 Hadsell, Walter P. 241 Hagemeyer, Hans 157, 165 Hahn, Johann Georg von 128–129, 137 Hales, Peter Bacon 45, 56 Halwani, Miriam 172, 176 Hamdi Bey, Osman 235, 237 Hammer, Franz 172, 176 Hanfstaengl, Franz 153 Hare, Jimmy 254 Harold 134 Hartman, Sabine 167, 177 Haus, Andreas 171, 176 Hauser, Alois 99, 105 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène 26 Haw, Dora Luz 246, 260 Hayden, Ferdinand 45, 49–53 Hayes, Patricia 13, 279–280, 282, 285, 290, 293–299, 325, 332 Hearst, William Randolph 248 Hébrard, Ernest 97, 105–106, 115–117 Hecquard, Hyacinthe 129, 137 Helgerson, Richard 19, 37, 39 Hendricks, Agab 296–297 Henne am Rhyn, Otto 158, 165 Henneberg, Krystyna von 182, 199 Henrichsen, Dag 279, 298 Henry, Florence 171 Henry the Lion 159–160 Hermann 160 Hernández, Gerónimo 244–245, 260 Hernández-Claire, José 247 Hevia, James 279, 298, 303, 318 Heyck, Eduard 158, 165 Heyman, Therese Thau 44, 56 Hibbert, Christopher 206, 218 Hight, Eleanor M. 63, 75 Hill, David Octavius 37 Hillebrecht, Werner 279, 291 Hillers, John Karl 45, 56 Hime, Humphrey Lloyd 27–28 Hine, Lewis 254 Hishongwa, Ndeutala Selma 280, 298 Hitler, Adolf 157

 339

Hlatev, Gavril Gruev: see Benkovski, Georgi Hobhouse, John Cam 120, 137 Hobsbawm, Eric J. 7, 59, 61, 75, 179, 322, 329 Hogg, Alexander 61–65, 73, 76 Holbach, M. Maude 103, 113 Hölder, Alfred 104 Hood, Robin 248 Howe, Stephen 63, 75 Hrelkov, Stanyo 224, 230 Huerta, Victoriano 249, 260 Hugelmann 249 Hughes, James L. 36, 39 Hugonnet, Léon 129, 137 Hult-Lewis, Christine 45, 56 Hunt, William Holman 32 Hutchinson, John 60, 75 Huxley, Julian 177   Idromeno, Kolё 123, 130 Iliev, Dragan 223, 226 Illia, Frano 137 Induno, Girolamo 216 Isabella, Maurizio 120, 138 Itten, Anneliese 176 Itten, Johannes 171–172, 175–176 Ivanowits, Paul 100 Iveković, Ćiril Metod 95, 97, 100, 106, 108–109, 111, 114, 116   Jackson, Alvin 70, 75 Jackson, Thomas Graham 96, 104, 115–116 Jackson, William Henry 45, 49–56 Jacoby, Heinrich 172 Jäger, Jens 39, 325, 329 James, Jesse 248 James, Peter 56 James, Wilmot G. 283, 299 Jamski, Piotr 91, 93 Jéquier, Gustave 106 Jeudy, Henry-Pierre 188, 199 Jezernik, Božidar 129, 138 Jiménez, Arturo 246, 260 Jonkov, Hristo 222, 227–229, 233, 237 Joseph II (Holy Roman Emperor) 119 Jurić, Zlatko 112, 116 Jurovics, Toby 45, 56 Jussen, Bernhard 12, 141, 143, 148, 159, 165, 323, 332

340 

 Index

Kableshkov, Todor 224 Kadaré, Ismail 119, 138 Kamenova, Anna 222–224, 226–228, 231, 237 Kämper, Heidrun 165 Kappus, Elke-Nicole 100, 116 Karađorđević, Alexander 112 Karaman, Ljubo 107, 115 Karzai, Hamid 275 Katz, Friedrich 248, 250, 260 Kaulbach, Friedrich 151–154, 160 Kazazi, Hamzё 122 Kečkemet, Duško 101, 116 Keita, Seydou 282, 299 Kelsey, Robin 11, 15, 21, 39–40, 45, 56 Khan, Mohammed Daoud 265, 276 King, Clarence 45 King, Thomas Davies 31–33, 39 Kirkland, Richard 63, 75 Kjolenda, Ernesto 131 Knyaginya, Rayna 228 König, Karl 112 Kodheli, Bernardina 125 Kodheli, Kel: see Marubi, Kel Kodheli, Mati 123–124 Koehler, Véronique 5, 15 Kolombi, Zef 130 Koqali, Andon 129, 138 Koselleck, Reinhart 141, 164–165 Kowalczyk, Georg 95–98, 101–105, 109–110, 112–116 Kozličić, Mithad 99, 116 Kraja, Ndok Palokё 122 Krüger, Gerhard 157, 165 Krzović, Ibrahim 113, 116 Kuczman, Kazimierz 88, 93 Kushi, Andrea 130 Kutschera, Chris 4 La Adelita: see Adelita Lacan, Ernest 24, 39 Laforest, Franz 97 Lampert, Tom 141 Lanckoroński, Karl 105 Landseer, Edwin 32 Langlois, Jean-Charles 122 Larrain, Marcos G. 250, 260 Lassam, Robert E. 218 Lassimonne, Pierre 122 Launay, Marie de 237

Laura, Domenico 179, 181 Lauria, Daniela 187 Lavisse, Ernest 154–155, 165 Lawlor, Catherine 75 Le Goff, Jacques 24, 39, 137 Le Gray, Gustave 183–184, 198, 206–207, 218 Lear, Edward 125, 129, 134, 137 Lecchi, Stefano 12, 121, 137, 184, 198, 203–215, 217–219 Lednicki, Adolf 87 Lefebvre, Henri 196 Leo III (Pope) 161 Leonhardt, Karl 157 Leonidas 133 Lesy, Michael 59, 75 Levi, Donata 185, 196, 199 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 161 Levson, Leon 282, 299 Lewis, David 219 Liebenberg, John 279–282, 284–299 Lien, Sigrid 9, 15 Lipi, Rafael 125, 138 Lister, Martin 303, 318 Little Crow 53–54 Liva, Walter 121, 138 Llosa, Mario Vargas 239 Locher, Hubert 141, 164–165 Löffler, Ludwig 151, 165 López Portillo, José 257 López, Nacho 239, 261 Lopez Y Royo Poggi, Simonetta 203 Lord Dufferin (Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Frederick) 36 Loughlin, James 66, 75–76 Löwenstein, Hubertus Prinz zu 159, 165 Lullies, Reinhard 115 Lumière, Brothers 126–127 Lyons, Claire 203 Lysaght, Sean 66, 76   Madero, Francisco 240–242, 244, 260 Madzharov, Michail 223–224, 227–228, 230–231, 238 Maffioli, Monica 200, 218 Magnin, Andre 282, 299 Maguire, William Alexander 61–62, 64– 65, 76 Maher, William J. 21, 39 Maleković, Vladimir 98, 116

Index 

Malev, Tatjana Krizman 120, 138 Malot, Franz 95 Mameli, Goffredo 210–211, 214 Mamoli Zorzi, Rosella 203, 218 Manara, Luciano 211, 214 Mancini, Roberto 12, 119, 122, 129, 138, 323, 325, 332 Manikowska, Ewa 12, 77–78, 80–81, 93, 323, 325, 332 Marchand, Suzanne 101–102, 112, 116 Marco (Venetian chemist) 119 Marcos (Subcomandante) 251 Maria Josepha (Archduchess of Austria) 107 Marin, Emilio 115 Mario, Alberto 210 Mario, Jessie White 210–216, 219 Markantonatos, Adriana 141, 165, 203 Marković, Slavica 95, 107, 116 Marky, Smajl 122 Martini, Ndoc 130 Martini, Smail 122 Marubbi, Maria 119–120 Marubbi, Pietro 12, 119–125, 127–130, 132–136, 138–139 Marubi, Gegë 12, 127–128, 130, 133–136, 138–139 Marubi, Kel 12, 124–126, 128, 130–131, 133–136, 138–139 Marubi, Pjetër: see Marubbi, Pietro Marubi, Rrok 126 Marville, Charles 26 Mary (Queen of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions) 64 Masina, Angelo 211, 214 Massoud, Ahmad Shah 275–276 Matania, Edoardo 212–216 Matejko, Jan 85, 94 Matelski, Dariusz 79, 94 Matia, Kin 132 Matsumoto-Best, Saho 219 Matteoni, Dario 106, 115 Maury, Édouard 113, 116 Maxentius 206 Mayer, Léopold-Ernest 26, 39 Mayo, Cándido 239–240, 252–261 Mayo, Faustino 239–240, 252–261 Mayo, Francisco (Paco) 239–240, 252–261 Mayo, Julio 239–240, 252–261 Mayo, Pablo 239–240, 252–261

 341

Mazzini, Giuseppe 120, 138, 179, 187, 203–204, 206–207, 209–210, 219 McCuaig, William 180, 198 McLaughlin, Samuel 23, 27 Michelet, Jules 26 Migjeni: see Nicolla, Millosh Gjergj McMahon, Timothy G. 60, 76 Medici, Giacomo 211, 216 Medina, Elsa 242–244 Méhèdin, Léon-Eugène 122 Meiselas, Susan 3–4, 15 Mendoza Avilés, Mayra 241, 260 Merero, David 295 Mérieult, Louis 146–147, 149, 164 Meyer, Lorenzo 245, 259 Miescher, Giorgio 298 Miller, David 322, 324, 326, 329 Miller, Fred 241 Milne, Robert 29–31, 37 Minkley, Gary 282, 299 Minkowski, Hermann 170, 176 Mio, Vanjush 130 Miraglia, Marina 183, 185, 191, 199, 207, 212, 219 Mitchell, W.J.T. 322, 324, 329 Mitchell, William J. 303, 318 Mlika, Ndriçim 119, 138 Modotti, Tina 239, 253 Mofokeng, Santu 298 Mohammed 272 Moholy, Lucia 12, 167–177 Moholy-Nagy, László 167, 171–173, 175–177 Mollenhauer-Klueber, Elisabeth 170, 177 Molmenti, Pompeo 117 Monaldi, Giacomo 84 Monck, Charles Stanley 33 Monteil, Amans-Alexis 26 Monti, Paolo 196 Moorsom, Richard 280, 299 Mór, Jókai 100 Morales Carrillo, Alfonso 246, 254, 261 Morales, Miguel Ángel 244, 246, 260 Morelowski, Marian 82–85, 88–89, 91, 94 Moretti, Gaetano 191 Morgan, Claudia 123, 138 Morris, Rosalind 298, 318 Mozzo, Marco 186, 189, 199 Mraz, John 12, 239–240, 246, 251, 253, 255–259, 261, 326, 332

342 

 Index

Mubarak, Hosni 303, 309 Mula, Çun 122 Müller, Heinrich Friedrich 99 Müller, Joseph 129, 138 Murawska-Muthesius, Katarzyna 87, 94 Mureimi, Moses 288 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban 32   Naef, Weston 44–45, 56 Napoleon Bonaparte 248 Napoleon III (Emperor of the French) 122 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 307, 316 Naya, Carlo 186, 199 Neale, John Mason 104 Neubauer, Theodor 172, 176 Neumann-Strela, Karl 149-150, 165 Newbury, Darren 282, 299 Nicholas II (Emperor of Russia) 5 Nicolla, Millosh Gjergj 127 Niemann, George 97, 104–106, 116 Nitzsche-Reiter, Ottilie 291 Noli, Fan Stilian 133, 138 Notman, William 17–19, 21, 27, 31–37, 39 Nova, Alessandro 13 Nujoma, Sam 280, 295, 299   O’Day, Alan 70, 76 O’Malley, Ilene 250, 261 O’Sullivan, Timothy 45, 47–50, 56 Obregón, Álvaro 240, 260 Obretenov, Nikola 228 Oliver (Charlemagne’s paladin) 149 Ornsten, Marjorie 203 Orozco, José Clemente 239 Orozco, Pascual 244 Orsini, Giorgio 107 Orthbandt, Eberhard 158, 165 Ortíz, José 251, 261 Osmani, Semiha 119, 138 Ottenfeld, Rudolf von 100 Otto III (Holy Roman Emperor) 145–146, 149, 154 Oudiné, Eugène-André 235 Oudinot, Charles 204, 209 Öztuncay, Bahattin 233, 235–236, 238   Pacor, Mario 120, 138 Pahwa, Sonali 304, 318 Pais, Ettore 117

Palmquist, Peter E. 45, 56 Panofsky, Erwin 141 Paoli, Silvia 194, 199, 203, 205, 208, 210–211, 219 Pasha, Hajdar 127 Pashë Shkodrani: see Vasa, Pasco Passuth, Krisztina 175, 177 Pasternak, Gil 321 Paton, Andrew Archibald 104 Pavia, Alessandro 121, 139, 195 Payne, Alina 116 Pederin, Ivan 99, 102, 114, 116 Pelizzari, Maria Antonella 182, 199 Peltola, Pekka 280, 299 Pendleton, Wade C. 283, 299 Pennazzi, Luigi 135, 138 Pepin the Short 161 Perrot, Georges 135, 139 Peterson, Nicholas 74, 76 Petter, Franz 99 Pfaffenbichler, Matthias 133, 138 Pierson, Pierre-Louis 26, 39 Pijarski, Krysztof 11, 15 Piłatowicz, Józef 80, 94 Pini, Ruggero 205 Pinney, Christopher 63, 74, 76, 296, 299, 310, 318, 323–324, 329 Piot, Eugène 183–184, 200 Piplović, Stanko 101, 116 Pius IX (Pope, Giovanni Maria MastaiFerretti) 203 Pizzo, Marco 138 Planiscig, Leo 107 Plater-Zyberk, Stefan 82, 84–86, 89–90 Poggi, Isotta 12, 121, 184, 323 Pölitz, Karl Heinrich Ludwig 151–152 Poniatowska, Elena 244, 261 Popov, Zhechko 222, 226, 228–229, 238 Popp de Szathmari, Carol 122 Poqueville, François Ch. de 126, 138 Porciani, Ilaria 185, 199 Porto, Nuno 62, 76 Powell, John Wesley 45 Pozzi, Pompeo 121 Praeger, Robert Lloyd 66–68, 70, 73, 75–76 Price, William Lake 25, 32, 39 Prigge, Walter 171, 177 Prince of Wales 27, 35

Index 

Prokudin-Gorskii, Sergei Mikhailovic 5–6, 8, 14, 15 Puccini, Sandra 138 Puebla, Carlos Salazar 255   Quemali, Ismail 125 Quensel, Paul 148, 164 Quiggin, Alison Hingston 69, 76 Quondam, Amedeo 187, 199 Qutb, Sayyid 316   Raby, Christiane 138–139 Rader, Olaf B. 165 Radetsky, Johann Josef Wenzel Anton Franz Karl 119 Ramos, Manuel 251, 254, 261 Rampley, Matthew 101, 116–117 Rancière, Jacques 296, 299 Ransonnet, Eugen 100 Raphael: see Sanzio, Raffaello Rapp, Christian 114, 117 Rapp-Wimberger, Nadia 114, 117 Rasnesi, Bartolomeo 216 Rassool, Ciraj 279, 282, 299 Read, Rev. W. J. 25, 39 Reed, John 248 Regnault, Victor 25, 39 Reid, Bryonie 70, 76 Reiter, Johann Joseph 291 Rembrandt: see Rijn, Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rénan, Ernest 128 Rethel, Alfred 145–146, 150–151, 153, 160 Ricci, Corrado 191 Rice, Shelley 26, 39 Richards, Thomas 39 Richardson, Heather Cox 46, 56 Rickard, Jolene 323, 329 Rieger, Giuseppe 99, 116 Riegl, Alois 101, 107 Riis, Jacob 254 Rijn, Rembrandt Harmensz. van 32 Rivera, Diego 239 Rivera Ortiz, Mario 255, 256, 261 Rizzo, Gino 187, 199 Rodríguez, Antonio 255, 261 Rodríguez Lapuente, Manuel 261 Roland (Charlemagne’s paladin) 147–149, 154, 161 Root, Marcus Aurelius 38–39

 343

Rosenberg, William G. 15, 40 Rosenthal, Donald A. 134, 139 Rossi, Lauro 219 Rossi, Paolo 190, 199 Rrota, Simon 130 Rudolf (Archduke of Austria and Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary) 100, 113 Ruiz, Blanca 241, 261 Runia, Eelco 324, 329 Russell Ascoli, Albert 182, 199 Rutland, Peter 321 Ryan, James R. 11, 15, 39, 63, 74, 76, 180, 200, 329 Ryckère, Raymond de 221 Ryzova, Lucie 13, 301–302, 304, 309, 312, 316, 318, 327, 329, 333   Sacchi, Luigi 121, 183–184, 198–199 Sachsse, Rolf 12, 167, 175, 177, 333 Said, Edward W. 20, 24, 37, 40, 128, 139, 327, 329 Salas, Elizabeth 246, 261 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos 242–244 Salomon, Erich 257 Salvator, Ludwig 113 Sampson, Gary D. 63, 75 Sandweiss, Martha A. 12, 17, 43–44, 56, 325, 333 Sanfelice, Giacomo 203 Sanije (Princess of Albania) 126 Santoponte, Giovanni 191–192, 200 Santos, Carla Almeida 268, 277 Sanzio, Raffaello 32 Sauvaire, Henry 39 Savorelli, Alessandro 215 Saxton, Christopher 19, 37 Scanderbeg, George Kastrioti 126, 131, 133, 136, 138 Schachel, Roland 105, 117 Scherr, Johannes 149–150, 152–153, 158, 165 Schiering, Wolfgang 115 Schindler, Emil Jakob 100 Schlegel, Franz 100 Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Julius 151 Schöttler, Peter 164 Schröder, Klaus Albrecht 99, 117 Schroll, Anton 95, 107 Schubert, Otto 95, 117 Schuller-Procopovici, Karin 218

344 

 Index

Schulz, Franz 175–176 Schulz, Lucia: see Moholy, Lucia Schulze, Winfried 145, 164 Schwartz, Joan M. 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21–22, 24, 28–29, 39–40, 74, 76, 180, 200, 325–326, 329, 333 Schweizer, Stefan 158, 165 Scotti, Sara 203 Sebah, Pascal 225, 229–230, 233–237 Sebastianutti, Gugliemo 123–124, 138 Seferović, Abdulah 95, 96, 98, 117 Sefton, Henry F 36, 39 Sekula, Allan 180, 200 Selvatico, Pietro 192, 198, 200 Serena, Tiziana 3, 11–12, 14–15, 17, 40, 179–180, 182, 184–185, 192, 195, 198, 200, 203, 321, 327, 333 Sesti, Emanuela 218 Seta, Ole 120 Settis, Salvatore 194–195, 197, 200 Severus, Septimius 205 Shaw, George Bernard 113 Sheehan, Tanya 75 Sheehy, Jeanne 60, 76 Shima, Rubens 137 Shiroka, Kolë 127 Siebenbrodt, Michael 170, 177 Siegert, Dietmar 218 Sieni, Laura 119 Signorini, Roberto 219 Sims, David 318 Singerman, Diane 317 Siqueiros, David Alfonso 239, 255 Sisi, Abdel Fattah el- 314 Skënderbeu, Giergj Kastrioti: see Scanderbeg, George Kastrioti Smajl Martini Ivezaj, Tringe 122 Smalberger, John M. 283, 299 Sokoli, Hodo 122 Soldadera: see Adelita Soleil, Carlo 208, 212, 219 Solimano, Sandra 137 Sondhaus, Lawrence 117 Sontag, Susan 59–60, 62, 73, 76, 328 Soraya (Queen consort of Afghanistan) 265 Souza Fernández, Cándido: see Mayo, Cándido Souza Fernández, Francisco (Paco): see Mayo, Francisco (Paco) Souza Fernández, Julio: see Mayo, Julio 

Spence, Mark David 51, 56 Spencer, Edmund 129, 139 Spencer, Franz: see Schulz, Franz Spiazzi, Anna 15, 185, 194, 199–200 Špikić, Marko 107, 115 Spiridonov, Zhechko 228 Stacke, Ludwig 157, 165 Starobinski, Jean 128, 139 Stavrianos, Lefton Stavros 128, 139 Steiner, Albe 10–11, 15 Steiner, Luisa 10, 15 Steinmetz, Willibald 141, 165 Stengel, Emil 97 Stenger, Erich 172 Stephen (Saint) 144 Sternath, Maria Luise 99, 117 Stevani, Rodolfo 130, 139 Stevenson, Sara 35, 37 Stewart, Susan 308, 318 Stillfried von Rathenitz, Raimund 97 Stoler, Ann Laura 63–64, 76 Stone, Benjamin 68, 75 Stoyanov, Najden P. 224 Stoyanov, Zahari 223, 228, 230, 232, 238 Strangford, Emily Anne 129, 139 Strashimirov, Dimitar 221, 230, 233, 238 Streckfuss, Adolf 150–151, 153, 165 Strzygowski, Josef 107, 112, 116–117 Suchenwirth, Richard 157, 165 Superbarrio, Gómez 251 Sury, Ernst von 237 Swanston, William 71, 76   Tagg, John 11, 15, 180, 200, 323, 329 Taibo, Paco Ignacio II 250, 252, 261 Talbot, William Henry Fox 207–208, 219 Tashko Koço, Tefta 127 Tautenhayn, Josef 236 Terpak, Frances 203 Theoderic 160 Thierry, Augustin 26 Thorwaldsen, Bertel 79 Titian: see Vecellio, Tiziano Tobia, Bruno 187, 200 Tocqueville, Alexis de 204, 219 Todorov, Milan 234 Todorova, Maria 139 Toesca, Pietro 107, 191, 200 Toivo, Andimba ya 295

Index 

Tomassini, Luigi 187, 190, 200 Tommaseo, Nicolò 120 Tonković, Marija 98, 116 Toye, Richard 169, 177 Treter, Mieczysław 89, 92–94 Trevelyan, George Macaulay 205–206, 219 Trevor, Roy 129–130, 139 Trogher, Augustin 114 Tronzo, William 203 Tsinhnahjinnie, Hulleah J. 62, 76, 329 Tucker, Jennifer 321 Turner, Brian Stanley 67, 68, 75 Turner, Frederick Jackson 55–56 Turner, Joseph Mallord William 32 Turrell, Robert Vicat 283, 299   Urbina, Tómas 251 Uta von Naumburg 159–160   Vaffier, Hubert 97 Valentin, Veit 159–160, 165 Van House, Nancy 309, 318 Vancaš, Josip 113, 117 Vannerson, Julian 54 Vasa, Pasco 130, 136, 138–139 Vecellio, Tiziano 32 Velázquez, Diego 32 Vélez Storey, Jaime 253, 255-258, 261 Velichkov, Konstantin 228 Veneziani, Giacomo 216 Venturi, Adolfo 107, 117, 199 Veqilarxhiu, Naum 128 Vercingetorix 156, 160 Victoria (Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland) 28, 68 Vidal, Lèon 191 Vignes, Louis 39 Villa, Pancho 240, 248–252, 260–261 Vinycomb, Marcus Ward John 68 Virilio, Paul 279, 299 Vischer, Peter 160 Vitali, Lamberto 121, 139, 194, 199, 211, 219 Vittorio Emanuele (last King of Sardinia, first King of Italy) 212 Vogeler, Heinrich 171 Voipio, Rauha 280, 299 Vojnović-Traživuk, Branka 107, 117 Volov, Panajot 224, 232 Vrandečić, Josip 101, 117

 345

Wagner, Richard 112 Warburg, Aby 141, 294, 299 Warner, Annette 165 Wasa, Pasha: see Vasa, Pasco Washington, George 248 Watkins, Carleton 45, 56 Weber, Anton 100 Weinberg, Paul 294 Welch, Robert John 62–73, 75–76 Welsh, Alexander 321, 327, 329 West, Elliott 57 Westerbeck Jr., Colin L. 59, 76 Wheelan, John Davidson 248–249 Wheeler, Sir George 104 Wheeler, George Montague 45, 47–50, 57 Whelan, Richard 254, 261 Wickhoff, Franz 101 Widukind 157–160 Wiegand, Theodor 105 Wielogłowski, Feliks 84 Wilder, Billy 175 Wilder Lane, Rose 138 Wilhelm I (Emperor of Germany) 150, 165 Wilkinson, John Gardner 104 Wilson, Woodrow 248–249 Winegar, Jessica 304, 318 Wingfield, William Frederick 129, 139 Winkler, Hartmut 176 Withaker, Ian 134 Wlha, Josef 97, 99, 107 Wolf, Gerhard 13 Woodall, Joanna 296, 299 Woods, James 44, 56, 218 Woolf, Virginia 172–173 Workman, Frank 64 Wray, F. 241 Wright, Christopher 62, 76 Wultz, Giuseppe 123   Xega, Spiro 130 Xhuvani, Alexandër 127   Yan, Grace 268, 277 Yeats, William Butler 60 Yerolympos, Alexandra 106, 117 Zagorov, Petar Iv. 228, 238 Zahir Shah, Mohammed 265 Zaimov, Stoyan 228

346 

 Index

Zapata, Emiliano 240–242, 244, 250–252, 260–261 Zeiller, Jacques 97, 105–106, 116 Zennaro, Licia 123, 139 Zetkin, Clara 172

Zevi, Fausto 129, 139 Zimmermann, Wilhelm 150–151, 153, 165 Zimmern, Alfred Eckhard 169, 177 Zinkham, Helena 5, 14 Zog, Ahmed / Zog I (King of Albania) 126