Luke Gartlan (University of St Andrews) discusses Victorian arctic photography in The Arctic Regions (1873) and an unpublished album. William Bradford's The Arctic Regions has often been cited as an exemplar of the Victorianera photobook. Published in 1873 by the renowned firm of Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, this imposing volume marked a new phase in private efforts to profit from the trans-Atlantic interest in Arctic subjects. Yet the systematic first-person narrative and captioned prints of this photobook belie the shifting contexts, applications, and private debates that had accrued to these photographs in the intervening years between the voyages and the publication. This paper aims to contrast selections from The Arctic Regions with an unpublished, privately compiled photographic album in the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Photo Archives VI: Vision in Doubt: Arctic Photography, Victorian Geology, and its Anglo-American Debates

This major international conference was convened by Geraldine Johnson (University of Oxford), Deborah Schultz (Regent's University London), and Costanza Caraffa (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz—Max-Planck-Institut). It is the sixth in the Photo Archives conference series.

This conference took place on April 20–21, 2017.

The conference investigated photographs and photographic archives in relation to notions of place. In this context, place was used to explore both the physical location of a photograph or archive, as well as the place of photography as a discursive practice with regard to its value or significance as a method of viewing and conceiving the world. Photographs are mobile objects that can change their location over time, transported to diverse commercial, artistic, social, academic and scientific locations. The photograph’s physical location thus has an impact upon its value, function and significance; these topics were explored at the conference through a range of archives and across disciplines. How might the mobility of photographs open up thinking about archives and, in turn, classificatory structures in disciplines such as Art History, Archaeology and Anthropology, or in the Sciences? The conference also addressed questions of digital space, which renders the image more readily accessible, but complicates issues relating to location. What is the place, or value, of the photographic archive in the digital age?

It was sponsored by the Kress Foundation, the John Fell Fund and the History Faculty's Sanderson Fund at the University of Oxford, and Christ Church, Oxford.

Education

This major international conference was convened by Geraldine Johnson (University of Oxford), Deborah Schultz (Regent's University London), and Costanza Caraffa (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz—Max-Planck-Institut). It is the sixth in the Photo Archives conference series. This conference took place on April 20–21, 2017. The conference investigated photographs and photographic archives in relation to notions of place. In this context, place was used to explore both the physical location of a photograph or archive, as well as the place of photography as a discursive practice with regard to its value or significance as a method of viewing and conceiving the world. Photographs are mobile objects that can change their location over time, transported to diverse commercial, artistic, social, academic and scientific locations. The photograph’s physical location thus has an impact upon its value, function and significance; these topics were explored at the conference through a range of archives and across disciplines. How might the mobility of photographs open up thinking about archives and, in turn, classificatory structures in disciplines such as Art History, Archaeology and Anthropology, or in the Sciences? The conference also addressed questions of digital space, which renders the image more readily accessible, but complicates issues relating to location. What is the place, or value, of the photographic archive in the digital age? It was sponsored by the Kress Foundation, the John Fell Fund and the History Faculty's Sanderson Fund at the University of Oxford, and Christ Church, Oxford.

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Photo Archives VI: Vision in Doubt: Arctic Photography, Victorian Geology, and its Anglo-American Debates

Photo Archives VI: Vision in Doubt: Arctic Photography, Victorian Geology, and its Anglo-American Debates

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