Bonds, Attachments and Networks: Photographies of Connection
There has been much recent work on photography and feeling, emotion and memory. Likewise networks of photographic practice have become almost de rigeuer in contemporary analysis. In this overview paper I bring them together to consider affection as a connective tissue within photographic practice. Drawing on my work on the late 19th and early 20th century photographic survey movement, I consider ways in which its activities were driven by networks of affection – familial and social, local, national, and international embracing both the sentimental and pragmatic. It was also driven both by a sense of potential loss and by pride and hope in the future, precisely the sentiments of personal relationships on which many photographic and survey activities were founded. Drawing on recent work on emotion as a historical modality, I shall use my survey material as a case study of the affective triangulation between people, place and photography, and ask to what extent can we write a history of photography through a history of emotion.
Date: 13 October 2023, 16:00 (Friday, 1st week, Michaelmas 2023)
Venue: Rothermere American Institute, 1A South Parks Road OX1 3UB
Venue Details: In person
Speaker: Professor Elizabeth Edwards (Oxford)
Organisers: Rothermere American Institute, Maison Française d'Oxford
Part of: Conference: Love and Lenses: Photographic Couples, Gender Relationships, and Transatlantic Networks in the Long Nineteenth Century
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Belinda Clark