Raw histories: photographs, anthropology and museums

TLDR

Raw Histories examines historical photographs in anthropology as cultural objects that inscribe contested histories across cross‑cultural colonial contexts. The book argues that photographs are dynamic participants in historical dialogue, enabling alternative voices and a clearer understanding of their multi‑layered demands across space and time. It applies concepts of social life, biography, material culture, and performance to photographs, organized into three sections of case studies drawn from archival research. The authors conclude that photographs are “raw”—uncontainable, resistant, unknowable—revealing uncomfortable, painful histories that challenge established narratives.

Abstract

Raw Histories is concerned with historical photographs in anthropology. Rather than seeing them merely as ideologically formulated products of colonial gaze and appropriative desire, it explores photographs as cultural objects which inscribe multiple and contested histories in cross-cultural environments, including those of complex and unstable colonial relations. The book argues throughout that photographs are not merely ‘of things’ but are part of this dynamic and fluid historical dialogue. Such a strategy allows alternative historical voices, counter-narratives and strategies to emerge. Taking the nature of photography itself as the starting point, the book was the first to employ the concepts of ‘social life’, ‘biography’, ‘material culture’ and ‘performance’ to historical cross-cultural photographs. Such an approach facilitates a clearer understanding of both the multi-layered and intersecting demands placed on photographs over space and time. The title of the book reflects these fluidities: photographs are ‘raw’, it is argued, in that they have an uncontainability, resistance and unknowability, and ‘raw’ because the histories brought into focus by such an approach are sometimes uncomfortable, painful and rub against the grain. Divided into three sections ‘Notes from the Archive’, ‘Historical Inscriptions’ and ‘Reworkings’, these key theoretical strands are explored through a series of case studies, based on detailed and original archival and institutional research. They range from the making of ‘the archive’ as a cultural object, through re-workings of colonial images from the Pacific, to the way the dynamics of the photographs and the issues around them have been engaged with by contemporary artists and curators.