Photography and Culture, 14.3 (2021): 371-393.

In special issue of Photography & Culture, Digital Heritage in Cultural Conflicts, edited by Gil Pasternak, 2021.

In March 1942, the Director of British Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey made a public appeal via the BBC Radio. Godfrey requested listeners to send in holiday photographs and postcards of Europe, particularly places of potential military interest. Over 80,000 people responded with holiday snaps forming a comprehensive library that by 1944 totaled ten million images. Relevant photographs garnered from the public for Operation Overlord were incorporated into military briefing materials, along with maps and zero-elevation aerial photographs, then issued to assault troops in preparation for the invasion of France in June 1944. While the material was largely returned to the British public, over 750,000 images were reproduced and remain in British archives. Over seventy years later, German photographer Simon Menner accessed the Imperial War Museum archive to digitize part of the collection for a photographic project that was not fully realized. This article considers Menner’s engagement with these records as a means by which this obscure national achievement has come to light beyond military history research. It also foregrounds the tension between political conflict surrounding digitization of declassified state and vernacular material, and Menner’s photographic intervention as a protagonist in the ongoing efforts to access formerly secret or confidential government material.

Photography and Culture, 12.2 (2019): 227-248.

The German Democratic Republic undertook mass surveillance of its citizens during the period 1950–1989 undertaken by its secret police service, which took the form of documents, audio recordings, moving footage, and approximately two million photographs. In late 1989 and early 1990, citizens of the GDR stormed the offices of the Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the Stasi, following a series of revolutions that shook Eastern Europe, marking the end of the postwar era and the division of Germany. Citizens occupied offices in Berlin, Leipzig, and other locations in order to halt the destruction of files by staff officials under orders to erase traces of its unlawful state surveillance actions. The regime is known for the precise rendering of its nation’s citizens in observational reports and photographic recordings and this article considers the ways in which photography was utilized by the surveillance regime to infiltrate everyday lives. Further, the article examines in what ways these photographs reveal various surveillance techniques and indicate its limits in what can be considered as inadequate or illegible photographs. Lastly, it considers the remedial possibilities of the Stasi archive and its afterlife, or extra-archival legacy via artistic mediation.

Mashriq and Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies 6, no. 1, (2019).

In her writings and video works, Hito Steyerl presents a disruptive tension between the pervading sense of constantly being under surveillance and the desire not to be seen or to be invisible. In observing the omnipresence of the camera, Ariella Azoulay also considers photography’s capacity for inscription and surveillance. This withdrawal from representation disrupts our expectations of the photographic process, in which a contract is made between the sitter and the photographer, that their likeness will be captured on the photographic emulsion or digital pixels, a likeness that can be observed, critiqued, printed or shared. Disrupting the political and social ontologies of photography undoes and unsettles what it is with think photography is and what it should do, hence Azoulay and others ask what is a photograph? This essay takes these concepts as a point from which to consider an aesthetics of disruption and the conditions that cause a subject or an image to withdraw, to hide or to disappear in the work of artists from the Arab diaspora; Cherine Fahd, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige.

IMAGE: Cherine Fahd, Ephemeral sculpture no 1. with fan, 2013, Courtesy of the artist.

In Photographies 9.3 (2016): 233-249.

In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”, André Bazin elucidates how photographic images enable the subject to elude death because by its very nature the image preserves the subject through the act of memory and remembering. This characteristic implies an indexical relation between the image and its referent and a reliance on memory’s capacity to recall such images. Problematising this position are photographs that are removed from their original context, detached from collective memory and forgotten, or images that, in their very banality, erase or negate meaning? This paper explores the disruption to photography’s meaning and memory in selected photographs by Thomas Demand that are restagings of photographs by Adolf Hitler’s official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. This paper analyses these photographs in terms of memory and indexicality and considers how banality can affect the circumstances of looking—a concept that is here applied in order to reconsider these images.

IMAGE: Thomas Demand, Thomas Demand, Modell/Model. 2000. C-print/Diasec, 164.5 x 210 cm. Courtesy Demand Studio. © Thomas Demand. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Viscopy, Sydney.

In Photographies 3.1 (2010): 7-21.

As part of a larger research project, this paper was originally written in the context of the “Framing Time and Place: Repeats and Returns in Photography” conference held at the University of Plymouth in April 2009. This research investigated how contemporary German photography relates to, or contextualizes, a history of place on the periphery of understanding. In my research on post-war German photography of place, I argue that photographs of the urban landscape reveal a multiplicity of histories and memories that challenge perceptions of knowing and seeing. I argue that such images indicate and speak about events, memories and histories that form part of the fractured space that sits outside of, or adjacent to, the events that they reference. In this paper, the literary Denkbild, as practised by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and others, is used as a means by which to analyse both photography and re-photography of place in the context of post-war urban landscape.

IMAGE: Thomas Struth, Hermannsgarten, Weissenfels 1991, © 2009 Thomas Struth

with Ann Shelton in Memory Connection, 1.1 (2011): 335–347.

“Trauma is a disorder of memory and time. This is why in his early writings Sigmund Freud used the metaphor of the camera to explain the unconscious as the place where bits of memory are stored until they are developed, like prints from black and white negatives, into consciously accessible recollections.”1 The relationship between the photographic impulse to record events in the landscape and how those events are viewed in the “here now” unfolds across complex layers of meaning that engage with artistic, philosophical, and theoretical positions on photography in relation to memory, trauma, time, and history. What is the association between trauma and time, between the photographic image, the past and the present? This article examines how the photographic might relate to concepts of trauma, and how those subjects are expressed in relation to landscape from a contemporary position. Psychoanalysis advocates remembering (perhaps for the first time) an event as part of therapeutic process, and often one visits a site as an aid to memory, whether this is an individual or collective memory. Hence, this article will also explore the testimonial potential of the photographic image and reflect on how it can act as an indexical marker of past events.

IMAGE: Sarah Schönfeld. Lichtung from the series Void, 2009. Courtesy the artist.