https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/Vvq9oLvj/the-institutional-lives-of-photographs-dec-2019

CONFERENCES AND STUDY DAYS Friday, 6 December 2019 – Saturday, 7 December 2019

The Institutional Lives of Photographs

How do photographs construct meanings in museums? Why are some photographs collected as ‘significant’ and others, of historical value, not?

Bringing together new work on institutional ‘photographic...

Presentation for the panel, Mediascapes in Asia at the International Convention of Asia Scholars 11, Leiden, Netherlands.

When Tokyo-based commercial photographer Matsuzaki Shinji made the first photographs of the Ogasawara Islands during a Japanese colonial expedition in 1875, he also created the first photographs of the multicultural islanders residing there, and among the first sets of colonial photographs commissioned by the emerging modern Japanese Empire. Ogasawara, known as the Bonin Islands in Western languages, was first settled by a cosmopolitan group of people from...

Abstract: When is a photograph a souvenir? A work of art? Anthropological data? How can tourist photographs, produced to appeal to foreign visitors of “exotic” lands, become scientific data? Based on his studies of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology’s collection of early photographs of Japan at Harvard University, David Odo, author of The Journey of “A Good Type”: From Artistry to Ethnography in Early Japanese Photographs, will discuss this complicated terrain. The collection—comprised of highly aesthetic photographs...