PHOTOGRAPHY BEYOND THE VAULT

Neelika Jayawardane is Professor of English at a public university in Upstate New York, and a Senior Research Associate at The Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS).

“Salvaging the Unstable: The Myanmar Photo Archive”

How do online archives mediate spaces of both resistance and desire? Founded in 2013 by Austrian photographer and archivist Lukas Birk, the Myanmar Photo Archive (MPA) houses approximately 40,000 photographs of Burmese life. It is the largest archive developed around Myanmar’s photographic history, its extensive holdings ranging from ethnographic images and studio portraits to private albums, documentary photographs, slides, and negatives. By digitising and making them accessible online, the MPA aims to preserve photographic heritage in the face of Myanmar’s political turbulence—marked by insurgencies and junta rule—as well as the absence of formal inventories and challenging storage conditions in the tropics. Through its collection, the MPA fosters civil discourse via exhibitions, incubator programmes, and social media engagements with audiences within Myanmar and across the globe.

This paper acknowledges the MPA’s role in revitalising interest in Burmese photography, while also seeking to critically examine the technological, financial and visual systems within which it operates. The MPA’s collaborations with Goethe-Institut, the European Union and the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme, whose funding and expertise help sustain their projects, open further questions on the cultural politics and ethics of photographic preservation under the auspices of foreign sponsorship. As much as the MPA empowers photographic heritage in computational ways, it carefully navigates the fragility, disturbances, and paradoxes of Myanmar’s photographic networks. Riding upon the shifting rhetorics of identity, culture and everyday life, the archive dances with Burmese instability, and offers spaces in which images and narratives compete under a new digital economy.

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Roy Ng is a postgraduate student at the University of Oxford and was Assistant Curator at National Gallery Singapore. His research focuses on Southeast Asian photography.

“The Specter of the ‘Vernacular’: Looking at Photographs from India”

Since the publication of Geoffrey Batchen’s now-seminal essay “Vernacular Photographies” (2000), the phrase—an opposite of “artistic photography”—has entered the academic common sense in categorizing the “ordinary and [the] regional.” However, over the past two and half decades, Batchen’s emphasis on plurality of practice has slipped into a dangerous singularity making “vernacular photography” a routinely employed phrase in specialist and popular discourses—a standardized, static, and non-negotiable category with specific limits and expectations. Two ready examples are how MoMA website lists “Vernacular Photography” under “Art Terms” found in the dropdown menu of “Art and Artist,” and how Wikipedia has a page dedicated to the same phrase to describe the ordinary and the everyday. Likewise, all non-Western photographs, understood as regional rather than global and/or metropolitan, are safely clubbed under the category, regardless of specific photograph’s claim to “artistic” intent or otherwise—simultaneously making “art photography” a prerogative of the West and homogenizing all “non- Western” photographies as the other and/or the supplemental. This is a widespread practice, irrespective of the commentators’ subject position, geographic location, and intellectual affiliation, and despite Batchen’s own provocation a few years ago to do away with the idea of the “vernacular.” In the postcolonial context “vernacular” has an added layer of hierarchy informed by the hegemony of the colonizer’s language that was the “language of command.” By looking at different genres of photographs from India, this presentation foregrounds the problem of the “vernacular” towards writing heterogenous yet global histories of photography, in an expanded frame.

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Ranu Roychoudhuri, PhD, is Associate Professor, Performing and Visual Arts, at Ahmedabad University and co-editor with Rebecca M. Brown of Documenting Industry: Photography, Aesthetics, and Labor in India (Routledge, 2025).

“Archive as Heirloom”

This presentation discusses the private and public facets of photographic archives in Cyprus through a comparative material analysis of private and public collections, encountering the intricate interplays between experiences and structures of colonialism and nationalism. 

Access to public and private archives, and to historical documents in general, in Cyprus are problematic. Academics have recorded issues, ranging from a selective granting of permissions, obscuring materials and documents relating to the conflict. Here, the accessibility and function of archives is questioned by juxtaposing the private photographs found in inherited personal albums with visual images in public records, examining points in which they overlap and point to gaps and/or differences/similarities. This comparative analysis raises issues with observed contestations around the archive in a postcolonial context, and questions how different forms of archives may work in parallel/contrast to one another to give insight into in/visible historical and personal narratives. Thus, public and private archives are considered key agents in observing how repositories may work to verify or veil the past, maintain or overthrow the present, and shape the future.

Notions of the archive as a living and changing entity, and the distinct nature of personal albums as an archival form, anchor this discussion in a realm of discovery that echoes the complex relationships between Cyprus’s colonial and national forces, as well as between its diverse local publics, by asking how everyday remembering and personal albums can contribute to a deeper, more multifaceted understanding of collective and shared memory in divided Cyprus.

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Esra Plümer Bardak is an art historian, writer, and researcher, focusing on rethinking art historical narratives within conflicting histories and archives. Her writing has been published as monographic books, interpretative essays, and as contributions to scientific journals and edited volumes. She lives and works in Nicosia/CY.

“3D Perspectives: Re(Imag)ining a Collection of Keystone View Company Stereographs”

Currently housed in the collections of the Michigan State University Museum are approximately 110 stereographs featuring North American Indigenous subjects. They were all published between 1890 and 1940 by one of the major American producers of stereographs, the Keystone View Company. As products made possible by scientific principles and mechanical means, stereographs seemingly provided consumers with enhanced visual knowledge. But most messages put forth by the Company were framed by colonial presumptions of Native Americans’ inevitable demise and racial inferiority. Some cultural institutions are, for good reasons, hesitant to display or provide access to these stereographs. Many images remain incompletely catalogued or unpublished. Funds to support archival research are becoming more limited. Little extended research on the Keystone Company stereographs exists in part because few records were kept. Many Native people have no idea that materials pertaining to their communities are in certain collections.

Indigenous communities have been reclaiming archival images since the 1980s. Fueled by worldwide 1970s activism, Indigenous peoples in Australia, the US, and Canada have used photographic archives as sources of countermemory and evidence of historical misconceptions. None of that literature, known so far, has thoroughly explored Indigenous peoples’ responses to early three-dimensional images. This paper examines an evolving collaborative research and publication project where an art historian is working with Hopi, Blackfeet, Navajo, and Sioux artists and cultural specialists to provide new narratives for KVC stereographs. I will discuss the history of this collection and the project’s development, as well as its intended outcomes.

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Laura E. Smith is Professor of Art History at Michigan State University with research specializations in North American arts and Indigenous photography.