Archaeology and Photography: Time, Objectivity and Archive

Description

Does a photograph freeze a moment of time? What does it mean to treat a photographic image as an artefact? In the visual culture of the 21st century, do new digital and social forms change the status of photography as archival or objective - or are they revealing something more fundamental about photography's longstanding relationships with time and knowledge?Archaeology and Photography imagines a new kind of Visual Archaeology that tackles these questions. The book reassesses the central place of Photography as an archaeological method, and re-wires our cross-disciplinary conceptions of time, objectivity and archives, from the History of Art to the History of Science.Through twelve new wide-ranging and challenging studies from an emerging generation of archaeological thinkers, Archaeology and Photography introduces new approaches to historical photographs in museums and to contemporaryphotographic practice in the field. The book re-frames the relationship between Photography and Archaeology, past and present, as more than a metaphor or an analogy - but a shared vision.Archaeology and Photography calls for a change in how we think about photography and time. It argues that new archaeological accounts of duration and presence can replace older conceptions of the photograph as a snapshot orremnant received in the present. The book challenges us to imagine Photography, like Archaeology, not as a representation of the past and the reception of traces in the present but as an ongoing transformation of objectivity and archive.Archaeology and Photography will prove indispensable to students, researchers and practitioners in History, Photography, Art, Archaeology, Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies and Museum and Heritage Studies.

Lesley McFadyen is Lecturer in Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London. She has published on a broad range of topics relating to the archaeology of time, architecture and geography in relation to European prehistory. She is the editor of The Prehistory of France (CUP in preparation, edited with Cyril Marcigny).Dan Hicks MCIfA, FSA is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology, School of Archaeology and Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. He has published widely in Archaeology, Anthropology and Museum Studies, specialising in historical archaeology and the history of archaeology, and is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology (CUP 2006, with Mary Beaudry) and The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (OUP 2010, with Mary Beaudry). With historian William Whyte, Dan is also General Editor of a six-volume series A Cultural History of Objects for Bloomsbury.

"A provocative collection that demonstrates how images, when we take the time to work with them, transform our understanding of time, movement, and the messy complexity of our involvement in the world around us. - Mark Edmonds, Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of York, UK This rich and intriguing collection charts the new intersectional field of visual archaeology across its key concepts of transition and duration, offering both substantive case studies and new methodologies. At stake is an understanding of photography as the mediation of everyday life in a time where nothing is quotidian. - Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, USA"