This innovative volume explores the idea that while photographs are images, they are also objects, and this materiality is integral to their meaning and use. The case studies presented focus on photographs active in different institutional, political, religious and domestic spheres, where physical properties, the nature of their use and the cultural formations in which they function make their 'objectness' central to how we should understand them.
The book's contributions are drawn from disciplines including the history of photography, visual anthropology and art history, with case studies from a range of countries such as the Netherlands, North America, Australia, Japan, Romania and Tibet. Each shows the methodological strategies they have developed in order to fully exploit the idea of the materiality of photographic images.
List of illustrations, List of contributors, Acknowledgements, 1 Introduction: photographs as objects, 2 Un beau souvenir du Canada: object, image, symbolic space, 3 Ere the substance fade: photography and hair jewellery, 4 Mixed box: the cultural biography of a box of 'ethnographic' photographs, 5 Making meaning: displaced materiality in the library and art museum, 6 Making a journey: the Tupper scrapbooks and the travel they describe, 7 Photographic playing cards and the colonial metaphor: teaching the Dutch colonial culture, 8 'Under the gaze of the ancestors': photographs and performance in colonial Angola, 9 The photograph reincarnate: the dynamics of Tibetan relationships with photography, 10 'Photo-cross': the political and devotional lives of a Romanian Orthodox photograph, 11 Print Club photography in Japan: framing social relationships, 12 Photographic materiality in the age of digital reproduction, References, Index
