Working with Photographs and Archives: An Interdisciplinary View

Photographs are everywhere and nowhere in humanities research, from the digital images almost all of us rely on for our research, to anthropologists or art historians for whom photographs might be social objects, works or art, or something in between. In this informal talk and discussion, Professor Christina Riggs will share her own route into working with historic photographs and photographic archives, with a focus on colonial-era Egypt and Sudan. How have different disciplines approached photography as a source and subject, what methodologies might different kinds of photographs and archives require, and what approaches, issues, and trends seem to be shaping photography studies today? 

Biography

Professor Christina Riggs from Durham University is a historian of photography, visual art, and museum and heritage practices. Her research considers how photography developed in tandem with industrialisation, colonial and imperial expansion (especially in North Africa and the Middle East), and ideas of heritage preservation. She views photographic archives and museum collections not as dead legacies of these pasts, but as living expressions of them which, as historians, we have a responsibility to analyse, evaluate, and confront.

Her previous research focused on how different people, at different times and places, have represented the culture we know as 'ancient Egypt'. Her work on the history of the Tutankhamun excavation has helped challenge conventional narratives of the discovery by drawing attention to the political contexts of archaeology, photography, and museum displays. Her most recent book, Treasured: How Tutankhamun Shaped a Century (Atlantic Books 2021; Public Affairs 2022) traced the different trajectories taken by the tomb, its 'treasures', and its archive, from the 1920s to the present day. She has also published the first academic study of the excavation's photographic archive, in a book called Photographing Tutankhamun (Bloomsbury 2019).

Professor Riggs lecture draws on her current research on the role of historic photographs in contemporary culture, from digital colourisation, to museum and heritage displays, to public art and local history.