Visual Culture

This paper examines the politics of representation in missionary propaganda, with reference to a series of albums, compiled by an Irish Holy Ghost priest, recording the Vicariate of Zanzibar in the early 1920s. Several photographs from these albums seem designed for inclusion in the order's magazine, The Missionary Annals. The images depict East African subjects, arranged around a series of signs, requesting aid and representing “an invitation to pity”. However, the photographs also dissolve geographic and cultural distance, bringing Ireland and East Africa into an imaginative proximity and placing both subjects and viewers within the shared bonds of Catholicism. Building on Marianne Gullestad's discussion of missionary photography in terms of Hannah Arendt's distinctions between pity and compassion, and using Ariella Azoulay's concept of 'the event of photography', this paper hopes to overturn and challenge dichotomous readings of mission photography.

The archival impulse, which remains a primary organising principle within contemporary art, is now, in an age of digital imaging and social media, also a mass-cultural phenomenon. These developments, together with a cultural field currently preoccupied with questions of history, remembrance and divergent conceptions of national identity, make an investigation of photography and the archive in Ireland particularly timely. This one day symposium will bring together researchers and practitioners who are concerned to interrogate the role of the archive in the production of new knowledges about photography in Ireland, and those who offer alternative narratives of Irish culture through a focus on photography. It will provide a forum for the critical examination of a range of photographic and archival practices, within both official and unofficial, public and private contexts. The symposium aims to gather and acknowledge ongoing research in historic, artistic and vernacular photography as it intersects with practical and theoretical considerations of the archive. We invite proposals for 20 minute presentations from researchers working in diverse fields and disciplines, such as: photography; media, visual, material and cultural studies; art history; museology; archival and librarian studies; digital humanities; visual anthropology and sociology; history and geography; architecture; and philosophy and literature.