Colin Sterling

Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past critically examines the production, consumption, and interpretation of photography across various heritage domains, from global image archives to the domestic arena of the family album. Through original ethnographic and archival research, the book sheds new light on the role photography has played in the emergence, expansion, and articulation of heritage in diverse sociocultural contexts. Drawing on wide-ranging experience across the heritage sector and two international case studies-Angkor in Cambodia and the town of Famagusta, Cyprus-the book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the role photography has played and continues to play in shaping experiences and conceptualisations of heritage. One of the core aims of the book is to problematise and potentially redirect the varied usages of photography within current practice, usages which remain woefully undertheorised, despite their often-central role in shaping heritage. Ultimately, by focusing attention on a hitherto underexamined aspect of the heritage phenomenon, namely its manifold interconnections with photography, this book provides fresh insight to the making and remaking of the past in the present, and the alternative heritages that might come into being around emergent photographic forms and approaches. Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past uses photography as a method of enquiry as well as a tool of documentation. It will be of interest to scholars and students of heritage, photography, anthropology, museology, public archaeology, and tourism. The book will also be a valuable resource for heritage practitioners working around the globe.

https://www.routledge.com/Heritage-Photography-and-the-Affective-Past/Sterling/p/book/9780367135577

This short essay outlines some of the main dimensions of ecological thinking and explores the different ways in which heritage scholars might engage with ecological ideas and approaches from a critical perspective. The paper offers an overview of the emergence of ecology and ecologies across the sciences and the humanities, highlighting the need to consider such work alongside and in conjunction with Indigenous ecological approaches. Finally, the paper serves as a position statement for the Critical Heritage Ecologies initiative, which began in 2024 and is situated in the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture.

This open access article co-authored with Asia Komarova of The Outsiders explores the constant transformation of museums in relation to environmental concerns, with a focus on the Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills - a new mobile museum that aims to connect people with a rapidly developing urban area in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

The essay forms part of a special issue of Stedelijk Studies on the concept of 'museum-ing'.

https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/forgotten-worlds-cultivating-museums/

AVAILABLE OPEN ACCESS

This essay explores the generative potential of a particular concept – Derrida’s notion of “hauntology” – across a wide range of heritage domains. In doing so it addresses one of the central concerns of critical heritage, namely what it means to practice criticality and what the social and political implications of this process might be. The paper begins by examining the broad points of intersection between heritage and hauntology, before moving on to consider three more defined areas of thematic overlap. These encompass the ghosts of place, spectral aesthetics, and recent ideas emerging from the environmental humanities around more-than-human hauntings. While there is considerable crossover between these fields, each builds upon a different set of texts and micro case studies to show the distinctive ways in which Derrida’s concept has been taken up and reconfigured in diverse disciplinary contexts. The paper concludes with a summary of the possible implications for adopting (and adapting) hauntology as a mode of doing critical heritage.

AVAILABLE OPEN ACCESS.

This paper outlines the main benefits and drawbacks of a posthumanist ontology for the heritage field. Instead of embracing or rejecting posthumanism outright, the paper considers the transformative potential and key limitations of this framework. Two core themes are picked up on here: the first positions posthumanism as that which comes after humanism, while the second decentres the human altogether. While the significance of the former to critical heritage is relatively easy to establish, the implications of the latter are more opaque. Building on critiques put forward by Indigenous scholars and environmental philosophers, the paper acknowledges the shortcomings of any posthuman political project. To look beyond this, the paper engages with the work of feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti and political theorist WilliamE. Connolly, who offer a concrete set of agendas for heritage to engage with posthumanist thinking. The essay concludes with a discussion of ‘planetary stewardship’ – a concept put forward by Earth Systems scientists and others that demands novel reflections on care, governance and responsibility across human and non-human worlds. A strategic alliance of critical heritage praxis and critical posthumanist thinking may provide a valuable counterpoint to some of the more technocratic solutions imagined for the climate crisis.

FREE DOWNLOAD: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/PXABEYQ85FYZ9WBMYIUY/full?target=10.1080/14655187.2017.1384279

This paper considers the impact of photographic clichés on the management, conceptualization, and experience of heritage. Working along the grain of pejorative readings of ‘snapshot’ photography, this account views the repetitiveness and redundancy of the cliché as a critical point of departure, rather than a cause for reproach. Taking the World Heritage Site of Angkor as a core case study, three intersecting axes of political concern are sketched out to elucidate the broad social, material, and affective implications of clichéd photography for heritage. First, processes of dehistoricization and depoliticization are interrogated in relation to the role certain images play in constructing a mythic sense of the past in the present. This leads directly in to the second strand of analysis, which examines the various ways in which individuals negotiate these myths through the production of their own highly personalized photographic clichés. Here I develop the concept of an embodied politics of heritage photography to grasp the multivalent resonances of tourist clichés in particular. Finally, the implicit and explicit forms of spatial control that permeate sites such as Angkor are examined in relation to the photographic clichés they respond to and help shape.

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This essay on speculative botany, inheritance and the Anthropocene responds to a series of drawings titled Herbarium by artist Carlos Molina. In the series, Molina asks how plants might evolve after the Anthropocene, in response to the violent modes of relation that characterise this epoch in the making. The drawings imagine how researchers might encounter and document these new vegetal forms, weaving together indigenous, scientific and more-than-human knowledge.

This chapter appears in a larger collection published by Berghahn Books (https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/Stylianou-LambertEmerging).

SAMPLE CITATION:

Sterling, Colin. 2022. “Experiencing the Anthropocene: The Contested Heritage of Climate Breakdown.” In Emerging Technologies and Museums: Mediating Difficult Heritage, eds. Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert, Alexandra Bounia, and Antigone Heraclidou, New York: Berghahn Books, 151-171

Published Open Access in the edited volume Deterritorializing the Future: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene, published by Open Humanities Press as part of their Critical Climate Change series. Whole volume available to download from the OHP site: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/deterritorializing-the-future/

This panel will re-examine the complex interrelationship of heritage and photography from a variety of socio-cultural, historical, and theoretical perspectives. Since its inception, photography has been part of what we would now define as 'heritage practice,' whether deployed to survey historic sites, document cultural practices, or as an aide memoire for travellers and tourists. To some extent, the concurrent emergence of heritage and photography within the modern period may even speak of an elective affinity between the two. More recently, a focus on heritage as process has shifted attention away from the monumental and towards the role of heritage in everyday settings. From this perspective we may interrogate the photo-album as crucial to personal heritage, or the importance of social media and online sharing as they open up new opportunities for the construction of heritage by re-contextualising old photographs (e.g. HistoryPin). Despite these noteworthy intersections, photography remains a largely under-theorised topic within critical heritage studies. This panel will seek to address this shortcoming. A key point of departure here will be recent calls for the interdisciplinary field of heritage to look beyond issues of discourse and the politics of representation and consider instead the 'affective qualities' of the past in the present (Harrison 2013). To this end, papers will focus less on aesthetics to examine issues more familiar to anthropology - including bodily experience, memory and processes of meaning-making. To borrow from Edwards (2012), our interest lies not in isolated images, but in the 'photography complex' of critical heritage

Paper for the Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference, Cardiff, December 2017.

Special session on Science Fiction, Speculative Futures and Archaeological Imaginings.

The museum has long provided an uncanny environment for sci-fi imaginaries. Objects come to life and wreak havoc on unsuspecting visitors, cursed artefacts lead to horrific murder, ancient horrors lie hidden in the dark recesses of the store room. The otherworldly atmosphere of the museum provides space for unsettling narratives that confront the ultimate unknowability of the world. Time and space are compressed in such settings, which seem to vibrate with an untapped potentiality. But what happens when the museum contains us, when the things dug up and put on display are from a world we claim to understand? This paper takes Chris Marker’s seminal short film La Jetée (1962) and Nicolas de Crécy’s graphic novel Glacial Period (2007) as starting points for a wider discussion of the post-apocalyptic rediscovery of the present. In these works, we are projected into futures where the natural, artistic and archaeological collections of today act as powerful anchors for re-awakening what have become long forgotten pasts. This has consequences horrifying and absurd: stuffed animals lead inadvertently to the saviour of humanity; sculptures debate their own worth; paintings devour arrogant archaeologists. Exploring themes of time travel, ruination, memory and the terror of discovery, this paper will contribute to debates around the speculative nature of archaeology, and the implications of posthumanist thinking for the heritage field.

Paper for the Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory Conference, Amsterdam, November 2017.

This paper sketches out an initial research programme on the theme of ‘speculative archaeologies’ – defined here as the varied ways in which artists, writers and others have imagined future historians, archaeologists or their equivalents confronting ‘the now’ as an archaeological object. Tracing a hitherto unexplored thread across different artistic practices, the paper aims to show how the hypothetical (mis)interpretation of the present can help us to rethink various ethical and political concerns, from the articulation of new cosmopolitan memories to the shifting emphasis of ‘progress’ away from economic development. Linking together creative works as diverse as Joseph Gandy’s fantastical drawings, Umberto Eco’s satirical short-stories, Azra Aksamija’s Future Heritage Collection, and the music of indie-rock band Low, the paper responds to and builds upon a broader ‘speculative turn’ in the humanities (Bryant, Srnicek & Harman 2011), connecting this new philosophical trend with the increasingly widespread projection of the archaeological imagination into the posthuman future.

Paper for the Symposium 'Decolonising History: Visualisations of Conflict in a ‘Post-War’ Europe', UCL, 18 March 2017

This paper critically examines the accretion and spread of images related to a highly specific site around which conflicting notions of the ‘post-war’ can be seen to coalesce and fragment – the beachfront at Varosha. When Turkey launched a military offensive against Cyprus in 1974, the largely Greek-Cypriot population of Varosha – a suburb of the popular tourist town Famagusta – fled at short notice, believing an aerial bombardment was imminent. A hastily erected fence of barbed-wire, disused oil cans, and corrugated iron was put in place around the area by the invading army, who saw in the prosperous suburbs a useful bargaining chip for any future negotiations on the fate of the island as a whole. Today, this site remains a ‘ghost town’, with its once bustling beachfront now largely inaccessible. Both as a shoreline and as a forbidden zone cut off from the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (itself an unrecognised state subsisting at the margins of Europe), the beach is therefore defined by a sense of liminality - at once present and absent, familiar yet remote. This tension is played out in the way visualisations of the site have been produced and circulated over the past five decades. My point of departure here is an image of the beach from 1959, taken by the Colonial Office, and intended to evoke the prosperity of the island at the culmination of British rule. The rupture of this imagined idyll is then traced through later tourist imagery, contemporary art practice, and alternative photographic readings of the site today. Crucially, the aim here is not simply to historicise depictions of the site, but to interrogate the social embeddedness of these visualisations, which have been caught up in varied material-discursive networks and political agendas. Clichéd postcard views may become intensely politicised under such circumstances, while the embodied practice of photography today marks one out as subversive or even transgressive. Building on ethnographic and archival research carried out in Cyprus and with diaspora communities in the UK, this paper contributes to debates around post-conflict memory and migration, the problematic romanticisation of traumatic sites, and activist uses of the visual archive.

Paper given at the International conference

'Photography + (Con)text: Photography in Academic Research', University College London, September 2016

Like most social domains, heritage is saturated with photographic imagery. From archives and museum displays to conservation records and tourist itineraries, photography is deeply embedded in the processes, practices and ideas of heritage. Understanding the moral, ethical and political ramifications of photography across these diverse contexts has become an increasingly urgent task, both for heritage researchers and for those engaged in the production and use of said imagery. The corporeal dimensions of these activities and encounters are however poorly understood. Responding to this gap, this paper focuses on the embodied moment of photographic creation and interpretation across a range of material-discursive environments, taking in touristic engagements with historic sites, the exhibitionary use of photographs by diaspora communities, and the production of new images that seek to question and destabilise the very category of ‘heritage’ photography. Drawing on ethnographic research and applied practice across the heritage sector over the past five years, the paper critically examines the affective resonances of photography and heritage as a means of generating an ‘embodied politics’ that builds upon rather than overturns the politics of discourse and representation usually prioritised by heritage researchers. What role photography itself can play in unraveling the intensities of embodied experience is crucial to this debate, and the paper concludes by questioning the extent to which the inherent stillness of photography can adequately address or illustrate notions of corporeality and affect, which are so closely tied to movement and the continual becoming of human engagements with the past in the present. 

The RIBA Collections were always intended to serve a focused ‘community’: that of architects and related specialists. In 1834 the Institute prospectus called for a “Library of Works of every kind connected with architecture” and a “Museum of Antiquities, Models, Casts, Specimens of the various Materials used in building, and of all objects tending to illustrate the Arts and Sciences in their application to design and construction”. The initial ‘impact’ of the collection was thus understood to be highly practical, closely connected to the ongoing work of architecture. 

Being tied to a membership body has its advantages and disadvantages. The collections are not reliant on public funding, and so operate with relative autonomy. At the same time, being supported by a network of members places the Collections under great scrutiny. Impact and relevance are vital here, and today these can be measured and understood in a number of ways. Most obvious are the outputs associated with research undertaken in the archives, from Design and Access Statements to artistic creations. Other impacts are more diffuse, but include the essays and projects of architectural students. At its core the collection remains a working archive, always intended as a laboratory of ideas and practices as much as a storehouse of material.

Using examples from learning, public programming and digital engagement, this paper examines the methods deployed by the RIBA Collections in striking a path between the profession of architecture and its varied public audiences. The question ‘who are we for?’ is central here. The RIBA archives document the work of architects around the world. This work gives rise to the built environment we all inhabit. By documenting this process the RIBA Collections offer a new way to think about the meaning and value of architecture to society, and the role of the historic record in contemporary debates.

Paper delivered at the Discovering Collections/Discovering Communities Conference, October 2016.

With some notable exceptions, the concepts and practices of tourism are often overlooked in theorisations or histories of photography. While sociological and anthropological research has confronted the phenomenon of ‘the tourist’ in thought-provoking ways, tourist photographies - dismissed as repetitive, unthinking and banal - have been marginalised in wider academic discourse. Taking the notion of the clichė as its core focus, this paper works along rather than against the grain of such criticisms, arguing that it is precisely the prosaic and mundane nature of much tourist photography that marks it out as an urgent field of enquiry. This is particularly true within the domain of heritage, where the ubiquity of the tourist-photographer has in many cases necessitated physical or operational interventions around historic sites. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research carried out over the last three years, this paper seeks to better understand the cultural embeddedness and corporeal implications of the clichė. Central to this task is a move away from discourse analysis to prioritise the affective qualities of photography, especially those qualities that circulate around the embodied moment of photographic encounter and the highly individualised memory-work that photographs are subsequently asked to perform. What impact do such images - rhythmic in their incessant repetition - have on historic sites, and more broadly on our engagement with the past in the present? What do they expose and what do they obscure? How does their apparent mundanity coincide with or overturn the mythic value of heritage? By tackling the concept of the clichė from a number of critical vantage points, this paper highlights the differential touristic and photographic performances that encircle and animate sites of heritage, in the process situating photography as a vital nodal point in the conceptualisation and - crucially - material manifestation of a distinct ‘heritage imagination’.

Paper delivered at the Photographic History Research Centre Annual Conference, Leicester, June 2016

This paper presents initial findings from recent fieldwork conducted in and around Siem Reap and the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Angkor, Cambodia. Against a backdrop of ever-increasing visitor numbers and vast new tourist developments I focus on a hitherto underexplored aspect of the 'heritage experience' at Angkor: photography. More specifically, my interest here is in the 'photo-tours' that have proliferated in recent years, offering (for a fee) a select few visitors the chance to improve their camera skills and - perhaps - gain privileged access to the site and photographic opportunities within. By asking what motivates people to undertake such photographic excursions - and to what extent these depart from more commonplace tours of Angkor - my research considers the impact of the overtly aesthetic heritage encounter on wider conceptions of value, meaning and site engagement.

Famagusta, a town of c40,000 inhabitants, has been part of the internationally unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) since 1974, when Turkey launched a military offensive that resulted in the partition of the island. It is a complex urban space, characterised by twentieth-century development and an historic medieval centre which has been the focus of heritage activities since at least the late nineteenth-century. In 1878, when Britain took de facto control of Cyprus from the Ottoman Empire, the Scottish photographer John Thomson documented Famagusta and described ‘a city of the dead, in which the traveller is surprised to encounter a living tenant’ (1879: 45). Although now much rejuvenated, the medieval core of the town remains at risk from careless property development and ongoing political machinations. The familiar monumentalism of this site finds its radical counterpart in Varosha. Just a short walk from the ‘historic walled city’, this largely Greek-Cypriot district of Famagusta was abandoned in 1974, when residents feared an aerial bombardment by the Turkish military. Today its hotels, shops, streets and homes remain empty, with a closely guarded barbed-wire fence and regularly placed signs warning onlookers not to take photographs. This message is routinely ignored, and a simple internet search lets slip the visual dialectic of ruins which personifies present-day Famagusta. Taking Thomson’s photographs as a key point of departure before moving on to consider more recent photographic activities around the site(s), this paper critically examines the role of photography in the social construction of Famagusta / Varosha as a 'ghost town' and a dialectical heritage space.