87. The Album as Archive – photography, materiality and colonialism.

This session invites papers that explore photographic albums as valuable records of visual expressions of the cultural politics of colonialism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Produced across imperial and cross-cultural contexts, photographic albums offer valuable insights into how individuals and communities documented and interpreted experiences of travel and place through the collection and arrangement of photographs. Building on theories of materiality and on the work of scholars such as Elizabeth Edwards and Martha Langford, this session asks what photograph albums can tell us about the visual cultures of colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More than passive repositories of images, albums reveal layers of meaning through their material form.

This session asks what photographic albums can tell us about the visual cultures of colonialism and the ways in which photography contributed to the production and circulation of knowledge about people, places and cultures. It encourages analysis of how photographers, journalists, writers, travellers, collectors, and album compilers used photographic collections to construct narratives, assert authority, preserve memories and reinforce or contest colonial ideologies through visual storytelling. By emphasising the photograph album as both a personal and ideological object, this session seeks to advance conversations about materiality, visuality and the role of photographic albums in producing, preserving and contesting colonial ways of seeing.

Themes: Photography, colonialism, materialism

Lead Convenor: Holly O’Farrell, Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dun Laoghaire, Ireland

Co-convenors: Justin Carville, Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dun Laoghaire, Ireland

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.