SESSION: Critique, Homage, Iconoclasm? The reuse of 19th-Century Photography in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture
Since its invention, photography has undergone continual redefinition, reshaping what we understand the medium to be—technologically, materially, and conceptually. As photography evolves, artists and others frequently return to early photographic technologies and image practices. This session explores how 19th-century photography has been recontextualized in contemporary art and visual culture, and how such references often reflect on and critique both historical and present-day concerns.
The session aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on the enduring presence—and critical potential—of 19th century photography today. We invite contributions that examine how these returns to historical photography engage with issues such as race, nature, labour, embodiment, human-animal relations, technology, and materiality. What ethical, political, or epistemological questions arise from reusing or referencing historical imagery, technologies or pictorial conventions? How do the material and technical conditions of early photographs shape their continued relevance in contemporary debates?
Session Convenors:
Sara Callahan, Malmö University
Speakers:
Serena Keshavjee, University of Winnipeg
Undead Archive: Ectoplasmic Photographs and Contemporary art
The most visited online archive at the University of Manitoba’s Special Collections holds a series of black-and-white photographs of materializing ghosts, made by the medical doctor T.G. Hamilton and his wife Lilian Hamilton, a trained nurse. The Hamiltons presented themselves as psychic researchers and set up a séance laboratory to experiment with mediums. They understood that the 700 photographic images they produced communicated messages from discarnate spirits through the ectoplasm. The laboratory and its staged photographs were influenced by French artist Juliette Bisson and German researcher Dr. von Schrenck-Notzing, whose early flash photographs of materialisations, made between 1909 and 1920, are preserved in the archive of the Society for Psychical Research, housed in the Library at the University of Cambridge.
In 2001, the archivists at the University of Manitoba digitized these uncanny photographs and uploaded them to the relatively new World Wide Web. From that point on, contemporary artists from around the world began seeing the Hamilton photographs as scientific artworks and used these photos as sources to produce new work. Some of the research for this paper comes from a panel discussion I organized in 2023 with BIPOC artists who set out to unsettle photographic production, as well as Canadian settler history. Other artists were drawn to the Hamilton state of the art photographic equipment and to the seemingly endless creativity of ectoplasm as a building material. This paper will introduce contemporary artists’ critique and homage to these modernist-style ghost photographs.
Ben Lapierre, Concordia University (Montréal, Canada)
Re-reading the Photographic Archive: Alexander Henderson
In this paper I review the work of Alexander Henderson, Scottish-born, Canadian-based landscape photographer, to produce an anticolonial reading of the “Canadian” cabin. The cabin is a rustic structure espousing a visual simplicity. Cabins have emerged across various Canadian cultural texts since the inception of the nation state and speak to a rugged identity that is steeped in notions of “wilderness,” contributing to what art historian John O’Brian and curator Peter White, call “the nationalization of nature in Canada.” This tendency of cultivating a visual identity through the landscape has simultaneously contributed to Indigenous dispossession and erasure within Canada. With this in mind, I question how Henderson’s photos of cabins contributed to this visual culture and examine how a renewed reading of his work reveals and challenges settler colonial sensibilities.
In this paper, I demonstrate how a reading of photographic archives “against their grain” and “from the bottom up” can result in decolonial and anticolonial outputs. Henderson’s photographs were historically used to promote settler colonialism within Canada. Though I argue that his collection may also be used to understand this history and to work against the harms produced through its circulation.
Sarah French, Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Contemporary Engagement with Nineteenth-Century Photographic Processes
At the end of the nineteenth century, it was widely believed that the skills and knowledge required to produce a daguerreotype, the product of one of photography’s earliest processes, would soon be entirely lost. Yet in 2025, Takashi Arai’s daguerreotype project, Exposed in a Hundred Suns, was shortlisted for one of the photographic art world’s most prestigious awards, the Pictet Prize. This was not a lamentation for an analogue technology; the daguerreotype is an integral part of the artist’s continuing project, which explores nuclear disaster, memory, and time.
Taking Arai’s work as a starting point, this paper will explore the application of early photographic processes as a method for responding to anthropic, ecological, and socio-political concerns today. It will draw upon several examples from across the current photographic art market and will argue that, since the publication of Lyle Rexer’s Photography’s Antiquarian Avant Garde in 2002, this approach has become increasingly relevant as a critique of a dematerialised, sustainable digital future.
Yimin Xiang, School of Fine Art, The Glasgow School of Art
Echoes of Images: Copperplate Archives and the Contemporary Re-narration of Media Hierarchies
In contemporary visual culture, where digital images dominate and values such as precision and standardisation prevail, the material and historical dimensions of images are often neglected. This paper examines how printmaking, a medium that merges mechanical reproduction with manual intervention, can engage with these conditions and challenge the hierarchies of digital image culture.
The research grows out of my recent artistic practice centred on the collection and reuse of early twentieth-century copper printing plates once used in industrial production. Marked by traces of labour and histories of use, these plates form what I describe as an “undecided image archive.” Detached from their original function, they reveal new visual and material meanings that prompt reflection on the relationship between image, time, and technology.
Through archival intervention and media-archaeological analysis, the paper explores how the reactivation of these materials creates dialogues between historical and contemporary image technologies. It argues that the visible traces and imperfections of copperplate-printed images act as critical gestures against the smooth aesthetics of the digital. These prints embody the “poor image” and suggest alternative ways of seeing that unsettle dominant visual values.
This study contributes to current debates in art history and media theory by reconsidering printmaking’s role within post-digital image systems. It proposes that the materiality of print can serve as a form of media critique, revealing how images persist, transform, and gain new significance across time.