[William England] London Stereoscopic Company, The Suspension Bridge, Niagara, 1859, Library and Archives Canada, Accession 1988-286, copy negative #PA-165997.
Please join us on Wednesday, January 24, for a talk by Professor Emerita Joan M. Schwartz, “i-Crimes and Misdemeanours: Between analogue photographs and their digital surrogates.”
Under pressure from administrators, funders, and the user-public, institutions strive to make photographs available online as searchable single items. In the process, the relationship between materiality and meaning is easily effaced, and valuable information about the physical and intellectual contexts of creation, circulation, and viewing is sacrificed at the altar of speed, quantity, convenience, and the almighty dollar. In this lecture, I point to examples of those instances for which institutions can justly be accused of “i-Crimes and Misdemeanours.” With a view to balancing access aims and descriptive affordances, I raise the distinction between search and research, call for a broader appreciation of photographs as “working objects in their own time” (Frizot), and advocate for better “best practices” as a way to bring the in-situ experience of analogue photographs and on-screen encounter with their digital surrogates into closer alignment.
A former specialist in photography acquisition and research at the National Archives of Canada, Ottawa (1977–2003), Joan Schwartz is Professor Emerita of History of Photography and Nineteenth-century Visual Culture in Art History and Art Conservation with a cross-appointment to Geography, at Queen’s University. She is co-editor of Picturing Place (with James R. Ryan); of Archives, Records, and Power (with the late Terry Cook); and All Shook Up: The Archival Legacy of Terry Cook (with Tom Nesmith and Greg Bak). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, the Society of American Archivists, and the Association of Canadian Archivists, she has published widely on photography and the geographical imagination and on archives as spaces of power. She recently guest-edited a special issue of Scientia Canadensis on “Photography: Science, Technology, and Practice” (44:1). Her current SSHRCC-funded research, entitled “Picturing ‘Canada’: Photographic Images and Geographical Imaginings in British North America, 1839–1889,” focuses on the role of photography in the making of early modern Canada.
We acknowledge that the UBC Vancouver campus is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam).