Date:Thursday 19 September
Time:9:30am
Venue: The CHR’s Iyatsiba Lab, 66 Greatmore Street, Woodstock, (Entrance on Regent Road).
Drawing on case studies from over twenty years of curatorial practice with an ethnographic photography collection, this keynote presentation seeks to explore what draws together our human engagements with historical time in photography, in the past and in the present. The theatre for this is the museum space itself, in which numerous narratives and dramas of contested meaning in relation to photographs are enacted. Yet our theatre for history is not only the museum space or archive in which people speak of or about images, but the image-object itself – a significant surface in which social engagements of prior time are suggested, but also brought forward for our consideration. Morten returns to atomistic conceptions of vision as a form of touch to explore how our understanding of the temporal connections that photographs make with us can be reconsidered as a sensory chain involving duration, extent, and movement in the social world. The modality of touch, of eyestouching, or being touched by, the indexical trace of a person, place, or social world, lies at the heart of a human-centred approach to the temporality of the photograph. If, as Barthes claimed, the camera is ‘a clock for seeing’ (1980:33), it is also a tool of the touching eye; the most important mechanism for extending its touch ever invented.
Christopher Morton
Christopher Morton is Deputy Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, where he has worked since 2002, and where he has had curatorial responsibility for its major photographic collection since 2006. An Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, Chris trained in history and anthropology, carrying out fieldwork in Ngamiland, Botswana, in 1999-2000. He has over 50 publications on the histories of photography, anthropology, and museum collections,
including two edited volumes with Elizabeth Edwards, Photography, Anthropology, and History: Expanding the Frame (2009) and Photographs, Museums, Collections: Between Art and Information (2015). He is also the co-editor with Darren Newbury of The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies (2015). In 2020 he published a monograph, The Anthropological Lens: Rethinking E. E. Evans-Pritchard on the fieldwork photography of the renowned British social anthropologist. https://prm.web.ox.ac.uk/people/christopher-morton