Volume 88, Issue 3 - Thematischer Schwerpunkt: Archival Absences: Towards an Incomplete History of Photography; Gastherausgeber: Elizabeth Otto and Steffen Siegel

This essay aims to complicate our understanding of photographic materialities. Tracing the object biography of Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre's View of the Boulevard du Temple , taken in 1838—one of the most prominent photographs from the medium's formative period—helps to reveal photography's character as not only reproductive but also reproducible. Variant photographic sources of the same motif can result in various histories that inform and transcribe each other. These multiple layers of meaning turn each photographic representation into a palimpsest loaded with information that is both visible and invisible, present and absent. A closer look at Daguerre's photograph unfolds a puzzling photographic ontology that deals with present images but an absent picture. This case evokes a pivotal question for the medium's historiography: Upon what traces are we basing our photographic histories?

This essay engages the approximately 100 metal plates held in the William Henry Fox Talbot collection in Oxford's Bodleian Libraries, examining them as material traces of Talbot's (1800–1877) experiments in photomechanical printing. Blank or bearing illegible images, these plates are often dismissed, but they shed clear light on the trial-and-error phase of Talbot's photomechanical practice, a crucial yet unexplored aspect of his scientific and photographic research. Shifting the focus from image content to the materiality of Talbot's photomechanical research during the late 1840s and the 1850s, the essay challenges and expands the prevailing narrative centred on his photochemical pursuits. More broadly, it calls for a reassessment of photographic ‘mistakes’ and ‘accidents’ so often simply omitted from history as central to this experimental medium.

Picture postcards originating from former colonial contexts are notably more prevalent than the photographic prints they were based on, and these postcards' abundance is mainly reflected in collections in those regions to which they were sent. Embedded in colonialist communication, these images continue to shape the history of colonial-era photography. This article examines the photographic practices of Jacob Vitta (?–1914), a photographer and publisher from the former Gold Coast Colony who documented the landscape ravaged by mechanized gold mining. I trace the practices and networks involved in the production and dissemination of Vitta's postcards and photographs in order to highlight the contradictory discursive contexts in which his photographs appeared.

In 1941, Bauhaus photographer Fritz Heinze, wearing the Wehrmacht uniform of the occupying German forces in Ukraine, took two photographs of Jewish women and children imprisoned in a greenhouse on the eve of their execution. These photographs, which, unlike his earlier work, were not donated to archives, a move which could have linked them publicly to the Bauhaus movement or to Holocaust history, were not seen outside of the family until Heinze's grandson published them online, seventy-five years later. We can consider Heinze's photographs—and his participation in the Bauhaus— under archived , difficult to access, and largely missing from the understood relevant corpus. In restoring his work to the historical record, this article traces the path of a communist anti–Nazi artist to a compliant soldier and a photographing bystander to genocide.

Against the backdrop of the intense anti-queer Lavender Scare, mid-twentieth-century queer visual culture in the United States centered on practices of concealing and revealing to avoid and work against censorship. These practices epitomize queer men's concurrent desire to see and be seen as sexual subjects and their need for the safety of privacy. Queer absences in archival materials produced by and for queer men suggest, as this article argues, the paradox of censorship: a hyperfocus on queer sex and the male crotch, especially the penis, that is visualized and emphasized across mid-twentieth-century physique photography and magazines, scrapbooks, and drawings. Central to this is the interplay between (self-)censorship and queer agency.

This article examines the interplay between the United Fruit Company's (UFC) photographic archive and the contemporary art archive of the digital humanities project Banana Craze . Through an analysis of UFC's archival photographs, it explores the company's neocolonial practices and the visual erasure of the hardships faced by local workers. Drawing on Ariella Azoulay's concept of “civil imagination” and Saidiya Hartman's “critical fabulation,” the article proposes contemporary art as a method of archival repair. By juxtaposing historical images with modern artworks from Banana Craze —including works by Ana Núñez, Andrea Chung, Elkin Calderón, and Leandro Katz—it demonstrates how art can address historical omissions and foster new understandings of past injustices.

This article examines everyday acts of disposal in the family photo archive as a mode of curation that I call “memorial housekeeping.” Situating everyday practices of curating family photo collections as an undervalued area of feminized labor, I analyze my mother's decision to throw out “bad“ family photos, as well as the photographs that I found stuffed in a garbage bag. Highlighting the unique vulnerability of family photos and the memories they index, I argue that such acts of disposal disrupt the intergenerational transmission of familial memory, “cleaning up” what gets remembered in the process. It is only by looking closely at what we don't want to see that we can understand the structuring role of disposal in family photo collections.

Computer vision, a branch of artificial intelligence aimed at understanding digital images, promises to help backlogged archives make their digitized collections more discoverable. However, resonances between this new technology and the history of photography make its application in photographic archives practically and methodologically fraught, especially with images of people. This article describes a critical, pared-back approach to person detection, a common computer vision task, designed in response to the shared physiognomic underpinnings of computer vision and photography. Reframing person detection around the question of presence and absence, it demonstrates how computer vision can enable archival discovery beyond its historically textual and classificatory limits.