In Archaeology and photography, editors McFadyen and Hicks suggest that visual archaeology (or, in the upper-case style adopted for certain nouns throughout the book, Visual Archaeology) offers a new way in which to give due weight to the role of the visual—and specifically the photographic—in archaeology. They present visual archaeology as a parallel to the visual anthropology spearheaded by Elizabeth Edwards, and others, since the 1990s. A point overlooked here is that visual anthropology developed as a counter to anthropology's disciplinary focus on writing, captured in the -graphy of its lynchpin practice, ethnography. In contrast, archaeology has been deeply enmeshed with practices of visualisation throughout its history, even if it has not always demonstrated critical awareness of the role visual media play in its methodologies, interpretations and assertions of professional authority.
In their introduction, McFadyen and Hicks posit that previous work on photography and archaeology has reduced them “to analogies to each other, collapsing one into a metaphor of the other, playing the mirror games of object and subject, of past and present as signifier and signified” (p. 3). Some of the previous work they cite as reductive is that of Michael Shanks, Yannis Hamilakis and Frederick N. Bohrer—three very different scholars. Shanks in particular is taken to exemplify what this volume terms ‘the Representational Archaeology’, a nominative expression consistently prefaced by ‘the’. In essence the phrase refers to post-processual archaeology, which fostered exactly the kind of critical work on visualisation called for here (by Shanks and Stephanie Moser, to give two examples). McFadyen and Hicks argue that a too strict separation between the time horizons of contemporary archaeology and its past subjects prevents archaeology from engaging with the quality of duration, and that photography may be one way to overcome this. Using the work of philosopher Henri Bergson to introduce the volume's three themes (time, objectivity, archive), they urge archaeologists to turn from ‘Archaeography’ to ‘Photology’. These neologisms are explored at length by Hicks in his two chapters.
Mark Knight and Lesley McFadyen (Chapter 3) extend the discussion of Bergson's notion of time as duration, rather than as a fixed, fleeting moment. They use their fieldwork at Must Farm, Cambridge, to consider how photography can help archaeologists bring human actions, events and processes into the study of the past. J.A. Baird (Chapter 4) considers aspects of time in the photographic archive of the Dura-Europos excavations, a welcome addition to her previous work on it. Baird's close attention to images in their archival context exemplifies the in-depth research that many archaeologists and institutions would do well to undertake, in order to understand, question and critique both past and present practices. As Baird writes, “Archaeological photographs blur the boundaries between documentation and interpretation” (p. 91). Photography created archaeological knowledge, often in a more haphazard or unintended way than archaeologists like to admit. But it is in the archive that archaeology can “think through stories that were not meant to be told” (p. 92), all the more so in regions that were subject to colonisation and remain sites of contestation or conflict today.
Several chapters reflect on the authors’ own field practices. Joana Alves-Ferreira recounts her use of the Polaroid camera, with its near instant results from self-developing film, to create what she terms ‘parafictions’, which introduce an element of speculation into archaeological fieldwork and reveal its subjective nature. Sérgio Gomes uses photographs from his fieldwork in Portugal to reflect on the role of memory and immateriality in the otherwise material-focused work of archaeology. James Dixon explores a case study of building archaeology, comparing four different kinds of photographs taken before the redevelopment of residential buildings in south London; the resulting images range from formal to informal, architectural to more human-oriented. Could and should archaeological archives incorporate a similar range, rather than only ‘record’ shots? Alex Hale and Iain Anderson contrast two case studies from Scotland as part of an ongoing attempt to document graffiti at heritage sites, where both the graffiti and the act of photographing it offer a way to engage local communities.
Scotland appears in two other papers. Oscar Aldred considers how aerial photography has shaped the archaeological imagination, from his own experiences to that of past proponents such as O.G.S. Crawford. The Brodgar Stone found on a farm in Orkney in 1925 is the focus of a chapter by Antonia Thomas, rich with insights into the ‘objectifying process’ of photography. If photography and archaeology between them work to constitute the archaeological object, then both photograph and object can be characterised as what she calls ‘multi-durational’. They endure physically and, in doing so, cut across times that are much longer than a single human lifespan.
The possibility of photographs to bridge past and present is also the theme of Samuel Derbyshire's chapter, which considers the anthropological practice of visual repatriation, that is, returning photographs, in some form (copies or reprints), to the communities represented in them. Derbyshire discusses his own efforts to do this with ethnographic photographs in the Pitt Rivers Museum; archaeology appears here only in the metaphorical sense of excavating layers of time, as Derbyshire's Kenyan interlocutors bring their own information to the images.
All these papers are bookended by co-editor Dan Hicks’s bifurcated 70-page essay, ‘The transformation of visual archaeology’. It continues the introduction's criticism of ‘the Representational Archaeology’ and contrasts ‘Archaeography’ with ‘Photology’, the latter defined as “the knowledge made through archaeology's mode of visualism” (p. 44). Several male scholars—Shanks, Hamilakis, Bohrer—are taken to task (perhaps unhelpfully) for seeing archaeology and photography as sharing any of the same roots and concerns. Women scholars working on visualisation in archaeology appear in passing (p. 30: Moser, Sara Perry, Baird, Mirjam Brusius and myself; the last three work on photography). Instead, the case for Photology is made through copious analysis of quotations, with Barthes heavily represented. Barthes's original French (and for Nietzsche and Hiedegger, German) is provided in endnotes, yet non-Anglophone scholarship on archaeology and photography is not evident; only Brusius's English publications are cited, for instance.
Historical studies of photography and archaeology were not the editors’ priority in compiling this volume, with its attention to the contemporary ramifications of photography in archaeological thought and practice. Nonetheless, critically informed archival analysis done by scholars such as Sudeshna Guha and Nick Shepherd shows the potential for historical research to address contemporary problems. Hicks closes his final essay, and the volume, with an evocative paragraph that ends, “As if archaeology could transform the world” (p. 234). The point is, archaeology already did, with a camera in its hand as well as a trowel.
