Shades of empire: police photography in German South-West Africa

This article looks at a photographic album produced by the German police in colonial Namibia just before World War I. Late 19th- and early 20th-century police photography has often been interpreted as a form of visual production that epitomized power and regimes of surveillance imposed by the state apparatuses on the poor, the criminal and the Other. On the other hand police and prison institutions became favored sites where photography could be put at the service of the emergent sciences of the human body—physiognomy, anthropometry and anthropology. While the conjuncture of institutionalized colonial state power and the production of scientific knowledge remain important for this Namibian case study, the article explores a slightly different set of questions. Echoing recent scholarship on visuality and materiality the photographic album is treated as an archival object and visual narrative that was at the same time constituted by and constitutive of material and discursive practices within early 20th-century police and prison institutions in the German colony. By shifting attention away from image content and visual codification alone toward the question of visual practice the article traces the ways in which the photo album, with its ambivalent, unstable and uncontained narrative, became historically active and meaningful. Therein the photographs were less informed by an abstract theory of anthropological and racial classification but rather entrenched with historically contingent processes of colonial state constitution, socioeconomic and racial stratification, and the institutional integration of photography as a medium and a technology into colonial policing. The photo album provides a textured sense of how fragmented and contested these processes remained throughout the German colonial period, but also how photography could offer a means of transcending the limits and frailties brought by the realities on the ground.International Bibliography of Social Science

IRWIN

Iles comments on the work of IRWIN, a group of Yugoslavian artists which takes part in the "Neue Slowenische Kunst" movement. The mixture of characteristic Slovenian iconography with European art historical references is seen to create a political/aesthetic paradox. The "Red Districts" and "Was Ist Kunst" projects are presented, along with manifestos by the artists

An Inadequate History of the Projected Image

This lecture proposes new readings of the history of the projected image in American art since the 1960s, foregrounding issues around the black cinematic to propose alternative models to the assumptions of whiteness that have dominated the history of moving image art, and challenging the presumed neutrality of cinematic tropes including the camera, the screen, light, the gaze, opacity, and surveillance. Chrissie Iles is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her specialization is the work of emerging artists, moving image art, and art of the 1960s and 1970s. She has co-curated two Whitney Biennials, and numerous exhibitions of the moving image as well as sculpture, including a retrospective of Dan Graham. Her most recent exhibition, ‘Dreamlands’, explored the role of immersive moving image installations in the history of American art from 1905 to the present. She is responsible for building the moving image part of the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection. She is a member of the Graduate Committee of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and a visiting professor in the Art Department at Columbia University. She was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Art History Department at Bristol University, England, in 2015. This lecture is co-sponsored by the department of Film, Animation and Video.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/havc_conversationsoncontemporaryart/1004/thumbnail.jp