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"The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin: Photographs from the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation" is a book that explores the life and presidency of Idi Amin through a collection of photographs. The book aims to humanize Amin and shed light on his rise to power, the collapse of his government, and his alleged crimes. It examines the relationship between Amin's presidency and the unseen actions captured by the cameras. The book also discusses the discovery of 60,640 negatives that provide insight into Amin's first 366 days, his campaigns, and the justice process in Uganda. While the book is comprehensive, it could benefit from including more perspectives and discussing missing photographs. Overall, it is a valuable resource for researchers interested in photography, history, and African liberation struggles. [Extracted from the article]

In the early 1920s, "Lady Bus Conductors" were recruited for the first time in Melbourne, Australia. They were employed by private companies, who entered into competition with the public-funded urban transport sector. Combining labour and cultural history approaches, this article draws on newspapers, photographs and union archives to develop an original gendered analysis of the interwar motorbus industry. It argues that women's labour underpinned the creation of feminised traits of service, safety and aesthetics on this new mode of transport. Such traits were successfully commercialised by private operators at the same time as they benefitted from "traditions" of women's lower wages. When the public sector reasserted control over metropolitan transport, they defined the buses as "men's work", with long-lasting implications. Yet as this article reveals, some women continued to seek employment on private buses, claiming access to elements of the economic, social and cultural status of uniformed transport work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a photographic plate archive of the Ulugh Beg Astronomical Institute (UBAI) of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences, the history of photometric observations, the current state of photometric plates, and the process of their digitization. We will talk about telescopes used for observations, their characteristics and observations. In addition, we will also talk about the preparation of photographic plates for scanning. Also, the work carried out in the "UBAI-SHAO scientific and technical project" on digitization of photographic plates in the UBAI archive at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and future work will be reviewed and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically engages with photographs, the institutions that archive and curate them, and the uses to which they are put in the work of heritage preservation, with particular attention paid to the ways in which these have been mobilized in Middle Eastern heritage debates. Photographs, often depicting uninhabited rather than populated heritage landscapes, in effect weaponize heritage preservation, ignoring the fact that individuals and communities have always had their own ways of preserving and engaging with the material past. The authors therefore seek to reconsider the disciplinary genealogies embedded in a photographic archive shaped by instruments of Western ideology and power – archaeological fieldwork, surveys and museum-building – to question the uncritical use of photography for the assessment of heritage significance, the construction of heritage value and management of heritage assemblages today. They argue that identifying and creating counter-archives is necessary to contribute to more inclusive narratives fostering heritage justice, including a deeper engagement with archaeology's long-standing entanglements with exploitative labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an introduction to a selection of portraits that are part of a personal archive of photographs collected over the last 6 years. The portraits are of artists, cultural agents, activists and people who, like me, have settled in the diaspora and who, despite the nuances of each experience, share the journey as a common element that allows us to learn from each other. The intention of the essay is to pay tribute to these people as a gesture of gratitude for their guidance and solidarity in the distance. At the same time, the exercise is a bet on the construction of an imaginary of our own about migration and a strategy to combat invisibility and silence through the recognition of the identities that emerge as a result of these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, artist Akram Zaatari reflects on his longstanding work with photographic heritage in the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora, and considers the different ways in which he has used photographs to illuminate and unfold historical truths. Charting divergencies and disagreements around issues of preservation that have arisen over the years within the Arab Image Foundation (of which he is one of the founders), Zaatari points out radical gestures of preservation that return photographs to the 'living tissue', the 'larger ecosystem' and a set of affective relations from which they had become detached. The far-ranging metaphor of archaeology that the artist employs to illuminate his practice also lends itself to describe the destructive nature of certain acts of collecting premised on 'excessive accumulation', of which the pillage of the archaeological heritage in the Middle East and North Africa in the late 18th and early 19th centuries is an emblematic example. Collecting, however, is also a tool for writing history and the displacement of photographs serves as a crucial step to reconfigure them within new narratives. Attentive to the changing nature of photographic archives, Zaatari frees photographs from fixed and prescribed readings, bringing new perspectives to bear on them without necessarily denying those former interpretations. Additional layers of historical information can be found nestling in details accidentally captured by the camera's lens, in signs of material damage or 'worthy' defects. In Zaatari's hands, digital technologies are used to emphasize, not to occlude the traces of these material histories. In the folds of the archives, hidden narratives wait to be revealed and unfolded under the loving gaze of the artist, collector and historian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I explore how a historic image archive can be re-worked through collaborative artistic-scientific practice, and how photography can be ‘re-performed’ as a strategy to observe an environmental change. The focus is on a project by the photographer Chrystel Lebas, who between 2011 and 2017 worked in collaboration with botanists from the Natural History Museum, London. The collaborators used historic and contemporary photographs for seasonal observations in the field. Their specific interest was in the potential for using historic visual ecological records to investigate environmental change as observed now.The paper explores the hybridization of technical, aesthetic and embodied knowledge, the application of montage and the tacit creation of a visual framework for observation. It draws attention to the potential inflexibility in interpretation inherent in the accepted systematic practice of placing ecological records within a herbarium in a natural history collection. Secondly, it illustrates the neglected potential of photographic collections within scientific research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Google announced in November 2008 that it was to host online one of the world’s largest corpus of photographic images, thanks to its collaboration with the Life magazine picture collection, it also said something, almost incidentally, about the state of the archive in the digital age. This essay examines the meeting between the archive and technology that the Google publicity announces by focusing on a relatively minor subset of the Life images digitized as a result of this partnership. It does so by foregrounding ‘user builders’ and their roles in both making meaning from digital archives and making digital archives meaningful. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The functions of an archive depend on the medium in which its holdings are recorded; the material on which they are inscribed; the location in which the materials are stored, and the system of order in which all of these elements are configured. Digital technology enables archives to be organized in new and multiple ways, according to the principles of what Weinberger calls a ‘new digital disorder’ in his 2007 book, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. This article asks how different archival orders affect the work of research by examining experiences of searching both the analogue and digital incarnations of two important art historical collections: the Photographic Collection of the Warburg Library and the Conway Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art. It questions the idea that particular ways of ordering an archive are necessarily tied to specific media or forms of materiality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ordinary people living ordinary lives inhabit meaningful spaces; in globalized urban environments, these spaces are vernacular landscapes. Urban spaces are also subject to the effects of social inequality. Class, racial/ethnic, religion, and citizenship hierarchies mark urban territories with differential meanings. Spatial semiotic analysis makes it possible to see even the most powerless of urban dwellers as social agents in the local reproduction of urban culture. The authors argue that sociological analysis of visual data is necessary to understand how urban vernacular neighborhoods are changing as a result of globalization. They present visual data on vernacular neighborhoods in Antwerp, Berlin, Brooklyn, Cape Town, Hong Kong, Lisbon, London, Manchester, Paris, Philadelphia, Rome, St Petersburg, Stockholm, and Tirana. These images are among the 9000+ photographs from more than 40 global cities available from their online archive. Urban spaces are filled with signs of collective identity. In the physical environment, architectural details, commercial signs, and graffiti, among other things, signify the flows of people and culture. So too do social practices, such as commercial transactions, socializing, and commuting in the public spaces of vernacular ethnic neighborhoods. The authors’ analysis, based on hundreds of images in their archive, reveals distinctive visual representations of social differences in vernacular landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]