Colin Sterling

Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past critically examines the production, consumption, and interpretation of photography across various heritage domains, from global image archives to the domestic arena of the family album. Through original ethnographic and archival research, the book sheds new light on the role photography has played in the emergence, expansion, and articulation of heritage in diverse sociocultural contexts. Drawing on wide-ranging experience across the heritage sector and two international case studies – Angkor in Cambodia and the town of Famagusta, Cyprus – the book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the role photography has played and continues to play in shaping experiences and conceptualisations of heritage. One of the core aims of the book is to problematise and potentially redirect the varied usages of photography within current practice, usages which remain woefully undertheorised, despite their often-central role in shaping heritage. Ultimately, by focusing attention on a hitherto underexamined aspect of the heritage phenomenon, namely its manifold interconnections with photography, this book provides fresh insight to the making and remaking of the past in the present, and the alternative heritages that might come into being around emergent photographic forms and approaches. Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past uses photography as a method of enquiry as well as a tool of documentation. It will be of interest to scholars and students of heritage, photography, anthropology, museology, public archaeology, and tourism. The book will also be a valuable resource for heritage practitioners working around the globe.

Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past

Rodney Harrison

This book is not a typical academic edited volume. Nor does it subscribe to the usual dictates of an exhibition catalogue. It does not seek to provide a comprehensive overview of work on climate change and museums or claim to have discovered One Quick Trick to Solve the Climate Emergency. Instead, the book reflects the main characteristics of the Reimagining Museums for Climate Action project: it is collaborative, distributed, conversational, subversive, nomadic and, at times, playful. The arguments it puts forward emerge through dialogue and speculation just as much as they respond to and build on empirical research. In this sense, the book is perhaps best seen as a partial and in many ways still evolving artefact of the Reimagining Museums project. It can be read from cover-to-cover, or its varied contents can be traversed in a less rigid fashion. It is one “output” among many, and its main aim is to prompt further transdisciplinary alliances, rather than set out a particular position or manifesto. To this end, the book invites peripatetic readings and strange deviations. It is anchored by eight concepts that reflect the diversity and creativity of museums, but it is also motivated by a desire to (re)situate this field within a broader set of debates on the roots of social and environmental injustice, and the role of museums in these histories.

Colin Sterling

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