IDIL CETIN // Fragmented Archives and Photographs

FRAGMENTED ARCHIVES AND PHOTOGRAPHS

Dwelling into the Armenian past through photographs is not an easy task not because of the characteristics of the technical image, but because of the way one can encounters the photographic collections. Just like the survivors themselves, Armenian libraries and archives took root in several countries around the world in the past century following the 1915 Genocide. The photographic collections these institutions hold have been accumulated throughout the years mainly through the donations by the Armenians. One of the striking features of these collections is their fragmented nature in the sense that images that apparently belonged to the same body once are scattered today across different institutions and it is difficult to notice this unless one visits these institutions in person mainly because the majority of the collections in several places remain undigitized. The fragmented nature of the photographic collections is further reinforced by the fact that the available images are those that survived the Genocide, which complicates even further the possibility of finding a coherence in the collections. The webinar will entail a description of the fragmentedness of these archives and photographic collections alongside a discussion on the ethical, political, and social implications of studying them.

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Idil Cetin is a Marie Curie postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo, Norway, with the project Histories of Reception of Photography in the Ottoman Empire, where she investigates the heterogeneity of experiences of different imperial ethnicgroups in their use and interpretation of the photographic medium. She intertwines her interest in visual culture and history with archival studies, with a specific focus on photographs as archival materials, on which she writes regularly.