Photography in the Making of Knowledge: European Art-historical and Scientific Investigations on Asia

The history of photography shares a profound connection with the history of the modern scientific disciplines, including art history, anthropology, and archaeology, as well as modern medicine, biology, and the natural sciences.

With the visual turn in the humanities, an increasing number of historians have analyzed visual materials from a new perspective, conceiving images as central rather than peripheral objects of historical analysis.

Images ranging from early X-ray photographs to drawings of distant cultures contributed in different ways to the production of knowledge.

All provided viewers with an impression that they were seeing something that would otherwise be invisible to them, whether inside the human body or geographically and ideologically distant.

The PhotoMaKEASIA project addresses the following questions: How did European scholars and scientists use photography to construct knowledge about Asia? To what degree did the photographic medium itself influence or affect the results of their studies? Do contemporary photographs of Asia continue to shape scholarly and popular understandings?

Departing from studies that focus on photography and the “colonial gaze,” this project concentrates instead on how photographs shaped knowledge in response to pragmatic concerns and scholarly interest in Asia.

The project develops four case studies: 1.) photographs of 1850s European expeditions to China to study silkworm cultivation; 2.) images created to document archaeological expeditions by the ISMEO (Rome); 3.) photographic reproductions of artworks used in art historical studies; 4.) and contemporary documentary photography.

Based on these four studies, the project will trace the history of photographic images in the construction of European knowledge about Asia in order to rethink photographs’ role in both the past and the present.