Archival meaning: materiality, digitization, and the nineteenth-century photograph.

Just as the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology was being founded at Harvard in 1866, Alexander Gardner was photographing native American tribal delegations in images that fused portrait with typology (now at the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives at the National Museum of Natural History) and the geological surveys of the United States turned a similarly classifying eye to the American West. At the Peabody, photographic images stood as documentary evidence in the study of culture or as evidence of processes and procedures by which those cultures became the object of study. Its nineteenth-century collections include over 10,000 glass negative plates and an estimated 100,000 to 125,000 prints. Ever since the 1980s, when daguerreotypes of Sea Island slaves commissioned by Louis Agassiz showed up in a storage cabinet, there has been a sense that the museum's photography collections have much to say about the terms on which knowledge was constructed through the twin institutions of the nineteenth-century museum and photography.

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The museum's contemporary galleries continue to rely on the nineteenth-century photograph as illustration and verification. One case in the Pacific Islands exhibit displays a basket collected by naturalist Alexander Agassiz during an 1896 expedition; next to it is a photograph of a bare-breasted woman with a similar basket. Without captions, both the object and the photograph are meant to speak for themselves. The basket, not the woman's body, is the important object that requires validation, even as her body authenticates the othered (and anthropological) qualities of herself and the object. Which is to say that, in places, photographs still operate in the museum under assumptions of authenticity and transparency photographs document authentic cultural rituals and authenticate the museum's objects unmediated by the cultures that produced them or that are their subjects.

In the last year, two exhibits, "'A Good Type': Tourism and Science in Early Japanese Photography" (exhibited October 2007 April 2008) and "Fragile Memories: Images of Archaeology and Community at Copan, 1891-1900" (exhibited June 2008-March 2009), complicate such uses of photographs as documentary objects and instead highlight the ways in which the interplay of archival storage, materiality, and technology are re-shaping the reading of the nineteenth-century photograph. At issue here is the photograph's relationship to history, which, as conceived of in Roland Barthes's terms as "that has been," (1) Dis photography as taxidermy. The meaning of the image is fixed at the moment of its making and cannot change no matter how or when or who looks--the history that matters is the moment of the photograph's making. By focusing on the photograph as object and the terms on which digitization is changing access to photographs as archival objects, these exhibits prompt a rethinking of the history of nineteenth-century photography as a history of what is collected and what is seen, what is stored and what is forgotten.

The theoretical premise of "A Good Type" is that photographic meaning is not produced by the universalizing equalizer of the archive but by tracing the material conditions under which a photograph was produced, collected, and archived. The exhibit takes its title from a photograph made in the 1870s by Baron Raimund von Stillfried, from the collection of William Sturgis Bigelow (whose fine arts collection is the basis for the extraordinary Japanese collections of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts), donated to the Peabody in 1927. The image, known as Singing Girl, bears Bigelow's note: "Shows very well how a Japanese woman's dress looks when properly put on. A Good Type." That the image is a commercially produced studio pose, created by a foreign photographer, collected by a renowned art collector, and then accessioned as an anthropological photograph, traces the photograph's discursive history as it moves from commercial stereotype to anthropological type, all the while relying on the photograph's status as transparent evidence to construct vastly different bodies of knowledge.

When Singing Girl is overlaid with curator David Odo's commentary, the photograph becomes a primer for the exhibit's method of reading photographs against the multiple visual, cultural, and archival histories of Meiji period photography (1868-1912). Digitized and enlarged to poster size, the image is superimposed with text that anchors the image with fact: "von Stillfried was one of the most important early photographers to have worked in Japan (active 1870s)," "Costume and prop have been arranged and painted to emphasize model's 'exotic' occupation," and "Studio backdrop--which recalls a European landscape--used in many Stillfried photographs." In turn, the material and discursive histories of the photograph are also raised: "Museum number given to this photograph when it was accessioned"; "Tourist souvenir transformed into scientific object." Other captions question the terms on which the image constructs the very knowledge of the subject that the photograph naturalizes. One label draws attention to the way the archival caption "imparts authority and guides meaning" so that the generalized appearance of this woman stands for all Japanese women, asking the viewer to consider "Is she really typical?" This is counter-memory as museum interpretation.

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Visually, the exhibit argues that commercial, artistic, erotic, ethnographic images made for domestic and foreign audiences share visual and epistemological foundations. This juxtaposition of images is evidence that diverse origins are subsumed by the archive; re-read, the arrangement repositions these images not as documents, but as artifacts of cultures in contact. The discursive terms on which the photographs construct knowledge are also exposed in the difference between their exhibition labels such as "Japan ('man in court costume')" (which stress the contingency of the photograph in the museum) and their archival captions such as "Shinto Priest" (which emphasize the museum's certain knowledge of the photograph's subject). Dominant conventions of photography do not stay in the hands of western photographers (nor did they begin there, but drew on the conventions of Japanese print culture). Instead, they are re-appropriated and revised by Japanese photographers in the name of modernization. There is no single hegemonic culture in command of photographic discourse; rather, those discourses are subject to multiple, conflicting, and shifting deployments.

The exhibit exposes the slippages between stereotype and typology, and the mobility of such visual rhetorics as artful images trades in stereotypes that slide into fact. Framed and matted, with cataloging notations concealed, these images seem to be void of context, except as beautiful objects, suggesting momentarily that they can be read as self-sufficient and authentic images of a samurai or a courtesan. But the labels suggest otherwise, pointing out that subjects were often models, hired to pose in multiple images. In one anonymous image, a courtesan stands on a pedestal with her young attendant. The delicate hand coloring of her robes romanticizes the prostitute as a signature icon of Japanese culture in western eyes. Any reading of such an image as authentic is disrupted by knowledge of their commercial production. The same kimonos, backdrops, and models were used again and again to produce images for the tourist market.

The tourist gaze, in turn, becomes the basis for the museum's gaze as evidenced in the way the archive looks at photographs of Japanese women. Partially unclothed and posed in domestic spaces, the cataloger's gaze absorbs a sexualized, western, male gaze. In this section of the exhibit, the museum's notations are deliberately exposed. One assemblage of four commercial photographs is mounted together and captioned, probably by an early-twentieth century museum cataloger, as Japanese woman bare breasted, posed." Such captions barely conceal the images' origin as erotic photographs made for export and simultaneously reinforce exoticism and eroticism as anthropological facts. Three other variations from the museum's collection re-caption the exact same images as "Partially clad Japanese woman washing face," "Partially clad Japanese woman washing hair," and "Partially clad Japanese woman at wash basin." If it were not for the way the camera gazes at these women and the fact that they were made in Stillfried's studio, the captions would nearly seamlessly reclassify the erotic souvenir to the anthropological category of "customs and habits."

The exhibit also makes counter-memory material as embodied by a replica of the museum's filing and storage system, known as the H-boards (historic boards), in which photographs are mounted on boards for classification and storage. Pasted onto boards, the original terms of the photographs are overtaken by those of the archive. It is these mechanisms of organization and narrative that impart the photograph with the authority of science, something a viewer feels intuitively upon grasping the file drawer's heavy metal handle. Storage is what transforms photographs from souvenir to science and remakes the terms by which they produce knowledge.

While these images trade on nostalgia and exoticism for exterior consumption and form the basis of the museum's study of culture, they also enlist nationalism's appeal to a traditional, timeless, and authentic past. An image of a samurai is hand colored with subtle pigments used by ukiyo-e colorists (who feared that photography would make their work obsolete) and contributes to the image's delicate exoticism. These images were not only made by western photographers. Kimbei Kusakabe, who first worked as a colorist for Stillfried, opened his own studio in Yokohama in 1881, and in 1885 bought Francis Beato and Stillfried's negatives, reprinting them into the twentieth century. Iconic images of Nikko, Kameido, and Mount Fuji made for the tourist market might work in the museum as evidence of traditional Japanese society, but they also serve as nostalgic visions of a fading feudal past for a modernizing nation.

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