Photographing Tutankhamun: Photo-objects and the archival afterlives of colonial archaeology (Christina Riggs (University of East Anglia))
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Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
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In archaeology, the photographic image remains fixed as an ‘objective’ record of a site or object, or a self-regarding snapshot of famous excavators rescuing ‘ancient Egypt’.
This paper uses the photographic archive of the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb (1922-33) to consider how archival processes were embedded in the practice of archaeological photography and in the ‘afterlives’ of these processes, as the archive was cared for in subsequent decades.
Prominent as the tomb of Tutankhamun has been in colonial, postcolonial, and neo-colonial imaginaries, my discussion of its photo-objects and historical archiving underscores the need for more critical approaches to current archival efforts, which otherwise risk reinforcing the empirical positivism that underpinned the colonial project in the first place.
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Patrizia Di Bello