Bonds, Attachments and Networks: Photographies of Connection

There has been much recent work on photography and feeling, emotion and memory. Likewise networks of photographic practice have become almost de rigueur in contemporary analysis. In this overview paper I bring them together to consider affection as a connective tissue within photographic practice. Drawing on my work on the late 19th and early 20th century photographic survey movement, I consider ways in which its activities were driven by networks of affection – familial and social, local, national, and international embracing both the sentimental and pragmatic. It was also driven both by a sense of potential loss and by pride and hope in the future, precisely the sentiments of personal relationships on which many photographic and survey activities were founded. Drawing on recent work on emotion as a historical modality, I shall use my survey material as a case study of the affective triangulation between people, place and photography, and ask to what extent can we write a history of photography through a history of emotion.

Elizabeth Edwards is a visual and historical anthropologist.  She is Professor Emerita of Photographic History at De Montfort University, Leicester and also has Honorary Professorships in the Department of Anthropology University College London and University of Durham . From 2016-22 she was Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Victoria and Albert Museum Research Institute, London. Until 2005 she was Curator of Photographs at Pitt Rivers Museum and lecturer in visual anthropology at ISCA, University of Oxford, where she is now Research Affiliate. She is on the advisory boards of the Kunsthistorisches Institut (Max Planck Gesellschaft) in Florence and the National Science and Media Museum (Science Museum Group) in Bradford. Her most recent books are Photographs and the Practice of History: a short primer (2022) and the co-edited What Photographs Do: the making and remaking of museum cultures (2022). She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2015.