Margaret's Letter, A Digital Media Shared ExperienceVideo, 7:30 minutes, 2022, Celio H. Barreto, Ph.D. Student, De Montfort University, Leicester, U.K., Faculty, Seneca College of Applied Art and Technology, Toronto.o

What is Margaret MacLean telling us about her experience of the Russo-Japanese War through her scrapbook? What obstructs a more accurate understanding of her work and its meaning in her day? The acts of archiving, cataloguing, and collecting themselves introduce additional layers of meaning modulation that create more distance between the reader and the author. MacLean has chosen specific objects for inclusion in her scrapbook and not others; the archivist has catalogued the items according to specific terminology and archiving standards, and not others. Is it possible to use digital technologies to overcome these obstacles and experience the affect in her work by privileging certain narratives in the author’s contemporaneous published texts?

In this paper I discuss the reframing of archived, catalogued, and digitized picture postcards, halftone press images and photographs into an audio/visual narrative founded on published text written by the collector and compiler of an early 20th Century scrapbook of Japan during the Russo-Japanese War, Margaret MacLean. This work is held at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. I discuss my motivation and methodology employing off-the-shelf digital technologies to create a performative shared experience to be screened at the workshop, and that hopefully conveys the affect of MacLean’s work.

ABOUT PHOTOWORKSHOP 2022 This workshopstrives for a synthesised history of photography, one of the first academic events to embrace such diverse aspects of photography with a focus on East Asia. Scholars from diverse disciplines explore the nature of interdisciplinarity in photographic research and through this, take the ontological status of photography seriously and re-visit questions raised by Christopher Pinney: Are there many incompatible photographs, or is there a protean photography foregrounded by the changing apparatus and techniques?  What was happening that could not be achieved by other media?  How can we account for the ‘photographic event’? Do formal elements matter? What about the materiality or immateriality of photography? This workshop, therefore, also functions as an intervention to historical narratives that have long been biased towards photography’s ‘core history’ and towards limited sources, often housed in colonial archives.

Organisers:

• Fengyu Wang M.A., PhD Candidate (Institute of East Asian Art History)
• Giulia Pra Floriani M.A., PhD Candidate (Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies; Institute of East Asian Art History)
• Shixin Liang M.A., PhD Candidate (Institute of Chinese Studies)
• Yanling Li M.A., PhD Candidate (Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies)