21st Nov 2013 6:30pm
G7, Pavilion Parade.
'In the end, though, business men invaded professional photography from every side.'
Walter Benjamin
This paper examines the relationship between the photographic image and capitalist exploitation; it takes the photographic album Oficina Alianza and Port of Iquique 1899, an industrial topography of nitrate mining in the Atacama desert of Chile, as a the point of departure for a series of questions. How are photographic acts of representation implicated in the development of capitalism? And, in the case of Chile, how does a photographic process become pressed into the service of European monopolists and speculators? Of the hundred images contained in the Oficina Alianza and Port of Iquique 1899 album, many contain nitrate miners; its industrial topography is a peopled landscape. How does the labouring body figure in such acts of representation and processes of appropriation?
Louise Purbrick is a principal lecturer in the History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. Her work with material culture is not restricted to academic enquiry alone; she is involved in the documentation of historic sites and the curation of exhibitions.
Purbrick has a longstanding interest in the Long Kesh/Maze prison site, Northern Ireland, and produced the architectural history that accompanied Donovan Wylie’s photographic works The Maze (2004 and 2008). She was curator of Rattling the Cage, a community archive of materials used in a local anti-Guantánamo campaign.
Since 2005, Purbrick has worked with Belfast-based cross-community project, Healing Through Remembering, on the establishment of a museum of the conflict ‘in and about’ Northern Ireland. Her academic and activist roles are brought together in the co-editorship of multi-disciplinary collections of writings that which attempt to understand the material remains of violent pasts (Re-mapping the Field, 2006 and Contested Spaces, 2007). Louise’s current AHRC funded project is Traces of Nitrate: Mining history and photography between Britain and Chile.
Open to all staff and students.
