Rupert Nuttle

"Vision Intervenes: Photography in the Colonial Apparatus, 1885-1925" argues that meaningful historical connections remain to be established in the epistemic entwinements of colonial, scientific and popular photography during the decades that bracket the turn of the 20th century. In this period, when European powers systematically deployed cameras to contain, pacify and justify the genocide of Indigenous people in South Asia, North America and elsewhere, the medium of photography nonetheless remained an unstable and materially volatile site for the contestation of knowledge and political agency. The case studies in "Vision Intervenes" are situated at the intersection of two major 19th-century colonial axes: India-Britain and North America-Western Europe. I show these two historical projects as co-constitutive and together radically entangled within the global circuitry of modern empire. The ballooning ubiquity of photographic reproduction (in postcards, cabinet cards, state records and the illustrated press) was a sustaining feature of late 19th-century Western empire ideology. "Vision Intervenes" argues that this image economy, instead of being stable and unidirectional in its power relations, was in fact precarious and fraught with subversion and reversal. I archivally recoup a diverse cast of overlooked turn-of-the-century image-makers (physicists, botanists, occult spiritualists, vaudevillians, and others) whose counter-hegemonic visual strategies overturned the imperatives of European expansionism — and initiated lasting changes in the material relations between photography and living beings.