We were delighted to be invited to speak at another conference organised by Professor Gil Pasternak of De Montfort University, Leicester, in conjunction with the National Trust. The event, Photographic Digital Heritage: Institutions, Communities and the Political, was livestreamed on 19–20 October 2021.
As part of the programme, BCVA contributed a talk on Punjabi Migration to the Black Country: A Photographic Journey through History, Cultures and Digital Technology. Our Director’s contribution can be viewed at 27mins:20secs into the video.
More about the event below:-
The conference explored how digital technology, and digitisation in particular, has transformed the ways in which historical photographs connected to cultural heritage are collected, interpreted, and used. It examined the role of formal heritage and memory institutions in driving this process, the ways communities have navigated their own aspirations around digitisation, and how political interests can shape the meanings and uses of photographic heritage.
More broadly, the event considered the long relationship between photography and heritage, showing how this connection existed well before the rise of digital technology and has played a major role in shaping heritage practice. It also addressed key questions around provenance, cataloguing, dematerialisation, and the possible loss or transformation of historical meaning when analogue photographic collections are converted into digital archives.
By bringing together photography and heritage scholars, policymakers, and community organisers, the conference opened up important discussion about the political dimensions of photographic digital heritage, particularly in social settings where questions of identity, representation, and power can become highly contested.
Speakers also considered interrelated topics, including:
• the influence that photographic digitisation practices have exerted on definitions of heritage assets;
• the effect of photographic digitisation on institutional practices and policies;
• uses of photographic digital heritage for community building and activism;
• the employment of photographic digital heritage by governing powers;
• and the effect of photographic digital heritage on social and inter-generational communications about history, memory and the past.