Writing Wednesday: Archaeology and Photograph

I’ve been working on writing whenever I can which doesn’t always create the most pleasant writing experiences (hecks, this is why they call it work, right?), but it is producing words on the page, which during a busy teaching semester is probably the best I can ask for.

Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been working on the concept of fragments and how it relates to the photographs that we took in the Bakken. As readers of this blog know, the photographs are the point of this particular book project, but my editors wanted me to contextualize the photos not only in our work in the Bakken, but in the broader conversation about photography, fragmentation, and oil. You can see the current outline of the book here.

Here is an effort to articulate the relationship between photography and archaeology in the context of the archaeology of the contemporary world. It’ll set up a subsequent section on photographs and fragments next. 

7. Photography and archaeology: permanence in the age of ephemerality

We framed our first book length study of the Bakken as a tourist guide leveraging the connection between oil and the emergence of the tourist, the middle class, and the suburb. We also played on the well-known connection between the modern tourist and the archaeologist (Johnson 2011). It is hardly surprising then that there exists an indisputable link between tourism, archaeology, and photography (Shanks 1992; Hamilakis et al. 2016; Riggs 2020) which continues to attract the attention of scholars in these fields. At the turn of the century, photography had emerged as both an important tool in the archaeologists kit as well as an the growth of photography as a tool to capture the fleeting experiences of the tourist’s gaze. As Susan Sontag famously observed, the tourist with their cameras covey a kind of immortality on their experiences. For Sontag, the permanence of the photograph compensates for the sense of alienation brought about by the tourists’ experience of the modern world. The same turn-of-the-20th-century currents that shaped tourism and photography, contributed to the development of archaeology which similarly employed industrial tools construct new forms of political and social identity in an age beset by alienation (Thomas 2004). Indeed, as Christina Riggs has noted, archaeologists recognized the relationship between the destructive practices associated with archaeology and the ability of photography to document what archaeologists was destroying. Y. Hamilakis and F. Ifantidis discerned the parallel work of the photographer and the archaeologists who claimed to draw together the fragments of the past and present them as a sufficiently comprehensive vision to serve as the foundation for the nation-state (Hamilakis and Ifantidis 2015). They stressed the capacity of photography and archaeology to arrest time and substitute permanence for the ephemerality of the contemporary world. Needless to say, the archaeology of the contemporary world has drawn heavily on photography to document the ephemerality seemingly intrinsic in the instability of the contemporary as a chronological period. In this way, archaeologists of the contemporary world are less concerned of their own explicitly destructive actions—particularly those associated with excavation—and more aware of their contribution to larger schemes of destruction implicit in modernity. Archaeologists of the contemporary world use photographs much like the tourist does: we seek to create an archive that allows us to convert our present experiences into a portable past. Unlike the conventional archaeologist, however, the destruction that we seek to forestall through photography is not the product of our method. 

This view of photography is grounded in an archaeological epistemology that understand photographs as evidence that makes possible the reconstruction of the past. It stresses the representational character of photography which limits the capacity of the photograph to produce knowledge beyond the archive. This ignores the potential for photography to function as a subversive tool in the hands of the photographer (e.g. Taylor 1994; Urry and Crawshaw 1997) or for viewers to read photographs against the grain and in ways counter to their intended purposes. These understandings of photography have prompted archaeologists to consider approaches to photography that go beyond their roles in the representational practices of the discipline. Indeed, Dan Hicks and Leslie McFadyen have argued that archaeology and photography form ”an idorrhythmic coexistence” rather than the latter being dependent on representational ways of seeing embedded within the visual language of the former. This approach to photography, that Hicks terms “photology,”allows viewers to consider photographs not as documents representing the past, but as objects that are contemporary with the viewer and every bit as unstable and fluid as the viewer’s understanding of their own world. This commitment to the contemporaneity of the photograph and its independence from some original archaeological object parallels the development of an archaeology of the contemporary world that places the archaeology in the same frame as the world that they study. The inability to distinguish the archaeologist from the period that they study or to separate archaeological work from the formation processes that produce the contemporary world also makes impossible the traditional acts temporal or spatial distancing at the core of the epistemologies that makes archaeological knowledge possible. This is a particularly valuable way to understand the archaeology of oil, for example, because it foregrounds how the viscosity of oil renders inseparable the archaeologist from their own modernity. Thus, photography, archaeology, the archaeologist, and the tourist continuously co-create a kaleidoscopic understanding of the world destabilize by the mobility facilitated by the viscosity of oil. 

This approach to photography seeks to emphasize the degree to which we can disentangle photography and archaeology from its modern roots. This is particularly important in the 21st century as modern problems, ranging from global climate change to the convulsions associated with late capitalism and overripe nationalism, beg for solutions that operate outside of the systems which have caused the current sense of crisis. The photographs included in this volume represent a minor contribution to this approach. They are not meant to represent the work of the North Dakota Man Camp project or to have captured for posterity a window into a more expansive reality that occurred “on the ground.” Instead they embody archaeological knowledge and invite critical engagement both within and between the photographs in this archive. This means in some ways, relieving these photographs — or indeed this essay — from carrying too great a theoretical or even ontological or narrative burden.