Happy World Photography day!
I’ve been thinking about digital archaeology and archaeological methods in general as a way to foment intimate connection (no not like that) and prefigure social relations and interpretation. Arguably this began with my work on archaeological photography, inspired by my own practice and taking a class with the brilliant Nancy Van House at UC Berkeley. For my final paper in the class I used methods from Visual Studies to analyse photographs from Çatalhöyük, in a content and semiotic analysis and applied lessons I’d learned to my own practice.
Taking photographs of whole people. Taking photos of people in their power. Asking permission. Working alongside people and earning their trust before taking photos, when I could.
I published the article eight-ish years after I’d originally written it, in Internet Archaeology. There’s more in my thesis, wherein I had an entire chapter written about the many lives of a digital photograph of a coffee pot on an archaeological tell. Learning how to read photographs was an excellent skill, wherein you can get a pretty good idea of the social relations, conditions, and general expertise employed at any archaeological site at a glance.
My photographs have been reusable under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license forever, so I occasionally see them pop up as illustrating news stories or other archaeological items of interest. And they’ve probably been scraped for use in generative AI, which was definitely not envisioned when I received permission to take the photographs in the first place. All of the carefully cultivated relationships built with local site participants, my colleagues, students on fieldwork projects, etc have taken on a different gloss now they’re part of a large, decontextualised training set for facial recognition systems.
After the rapid proliferation of digital photography and rapid acquisition of good quality digital cameras, there seems to be a general decline in quality and availability of archaeological photography. A recent thread on Reddit asked after good quality cameras to take on fieldwork and most people said they just use their phone. There’s certainly further evidence that photography in archaeology continues to proliferate, even while the quality is reduced. I’ve previously argued that one of the affordances of digital cameras, being able to see the photo before you take it, allowed people to take photos with more strategic care, it seems that the lack of training in photography has overcome that minor advantage. Perhaps even further that archaeological photographs are, fundamentally, visual arguments, and the interpretive heft has been overcome by mechanical practice.
Finally, there are relatively few places to broadly share archaeological photographs. Flickr was great until the business model dictated for the company yell at me about retroactive violations of their upload limit. Wikimedia would be an obvious next choice, and I probably should move my collection of photos over there, perhaps with the Flickr2Commons tool. A lot of the most charismatic photos these days are likely to be shared amongst site participants, in whatsapp groups, and that’s probably fine. But between AI facial recognition tools and the lack of hosting, we’re in danger of becoming an un-faced discipline again, finds and sites divorced from the people who participated in their uncovery.
Finally, my own practice has faltered in recent years, as the demands build up. Digital archaeology is laughably difficult to personalise, with many variations of people pointing at screens, like this photo from the 2024 Heritage Jam:
Indeed, much of it is difficult to disambiguate from generic marketing imagery.
Of course, I’ve taken hundreds of these kinds of photos as well, so perhaps it’s me that needs a more creative approach:
So what’s next for archaeological photography? Are we retreating to our private groups and stashes, with only the bare (faceless) minimum published, uploaded to archives and shown at conferences? Does the preponderance of generative AI make the above photographs obsolete? Do we have enough photographs of people pointing at screens and holes, now that the imagined truth of photographs has been completely undermined?
Smile! click
Colleen Morgan 