Lecture: Ruins of Photography - Migrations of family archives and their ecosystems of belonging

The Laboratory of Image and Sound in Anthropology (LISA-USP) will host on April 29, 2025, at 2:30 p.m., the lecture "Ruins of photography: migrations of family archives and their ecosystems of belonging" by researcher Dr. Fabiana Bruno, a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Anthropology at USP supervised by Professor Dr. Sylvia Caiuby Novaes.

The lecture will address the context and policies of “emerging collections” formed with abandoned or discarded photos, in particular, vernacular family photographs unlinked from personal albums. The starting point will be the presentation of an overview of the stories of three “emerging collections” researched: Arab Image Foundation (AIF), Lebanon; Found Photo Foundation, England; and ACHO – Arquivo Coleção de Histórias Ordinárias, Brazil.

In these emerging collections, the collected and sheltered vernacular photographs – from diverse sources – acquire other ways of survival, when they are destined for a “second life” in re-gatherings, within the scope of “anarchical” initiatives (Seligmann-Silva, 2023) in different places around the world. In what way does the way of life of these photographs, when gathered in other archival environments, devoid of family belongings, point to other epistemologies of images and archives in anthropology?

The “ruins” (Tsing, 2019; 2022) of family albums, the destitution of their ecosystems of belonging and the “survival” and “assembly and reassembly” of these images (Warburg, 2010; and Didi-Huberman, 2013) are some of the topics discussed in the lecture.