A Photograph’s Life

and Afterlives
A theoretical analysis of the meanings created and reflected
by a vernacular photo collection depicting a family
of Polish refugees in Uganda, 1942 - 1952.

Anna Kućma

s1981676

annakucma@gmail.com

Supervisor: Dr. Helen Westgeest

Second Reader: Dr. S.A. Shobeiri

17,241 Words (excl. of notes and bibliography)

MA Thesis

Masters of Media Studies: Film and Photographic Studies

Leiden University

August 2018

Table of Contents

Introduction 3
Chapter 1: Content and Context, or How an Image Speaks for Itself 7
1.1 The case study as an example of vernacular expression 8

1.2 Exploring content and context 10

1.3 Portraiture’s codes of meaning 15

1.4 To record and remember 17

Chapter 2: Family photo collections versus institutional archives 20

2.1 Photography and the storage of knowledge 21

2.2 The family photo album as a form of archive 25

2.3 The role of the family photo collection in remembering 29

Chapter 3: Materiality and affect in decoding meaning 34

3.1 A closer look at affect in photography 35

3.2 The materiality of vernacular photography 39

3.3 Digitalising and online sharing 42

Conclusion 47
Bibliography 50
Appendix 54

2
 “(…) the archive of a society, a culture or a civilization cannot be described
exhaustively: or even, no doubt, the archive of a whole period. On the other hand it
is not possible for us to describe our own archive since it is from within these rules
that we speak, since it is that which gives to what we can say- and to itself, the
object of or discourse- its modes of appearances, its forms of existence and
coexistence, its systems of accumulation, historicity and disappearance. The
archive cannot be described in its totality; and in its presence it is unavoidable. It
emerges in fragments, regions, levels…”

Michel Foucault, “The Archaeology Of Knowledge”

Introduction

Vernacular photography is one of the most common ways in which

photographic images are created. Generally, as the name itself suggests, it is a
record of the everyday created by common people. The development and
accessibility of photographic equipment now allows us to take our photographs
with great enthusiasm and eagerness — in the United States alone about 550
snapshots are taken per second.1 And as time passes these family snapshots
become what could be broadly called an archive- a physical or digital entity that
very closely associated with the processes of remembering and forgetting.

A few years ago, while living in Uganda, I came across an image depicting a
couple, both Polish refugees who had found shelter from World War Two in what
was then called the British Protectorate of Uganda. The image stuck with me for
years, and was a reason for me to find out more about my own country’s little-
known history, a source of curiosity that led to writing this thesis and conducting
research about vernacular photography and the archive from the perspective of that
particular photograph and following the thought process caused by it. During the
research, I soon found out that the photograph belongs to a wider collection, the

1Batchen, “Forget Me Not”, p. 8. It is worth to mention here that “Forget Me Not” was published in
2004 and therefore the number of snapshots taken per day in the USA today would probably be
much higher.

3
personal photographs of the Jagla family, and decided to include two similar images
in the case study, so that I would be able to illustrate my arguments in a more
precise way. My rationale for selecting these photographs and thus vernacular
photography as my subject is also arguably a result of what Gilles Deleuze called
the “encountered sign”, a sensation that the image evokes in a person that
becomes a catalyst for thought and critical inquiry, forcing someone to think about
these images for an extended period of time. Deleuze describes this draw towards
an image by saying that “it, in spite of ourselves, is an impression, a material
impression because it has reached us through our senses”.2 Therefore this family
photograph, and the personal collection that the image is a part of, will serve as a
case study for my investigation.
This thesis will draw on research from within the field and apply those
theories and approaches to demonstrate the ways in which images carry their own
meaning, both as images and as objects, and how that meaning changes not just
over time but also depending on their context and who is viewing them and why.

My focus is the analysis of the case study from the perspective of

photographic theory, with the main goal of understanding some key aspects of the
core image of the case study, such as what it represents, the genres it belongs to,
the meaning of the collections it is a part of, and its materiality, to the highest
possible degree. This approach, which will seek to dissect the case study in greater
depth with each chapter, acknowledges that until very recently vernacular
photography, while being one of the most common genres, was rarely seen as a
topic of interest for scholars of culture, art history or photography. Scholarly work
considering family photography and its archives has mostly been a focus for
researchers concerned with visual anthropology and anthropology. Hence, the
theoretical framework of the thesis will be a combination of what could be referred
to as ‘classical’ photographic theory and more recent cultural and visual theory in
order to derive and underline possible interpretative conclusions.

The first chapter will concentrate on introducing the vernacular as a genre

and will review previous literature to create a picture of the history of personal
photography, introducing the case study as well as its historical background, and
proceeding to analyze the content of the photograph, and considering a number of

2 Deleuze quoted in Van Alphen, “Affective Operations , p. 22.

4
components that make this photograph what it is. In this chapter I’m basing my
enquiry on writings by scholars and researchers specializing in photography and
popular imagery, most notably Geoffrey Batchen, Patricia Holland, Matte Sandbye
and Clive Scott. Additionally, particularly when it comes to considering the genre of
portraiture and decoding meanings, I draw on writings by Grahame Clarke and
Phillipe Stokes.

In the second chapter I will take a different perspective altogether and look at
the way that the images are preserved and seen, and the effects that these
processes have on the meanings that can be derived from them. To do that I will
start with considering the notion of the archive from a historical perspective and
then demonstrate how a family photo collection, whether in an album or in a
different shape, is a form of archive. I will be supporting my arguments with theories
based on the writings of Michel Foucault. Those arguments, on the topic of power
relationships within the archive, were introduced by theoreticians such as Alan
Sekula and John Tagg, whose work was inspired by Foucault and is considered
seminal for this area of photographic studies. Additionally I will be drawing on the
thoughts of art historian and curator Okwui Enwazor, Marianne Hirsh,
who combines feminist theory with memory studies, and philosopher Gillian Rose,
among others.

Lastly, the third chapter will return to considering the image, but this time I
will concentrate on its materiality as opposed to (but also related to) its content. I
will investigate its affect in relation to vernacular photography, and discuss image-
object in terms of an analysis of the impact of its physical appearance on the
beholder. In other words- what an image does, as opposed to the earlier analysis of
what the image is. I will also briefly explore how an image can change its meaning
when being digitalised and entering the realm of the Internet. The theoretical
framework of this chapter is based on affect theory as discussed by Patricia
Clough, Brian Massumi and Marguerite La Caze, and Henry Martin Lloyd. When
considering affect in relation to photography I will support my argument with the
work of Elizabeth Edwards, Christopher Pinney, Laura Marks, Elspeth H. Brown, Thy
Phu and, most notably, French philosopher and critic Ronald Barthes. When
considering the influence of new technologies such as digitalizing or online sharing

5
on the affective qualities of archival prints, I will draw on scholarly works by Nancy
Van House and Joanna Sassoon.

All in all my investigation attempts an analysis of the image itself, its content
including its site of production, and the sites and forms in which it has been kept
and seen by various audiences, both private and public. The analysis will centre
around the case study, namely three specific images, with a particular interest in
one, and the wider family photo collection that belongs to John “Zbyszek” Jagla.

The aim of this thesis is to highlight through the example of the case study
that vernacular photography carries certain qualities, primarily documentary and
affective, that extend further than just to the individual who owns the photograph,
and to consider what role vernacular photography performs in a collective sense.

At this point it is also necessary to note that the chosen case study presents
certain limitations; because I only had very limited access to it I built certain
arguments on presuming some specific qualities that it could possibly have. I
believe it is important to think about them in a more general sense, as it contributed
to the whole process.

6
Chapter 1: Content and Context, or How an Image Speaks for Itself

I will begin my analysis by looking at the content of the photographs in my

case study and at the subjects they portray, and through this examination address
the question of what we are actually looking at. The pictures that I’m interested in
were taken by a human hand and therefore the context of their creation, as well as a
consideration of their physical attributes, adds to our understanding of the subject.
This inquiry will not try to assess the aesthetic, formal or technical value of the
photograph, but rather to explore the meanings arising from these factors using the
theoretical tools and techniques available to me.

Photographs are recordings of reflected light, capturing and freezing a

moment to allow it to be re-examined later. However once an image becomes an
artefact the viewer is often a third party, unrelated to either photographer or subject,
and in many instances even the place in which the image was made does not exist
anymore or is not accessible, making it a literal record and representation of what-
has-been3 . However the knowledge of a moment that is hidden in images can be
important not just to the individual to whom the image belongs, but also to the
collective, historical consciousness and therefore to people who are not in any way
directly connected with the subjects.

How do we then make sense of what we see and form more informed
opinions about photographic images that we know nothing or very little about, and
how important is our understanding of content, genre and context to the clear and
correct reading of an image? What is the indexical nature of these photographs and
their denotative power in the context of microhistories (as opposed to the
metanarrative)?

The aim of this chapter is to answer the above questions, and the outline will be as
follows: To start with I will introduce a working definition of vernacular photography
formulated by others in order to frame and clarify my approach to this broad field in
relation to my research. Further, I will place the genre of vernacular photography
within the photography theory discourse, and discuss the definition of vernacular as
it applies to my case study. It will be then followed by a description of the visual

3“That-has-Been” is a statement describing the nature of photography formulated by Roland

Barthes in his seminal collection of critical essays on photography titled Camera Lucida. See:
Barthes, “Camera Lucida”, p. 76-77.

7
contents of the photographs, and I will also address the meanings that can be
derived from that content. I will examine more closely how portrait photography and
vernacular photography overlap in my case study. And lastly the notion of recording
and remembering will be addressed.

My argument will demonstrate that the message of a photograph cannot be

fully considered in the absence of context, and while an image may offer partial
stories to casual viewers, to better understand it one has to be aware of many
variables that create the context of its production.

1.1 The case study as an example of vernacular expression

To begin with it is important to consider vernacular photography as a

concept and attempt to situate this kind of imagery in the larger history of
photography and the theory of the photographic field. According to the dictionary-
like publication, “The Oxford Companion to the Photograph”, vernacular
photography is typified by “aesthetically unpretentious, generally functional images
made by amateur snapshotters or grass-roots professionals (e.g. (…) jobbing local
portraitists) for everyday purposes such as creating keepsakes or recording
mundane objects.” Photography historian, Geoffrey Batchen, defines vernacular
photography as “ordinary photographs, the ones made or bought (or sometimes
bought and then made over) by everyday folk from 1839 until now, the photographs
that preoccupy the home and the heart but rarely the museum or the academy.” 4
According to him the genre started developing immediately after the very invention
of the photographic medium and, as pointed out by Mette Sandbye, family
photography “is one of the most common types of photography in terms of its
sheer numbers.”5 Even though vernacular practice represents such a vast and
widespread proportion of photographic production, both researchers agree that it
has been to a large extent ignored by specialized academic analysis. To support her
claim Sandbye gives an example of the survey-like publication titled Photography: A
Cultural History, in which its author Mary Werner Marien considers the different
disciplines of photography and explores both professional and amateur work across
all genres. It is immediately telling that the section concerning “Family Pictures” can

4 Batchen, “Each Wild Idea,” p. 57.

5 Sandbye, “Looking at the family photo album”, p.2.

8
only be found towards the end of the book. Marien describes the genre in the
following manner: “(…) throughout the twentieth century, families accumulated
extensive collections of images, the majority taken with simple cameras and
increasingly reliable film. The content of family photographs was dominated by
celebratory occasions, such as weddings, birthdays, and vacations.” She then
continues, pointing out that only a small number of families dedicated any time to
recording how their everyday life looked like, and she notes the absence of
elements that we usually keep very private, such as messy kitchens and unmade
beds. It could be argued that by adding this detail she implicitly devalues the
meaning of the family photograph for what it is, and takes a dismissive tone,
pointing out that not many people use their cameras for conceptual purposes or
“psychological self-study and therapy.”6 Then, rather than concentrating on the
genre itself, she proceeds to discuss conceptual and artistic photographic
approaches inspired by vernacular images. Additionally it should be noted that the
term ‘snapshot’, which is frequently used to describe vernacular images, and which
will also be used in this essay, has a certain implication already inbuilt- by
describing it in this way we accept to consider images to be banal, informal and
amateur.7

Patricia Holland, on the other hand, writes extensively about the genre in her
chapter published in Photography. A Critical Introduction. She makes a distinction in
referring to “private” and “personal” pictures rather than “domestic” or “family”,
saying that “private” and “personal” are more capable of encompassing a person’s
life and experience as opposed to the rather stiff “domestic” or “family”, which
carries a different meaning all together8. While favoring the former, she agrees with
Batchen by pointing out that personal photography has evolved in parallel to the
development of the history of photography itself.9 Additionally, Holland suggests
that in the discussion about vernacular photography it is beneficial to differentiate
between “users” and “readers” of private photography. She argues that users
generate an amplitude of surrounding knowledge about the photographs as their
own private pictures are also part of the complex, interconnected system of

6 Marien, “Photography: A Cultural History”, p. 445.

7 See Berger, “Understanding a Photograph”, p. 18.
8 According to Holland, the term “family” is already problematic itself, as the definition of “family”

carries with it opinions and politics that differ from person to person.
9 Holland, “Sweet It Is To Scan”, p. 137.

9
memories and meanings that help them to make sense of their day-to-day lives.
Readers, by contrast, will interpret a faint ‘snapshot’ or a “smiling portrait from the
1950s (as) a mysterious text whose meanings must be teased out in an act of
decoding or historical detective work”.10 Consequently this the line of academic
thought within which I will situate my case study as I continue my investigation.


1.2 Exploring content and context

The principal image (Fig. 1) that will be examined in pursuit of answers to the
questions posed in the introduction is a black and white photograph, approximately
9x13 inches, depicting two adults, a man and a woman, beside a body of water. The
woman is sitting on a dead crocodile which has a stick propping its jaws open so
that the teeth of the reptile are displayed clearly in its gaping mouth. The man is
standing behind her, one of his feet resting on the animal. A scan of this image was
sent to me by its owner, and the file was named “Jan & Karolina Jagla in Koja with
Lake Victoria in background”. The back of the image (Fig.2) bears a note
handwritten in Polish that translates as: “We live amongst creature like this one is a
crocodile, it is 12 meters’ long him who consumes people is lying dead here”. The
written Polish has errors in it that I have tried to reflect in the translation.

I initially came across a photograph (Fig. 3) in a Polish online forum while

doing research about Poles in Uganda.11 I then got in touch with the person who
had posted it, Mr. John “Zbyszek” Jagla, initially via Facebook and then via email.
He sent me several more scanned photographs when I asked him to share more
about his family history. Three of these images form my case study. According to
Mr. Jagla, the core photograph (Fig. 1) was taken in either 1947 or 1948 and the
note on the back was written by his father (the man in the photograph) to a relative,
then later returned to the children as a memento.

The image can be qualified as belonging to the genre of vernacular

photography and to be more precise it is a personal photograph constituting part of
a larger collection which is held by the owners as a record of their family’s life. The
image appears to have been made as a souvenir to preserve and communicate
individual memories of this family from a certain time and place. According to Clive

10 Holland, “Sweet It Is To Scan”, p. 138.

11 See Chapter 3 for more details.

10
Scott, “the family snap would have no value if it were not firmly embedded in a
specific instant of history”.12 Additionally, in Scott’s view, the particularity of that
instant is a driving reason to photograph it. The photographic collection that this
thesis focuses on belongs to the family of Mr. John “Zbyszek” Jagla, and the
observation made by Scott seems to be an accurate description of why the image
was taken. I will return to this point in more detail, but first a closer explanation of
the instant of the history in which this photograph was taken, is needed.

Mr. Jagla, the owner of the image, was born in Uganda in 1945 to Polish
parents (the couple depicted together with the crocodile, Fig. 1), who at that time
were displaced persons who had fled the Soviet invasion of Poland and found safe
refuge in the British Protectorate of Uganda. Mr. Jagla’s personal story and that of
his family forms a part of a larger history of the migration of thousands of Polish
refugees from eastern Poland and Ukraine during the early days of World War II, one
of the many peripheral chapters of the conflict. After countless hardships, including
detention in Soviet labor camps and a terrible journey through Siberia, Iran and
India, they eventually made their way to the East coast of Africa. The British settled
some of these refugees in Uganda, placing them in two settlements, one in
Nyabyeya, near Masindi, and the other at Koja, beside Lake Victoria. Altogether
there were 22 different resettlements for an estimated 18,000 displaced Poles in
Eastern and Southern Africa. The Ugandan contingent, which stayed from 1942 to
1952, numbered some 7,000 people, mostly women and children. As such they
outnumbered the resident European population in the Protectorate by three to one.
By 1952 all the Poles had left Uganda, being forcibly resettled elsewhere within the
British Empire. They left behind settlements that had been virtually self-sufficient
and functioning almost as a parallel state, with schools, a hospital, a bakery and a
piggery. Over time, the Koja settlement was completely dismantled, disappeared
and became forgotten. In Masindi traces of houses and a Polish church remain as a
part of the Nyabyeya Forestry College, while in Koja the only sign of the past is a
cemetery, parts of which were renovated in 2009 by the Centre for Documentation
of Deportations, Expulsions and Resettlements (CDDER), a research institute
attached to the Pedagogical Institute in Kraków, Poland. Mr. Jagla, together with
some other Poles, was resettled in the UK and now lives in Somerset. Knowing a

12 Scott, “The Spoken Image”, p. 29.

11
little more about the historical circumstances in which the images were taken helps
us to place them in time, geographically and culturally, and explains why Poles are
depicted alongside African wildlife and vegetation. 13

Vernacular photography performs a social function and the physical

attributes of the image, namely its size and appearance, brings to mind a visual
similarity with postcards, inexpensive and small photographic prints that could be
sent through the post as a correspondence card. Typically those types of
photographic portraits were often basic in their visual style, with a standard
backdrop or none at all, minimal props and simple or natural lighting, as the image
of the Jagla couple is.14 They were taken quickly and printed cheaply in order to be
affordable to the widest possible range of customers. The crocodile may have been
a prop which the photographer was using to attract customers and encourage them
to have their picture taken, but it could also have been a scene which the subjects
happened upon during a day out, such as the crocodile been perhaps killed by
fishermen. Either way it could be argued that its function in the image is
predominantly to represent the exotic and demonstrate how foreign the land is to
the image’s subjects. The above-mentioned writing on the back supports that
theory, as it also supports the interpretation of that particular photograph’s main
purpose as a postcard that was intended to be sent to other family members to
show them how different the place where the image was taken is from their country
of origin.

From my email correspondence with Mr. Jagla, I know that both of his
parents came from small villages in southern Poland and life in Uganda was not
only a ‘safe haven” for them, but also an exotic destination to be. The writing on the
back confirms that the parents belonged to the working class, as the level of writing
implies a poor education. Furthermore, knowing the historical background helps to
situate this image together with many similar photographs taken in the colonial
period, when missionaries, settlers, colonial officials and travellers also had posed
portraits taken with objects or backdrops that they considered memorable or
illustrative of their situation, and kept them as souvenirs.

13 See: Kiyaga-Mulindwa, “Uganda: Safe Haven for Polish Refugees: 1942- 1951” or Chudzio, “Z
mrozów Syberii pod Slońce Afryki. W 70. rocznice przybycia polskich Sybiraków do Afryki Wschod-
niej i Południowej”.
14 Stokes, “The Family Photograph”, p. 195.

12
 The image in question was probably taken by a semi-professional
photographer from Kampala who made the journey to the refugee camp in search
of customers. At that time many photographers were of Indian origin, and most
were based in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda, because of the availability of
equipment and materials as well as the relative wealth of the city and thus their
potential customers. Whoever the photographer was (and assuming, as was likely at
the time, that it was a man), he made a certain number of individual steps or
characterisations as he followed through the photographic process, starting with
the chosen (or available) equipment and the way it was used.15 Even if some of
these decisions were not conscious it doesn’t mean that they didn’t take place.
They determined the amount of detail and information that appears on the picture
and, as is visible in the examples at hand, the exposure of the pictures. Comparing
Fig. 1 and Fig. 3, it could be said that one image is better exposed than another.
Equally these two images are digitalized copies and not originals and the process of
scanning itself may have impacted the way the scans look. However it can be
observed that despite the difference in subjects between the two images, which
likely took some time, the photographer didn’t change viewpoint. That on one hand
indicates the use of a tripod and on the other that the photographer was happy with
his framing. The positioning of the camera is yet another characterization and is
usually carefully planned by professional photographers as they compose the image
to make it aesthetically pleasing. Yet, in this case, the positioning of the camera
puts the subjects in the right hand side of the picture leaving the left side almost
empty. Subject positioning and framing is quite an important characterization to be
made, especially for readers of an image as it contributes to how the subject is seen
in relation to the environment they are in. In this particular example it is difficult to
say if the decision was taken consciously or not, although it might have been
dictated by the desire of the photographer to show the crocodile in its full glory. As
the composition does not seem obviously deliberate or consciously arranged it
could be concluded that the photographer might have been more of an amateur,
taking low-cost family pictures for refugees as he sought to make money, rather
than a professional with a clear idea in mind. However the lack of distracting

15 Snyder, Allen, “Photography, Vision”, pp. 149-150.

13
background detail has the effect of overcoming the composition as our attention is
focused on the human and animal subjects because there isn’t much else to see.

According to Holland, even when photographs are taken by a professional,

the contract between photographer and subject in vernacular photography is very
different from other genres of photography. “The photographs we make for
ourselves are treasured less for their quality than for their context, and for the part
they play in confirming and challenging the identity and history of their users.
Personal pictures have been made specifically to portray the individual or the group
to which they belong as they would wish to be seen and as they have chosen to
show themselves to one another.” 16 What Holland implies here is that as much as
the photographer took certain decisions that influenced the final image, the family
depicted did so too. They have decided to wear certain clothes- the father is
wearing a suit and the mother a dress and blazer, making an effort to present
themselves smartly. The twins were dressed in matching outfits- a common practice
when it comes to representation and the general manner in which parents highlight
the fact that their children are twins (Mr Jagla is one of the twins depicted in the
photograph). Graham Clarke points out that portrait photographs are full of
ambiguities at every level of meaning. He explains that a photographic portrait “for
all its literal realism (…) denotes, above all, the problematics of identity, and exists
within a series of cultural codes which simultaneously hide as they reveal what I
have termed its enigmatic and paradoxical meaning.”17 The family made an effort to
be captured in a certain manner, perhaps trying to hide certain elements of their
reality, such as the general poverty the Poles had to confront while in Uganda. They
wanted to be represented and therefore remembered in the way they would rather
to be seen. Clive Scott sums that up by saying that “the resulting photograph is a
record not of reality but of a set of judgements made in front of reality.”18 Thus
photographs that we trust to be transparent, and even (or perhaps especially)
personal ones with their perceived innocence of purpose, are in fact constructed
visions communicating the wishes of their subjects.

16 Holland, “Sweet It Is To Scan”, p. 138.

17 Clarke, “The Photograph”, p. 4.
18 Scott, “The Spoken Image”, p. 35.

14
1.3 Portraiture’s codes of meaning

The observed similarities between the image and a photographic postcard

mentioned above signal that the photograph can also be qualified as a sub-genre of
photographic portraiture whilst claiming vernacular status in the same time. In its
most basic form a photographic portrait is a proof of what Barthes calls “a
certificate of presence”, a record of someone being in front of the camera when the
photo was taken. 19 Graham Clarke expands on that, when he writes that “as an
analogue of the original subject, the portrait photograph surreptitiously declares
itself as the trace of the person (or personality) before the eye.” In our everyday lives
as citizens of nation states, the photograph serves to validate identity. It has
acquired a rank equal to a signature and the presence and identity of the individual
is made known through it. According to Clarke however it is not as simplistic as it
might seem, because rather than representing the individual, the photograph
“codifies the person in relation to other frames of reference and other hierarchies of
significance”. And therefore the portrait, more than any other type of photographic
image, establishes its meaning through the context in which it is looked at.20 The
way in which the photographic portraiture functions has of course its origins in its
links to painterly portraitures and traditions, which was also full of codes and
different styles of representation. As previously mentioned, in both content and
physical form the image resemble a postcard type of print and that development in
photographic portraiture can be traced back to painted portraits, affordable to a
very narrow section of the society, and later to daguerreotypes and carte-de-visites,
which became more and more affordable.21

It was David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson who introduced an element
of informality to portrait photography, extending its nature in revolutionary ways by
taking it away from the formal and impersonal setting of the studio. By doing so
they initiated a trend which still remains relevant, where the photographer places the
subject within a context in which their daily life and existence can be represented.

19 Barthes, “Camera Lucida”, p. 87. Of course this statement is vulnerable to criticism as the photo-
graphic image can be manipulated in such a way that it will show a person present even if he or she
wasn’t, but that discussion will be omitted here for reasons of brevity as it does not add anything to
the line of argument.
20 Clarke, “The Portrait”, p. 1.
21 See: Holland “Sweet It Is To Scan”, pp. 146-148.

15
More importantly Hill and Adamson expanded the range of portraiture and made it
both a populist and a democratic domain.22 The developments in photographic
techniques made portraits more accessible, but not any less important for those
posing for it. During the twentieth century portrait photography has increasingly
become a medium through which individuals not only confirm, but also explore their
identity. 23 The subjects in both Fig. 1 and Fig. 3 are posing for the photograph in a
rather formal way and it could be therefore argued that it qualifies the image(s) less
as a typical vernacular family snapshot, and more as a posed portrait, albeit taken
by a semi-professional. The usual hierarchies employed in this type of imagery are
also visible. When looking at Fig. 2 we can see that the children, who are much
shorter, are placed in front of the parents. The father is embracing and supporting
the twins and it could be argued that by doing so he is expressing his role as head
of the family. Similarly Fig. 424 depicts the children in between the parents, an
analogical family arrangement expressing the hierarchy in a natural manner.
Additionally another common practice of family portraiture can be observed when
looking at Fig. 4. Philip Stokes describes a custom of arranging for family
photographs to be taken with the family home present in the background as a
backdrop and a dominant motif. He claims that this practice represented a “general
habit of identifying sitters with their material possessions”.25 An analogy could be
therefore drawn between those practices and Fig. 4, the family being depicted with
a monument constructed to commemorate a national holiday. The object present in
the image can serve as a sort of mapping of an important social space. Further
Stokes explains that the notion of mapping could be supported by the somewhat
unusual, though still frequently seen images where group of subjects were
photographed not in a cluster, but rather “distributed throughout the whole visual
field”.26 It could be argued that Fig. 4 has been executed exactly in that way, to
preserve the whole memory not just for the viewer but more importantly for its

22 Clarke, “The Photograph”, pp. 106-107.

23 Holland “Sweet It Is To Scan”, p. 122.
24 Fig. 4 depicts the Jagla family in front of the 3rd of May celebratory construction in Koja settlement.

The 3rd of May is a Polish national and public holiday celebrating the declaration of the first Polish
Constitution on 3 May 1791. We can see Polish flags and the Polish coat of arms as well as banana
trees surrounding the construction. The parents and the twins are standing in front of the celebratory
construction.
25 Stokes, “The Family Photograph”, p. 195-6.
26 Ibid, p. 197.

16
subjects. In summary, as well as being vernacular expressions these images can be
categorised as portraits, implying yet another additional layer of possible
interpretation. Alongside this, the fact that more than one photograph can be looked
at in the company of other similar images helps us to form more informed opinions
about the way in which the images were approached and thought of by the Jagla
family, namely as memory keepers.

1.4 To record and remember

A vital reason why the images of the Jagla family were taken has to be
addressed too. According to John Berger “the most popular use of the photographs
is as a memento of the absent”27 and indeed the emotional attitudes humans share
towards their personal photographs is driven by the desire to record and remember.
As was mentioned above, the vernacular photograph is associated with recording
events related primarily to family life and the resulting imagery has often been
considered as having little value for contemporary scholars, and yet that is where its
value lies for both its users and readers.

Vernacular photography has become more relevant and more of a source of

information worthy of academic study as the ‘present’ has become the ‘past’ and
the contemporary has become history. As time passes the initial ‘micro’ purpose of
the image, recording moments to remember, becomes secondary to the ‘macro’
knowledge which it offers to unconnected readers. That can be observed on the
example of the case study, where private photographs can become an object of
scholarly enquiry and a point of departure to think about often unconscious features
of photographic genres. Batchen observes that by this change the snapshot throws
into confusion the established categories of “art history and its definitions of
photographic meaning” 28. This transformation in critical perspective has been
helped by a wider “material turn” in photography (further discussed in Chapter 3), a
shift supported by photographers such as Nan Goldin and William Eggleston, who
used the visual language but subverted it to create widely-recognized art. Over time
and with the shifts in perception, cultural forms have become recognized separately

27 Berger, “Understanding a Photograph”, p. 20.

28 Referencing Batchen in Cross and Peck, “Special Issue”, p. 130.

17
from the images’ ideological content, and imagery that seemed banal when taken
assumes a more meaningful role.

Indeed, the value of the vernacular photographs, such as those presented in

the case study, do not represent the value solely to its users. They have gained not
only a scholarly value in the area of theory of photography but also history or visual
anthropology. Those images are also quickly becoming relicts of the photographic
history because they have been taken on a analogue camera and kept printed on
paper. According to Philip Stokes, “to look at the portrait of an individual is to invite
oneself to all sorts of speculations as to who they were, how they would have
spoken, what they would have thought.”29 Indeed, as pointed out by Holland,
readers are required to translate those private meanings into a more public realm in
an attempt of decoding the photographic meaning, however tricky it might prove to
be. Therefore cultural codes embedded in photographic genres play a crucial role in
understanding, even if they are not realized in a conscious way. In the same time the
remarkable fascination with personal photographs comes from a contrast between
an almost overpowering richness of potential meaning, coded in space, posture,
clothes or historical timeframe, and the inconsequentiality and triviality of the
genre30. Establishing meaning is a complex and methodological process and it gets
more complicated as the time passes. As demonstrated in the example of the case
study, it is not only the understanding of photographic genres or methods of
representations, but equally our practical knowledge and day-to-day experiences
and our own cultural background that helps us interpret images.31

One can understand an image to a much greater degree when not only the
content (what can we see) but also the context of what, where, when, why and how
is available to us. Again, as demonstrated with the case study, often those elements
can be obscured by time and lack of relevant records, especially when looking at
historical images. Therefore the process of understanding can only be done by a
systematic approach, uncovering hidden messages that require not only
photographic but also historical and cultural knowledge and study. It could be
claimed that humans generally regard the photograph as an honest source, and that

29 Stokes, “The Family Photograph”, p. 193.

30 Holland, “Sweet It Is to Scan”, p. 138- 139.
31 See: Snyder, Allen, “Photography, Vision”, p. 156.

18
vernacular imagery, with its lack of motive beyond simple record, is usually
perceived to be more trustworthy than, for example, fashion photographs. It is that
assumption that allows us to trust that what was captured is truthful in what it
depicts. Those records often determine that the world that we live in is not
homogenized or does not subscribe to one singular version of history. We now
ascribe documentary value to the vernacular imagery. The images of the Jagla
family have become documents of a group of people who found themselves
refugees in Uganda in the 1940s and 1950s. We trust that they are authentic and
true, but that belief is only created by the context of creation of those photographs,
not by the photographic representation itself.

To summarize, it could be said that photographs record reality, but also

construct it and represent it in ambiguous ways. They transmit personal and
collective memories by giving clues that tell viewers where and how to look to find
more information (I had never heard about Polish refugees in Uganda until I saw an
image that caught my attention and made me search for more information). This
particular example, if we accept the previously-introduced working definition of
vernacular photography as being images made by ordinary people for the purposes
of remembering, shows that as a visual category it can be less polished than other
photographic genres but the photographs discussed here still retain some of the
ambiguity inherent in the medium. In some ways it can be more deceptive to both
users and readers, because despite its perceived honesty, which comes from the
amateur and unpolished visual style, its subjects, in this case the Jagla family, are
involved in its creation and they seek to present themselves in the way they would
like others to see them. It does not mean however that their documentary value has
been diminished. 


19
Chapter 2: Family photo collections versus institutional archives

It could be argued that the invention of photography has been a driving force
for, and to an extent even created the principle mechanisms for the ongoing human
passion for recording and archiving. 32 As human beings, we do not only want to
capture moments and freeze them in time, but we archive them and arrange them
too, so that we can return to those frozen instances and look again at the past. Our
ways of archiving and arranging, and the motivations that are behind this interest,
vary widely but the result is always a similar product- history laid out in a format that
makes its reading more understandable to its reader.

In the previous chapter I considered the content of single images or records

as I attempted to decode the possible meanings and to position those photographs
within the context of photographic theory and production. A consideration was also
made as to which photographic genre the images could belong to, which included
investigating the initial intention of why the image was taken.

In this chapter, on the other hand, I will reflect on how meaning is created
when one also considers how the images have been stored and their specific
material location, but also the social and cultural background of both image and
location. To be more specific, this chapter will focus on the archive and its history
and motivations in relation to vernacular photography’s equivalent, that could be
broadly referred to as a family album.

I will introduce the notion of the archive itself and talk about the role of
photography and image production in construction of the archive. I will look closer
at how the photographic archive has been weighed and treated within the discourse
of photographic theory and, as a contrast to my first chapter in which I discussed
the ways in which information can be derived from an individual image, I will
address the new perspectives, both positive and negative, that are added when that
single image is considered within a larger collection. Does it influence our reading
and understanding of what we are looking at? And if so, how? The consideration of
a specific type of photographic archive, namely what is broadly understood as
constituting a family photo album, will follow. Through this consideration I will

32 For example see: Enwazor, “Archive Fever”, p. 22.

20
attempt to answer the question of whether we can qualify a family album as an
archive and if so on what terms.

The case study for this chapter is the wider collection of images belonging to
Mr. Jagla. This collection will serve as a point of reference for a wider discussion
about this specific type of photographic archive. Still, it is key to look into these
aspects of meaning creation to clarify the points of this thesis. Finally I will look at
the mnemonic function of the family album. What is the changing meaning and
usage of the album as its historical significance becomes more clear with the
passage of time?

At this point I should clarify that for the purposes of this chapter I will only
look at the physical family album as a form of archive. I will omit more recent
manifestations of family photography and archives that are held in digital formats
and visible via online spaces. The reason for doing so is dictated by constraints of
space and clarity, and also by the fact that the case study is indeed first and
foremost a collection of photographic prints that have been printed and stored
since. Even though some have been digitalised, the whole collection still represents
what one could summarise as an older iteration of vernacular photography. Digital
archiving and the changing modes of information dissemination will play a part in
my next chapter. Additionally, since the Jagla collection has not been stored in a
typical album format, but rather in a simple box, the “family album” functions also
as a term that is used to encompass different manifestations of how vernacular
photographs are being kept.

For my theoretical basis I will focus on the theory of archives built around the
writings of Michel Foucault, which was taken over by the seminal photography
theoreticians Alan Sekula and John Tagg. Additionally I will draw on research
conducted by Okwui Enwazor, Marianne Hirsh and Gillian Rose among others.

2.1 Photography and the storage of knowledge

The Oxford Dictionary defines an archive as “a collection of historical

documents or records providing information about a place, institution, or group of
people”. The word’s origins go back to 17th century French, deriving from the Latin
words “archiva” and “archia”, which in turn come from the Greek words “arkheia”,
meaning public records, and from “arkhē”, which means government. The verb “to

21
archive” dates back to the late 19th century.33 Apart from a collection of records, an
archive can also refer to a physical place where historical material or records are
kept, be it by a government, museum, university or private individual. However it is
important to note that, especially in the post-colonial era, archives are not simply
historical repositories but now also sites for the uncovering and exploration of
histories that are often unknown, including those whose presence has been denied.
Therefore historical archives, particularly those of governments, can become crucial
in forming our understanding of the present day through past experience and our
individual and collective identities as they were in the past and in the present, and
may also shape them in the future.

Post-structuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida notes in the first sentences of

Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995) that archives also exclude, and that this
contradiction is inscribed in the etymology of the word. He explains that “arkhe, we
recall, names at once the commencement and the commandment. This name
apparently coordinates two principles in one: the principle according to nature or
history, there where things commence- physical, historical, or ontological principle-
but also the principal according to the law, there where man and gods command,
there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is
given- nomological principle.” The Greek etymology of the word, according to
Derrida, points us into the direction of an understanding whereby only citizens with
significant power were considered to have the right to preserve the records.34
In The Imperial Archive (1993), Thomas Richards dates the beginnings of the
contemporary archival impulse back to the 19th century in England and thus to the
height of British imperialism, a period whose later years also encompasses the time
during which the images I am principally studying, of Polish refugees in Uganda
under the jurisdiction of the British Empire, were also produced. The objective of the
Victorian archival machine and its continuation through the end of the empire and,
through various incarnations, to the present day was to accumulate, unify and
synchronize knowledge by the means of producing records both in the form of
images and written documents. Richards emphasizes that “(…) the archival gaze
has combined the triple register of inquiry, measure and examination to prepare

33 Oxford Dictionary Online, accessed April 22nd, 2018. Additionally “archive” refers to a date record
of a computer system.
34 Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”, pp. 9- 10.

22
data to be acted upon by the variable modalities of power.”35 Indeed, in The Burden
of Representation (1988), photographic historian John Tagg argues that the quickly-
established connection between the collection of information and photography was
tied up with new practices of record-keeping and new institutions (such as the
Royal Photographic Society). “Power and meaning”, Tagg writes, “thus have a
reciprocal relation described in the coupled concepts of the regime of power and
the regime of sense. What characterized the regime in which the photographic
evidence emerged, therefore, was a complex administrative and discursive
restructuring, turning on social division between the power and privilege of
producing and possessing and the burden of being meaning. In the context of this
historical shift in power and sense, photographic documentation and evidence took
form (…).” 36 Tagg claims37 that only social beings can ever make sense of
photographs, and therefore what viewers think they see in the picture is determined
by the everyday knowledge and discourses within which the photograph is situated
and to which the viewer can refer. Moreover, Tagg also argues that the status of the
photograph as ‘evidence’ is not a product of its inherent and indexical properties,
but rather it is a result of how powerful institutions have represented some types of
imagery as faultlessly reproducing the recognizable world at certain moments in
history.38 It is precisely the use of photography by institutions that, according to
Tagg, validates the medium as unified and coherent, and which also results in the
belief that photographs picture the real. In other words, photography has been used
by institutions of power as a crucial technology to produce what was intended to be
seen as and believed to be the truth.

Allan Sekula, in his article titled “Reading the Archive. Photography Between
Labour and Capital” (2003) considers a number of questions relating to the
photographic archive and its power. He describes the archive as a “quantitative
ensemble of images” and defines several different types of archives, such as the
museum archive, historical collection or family album. What those have in common
is that they accumulate photographs of different types, and yet inflict on them a
hegemoneity that is the product of the archive itself. According to Sekula, “the unity

35 Richards quoted in Enwazor, “Archive Fever”, p. 19.

36 Tagg, “The Burden of Representation”, p. 6.
37 Tagg’s claim was written in opposition to Barthes. I will introduce Barthes’ standpoint in Chapter 3.
38 Tagg, “The Burden of Representation”, p. 5.

23
of an archive is first and foremost that imposed by ownership”. Many kinds of
photographs, taken for different, possibly antagonistic reasons, are brought
together and so “in an archive, the possibility of meaning is “liberated” from the
actual contingencies of use. But this liberation is also a loss, an abstraction from the
complexity and richness of use, a loss of context”.39 Sekula, in a similar vein to
Tagg’s reflections, also claims that archives are not neutral depositories, but rather
reflections of the politics and institutions that are “running them”; they are selective
and they also represent what is absent.40

According to Gillian Rose, by exploring the effects of archivisation, writers

such as Sekula are following an understanding of the discourses and interpretations
of institutions that was first proposed by French philosopher Michel Foucault, most
notably in his Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (1977). Rose suggests
that two major methodologies developed and used by researchers in visual studies
both use Foucault’s work as a basis.41 Discourse analysis I, as described by Rose,
concentrates on “the notion of discourse as articulated through various kinds of
visual images and verbal texts”. Discourse analysis II, on the other hand, shows a
tendency to concentrate on the material practices of institutions and is more
concerned with issues of power or regimes of truth.42 Both discourses share an
interest in power’s links to the production of knowledge; however the one that
appears to heavily influence Sekula and especially Tagg is the second one, which is
primarily concerned with the production and reiteration of visual material by these
particular institutions, as well as their practices and their production of particular
human subjects.43

Archives, according to this Foucauldian analysis, are institutions that work in

quiet and particular ways, that have effects not only on what is stored in them but
also on those who use them.44 Foucault argues that institutions function through
their apparatuses and through their technologies, and he defines institutional
technologies as the techniques that are used to apply and express power and
knowledge. Both Tagg and Sekula argue that photography should be understood as

39 Sekula, “Reading an Archive”, p. 444.

40 Ibid, p. 446.
41 Also see: Smith, “The Politics of Focus”, p. 14.

42 Rose, “Visual Methodologies”, p. 195.

43 Rose, “Visual Methodologies”, p. 227.

44 Ibid, p. 228.

24
a technology in the Foucauldian sense. As pointed out by Rose, “their work has
been held together by insistence on power relations articulated through institutions
and their technologies.” In summary, for these writers it is clear that images are
articulations of institutional power.45 This agrees with Tagg’s earlier argument that
the colonial archivists and their modern counterparts see control of the production,
storage and dissemination of information as a way of maintaining power. I will return
to this point in my conclusion as I seek to define the archival characteristics of my
case study and relate it to the debates around terminology, as well as discussing
the effects these relationships may have.

2.2 The family photo album as a form of archive

In writings both by Tagg and Sekula the lack of acknowledgement of the

possible existence of visualities different than those accepted and projected by
dominant institutions has often been criticised. For example Lindsay Smith, in The
Politics of Focus: Women, Children and Nineteenth Century Photography points out
that both theoreticians have overlooked the wide range of domestic photography
produced during the nineteenth century, in particular those images produced by
women. Those practices, it could be argued, do not agree with the institutional gaze
that was favoured at that particular time, but rather create a different, more personal
perspective. Additionally, by not allowing those practices and perspectives a place
in the mainstream, Smith argues, Tagg doesn’t allow counter-narratives nor the
space for contestation.46

Indeed, alongside the archive as state institution, another type of archive was
developing– a private one. If an archive represents a need to formally organise the
elements that it consists of47, then “the realm of the snapshot” should be qualified
as stored in a specific type of archive,48 the photo album. The first commercial
photographic album was designed in 1854 in Paris to display cartes-de-visites as
an attempt to equip photographic consumers with a collection management tool.
Three principal categories of albums emerged in the nineteenth century, in particular

45 Ibid, pp. 230-233.

46 Smith, “The Politics of Focus”, pp. 14- 15
47 See Enwazor, “Archive Fever”, p. 14.
48 Enwazor, “Archive Fever”, p. 13

25
personal albums, speciality albums and official albums.49 Very quickly the personal
album became a constant element of the typical Victorian household and soon the
subcategory of the family album emerged, displaying a visual record of family life to
be shown to family and visitors.50 The albums developed during Victorian times by
women were often overseen.51 Smith refers frequently to those perspectives,
discounted by Tagg and Sekula.

The album soon became an important object that can be still found in some
form in most households and yet, even though most people in the Western world
have produced some version of this album, it only entered histories of photography
relatively recently. Beaumont Newhall’s important survey that has served as a reader
for generations of photography historians, first published the 1930s and titled “The
History of Photography”, does not mention the family album at all.52 Similarly in her
survey of photographic history Mary Werner Marien does not find family albums
interesting enough to deal with extensively, and in fact she rather vaguely calls them
“large image collections”.53 As Batchen argues and Sandbye agrees, family
photography represents an interpretative problem because of the presumed banality
of those images. The researchers suggest that this is why snapshots and family
albums have been positioned as distinct forms and have been denied entry into the
history of photography. But regardless of how marginalised they are within scholarly
research, family photographs and albums should not be automatically dismissed as
irrelevant records of lives or cultural forms.

At this point I would like to return to the case study. The image collection
under scrutiny here were sent to me by Mr. Jagla via email in 2015 which included
28 images and a map of the resettlement in Nyabyeya, near Masindi. The images
shared are the digitalised versions of the original images and form part of even
larger collection and at present are stored in a box. Some of the photographs that
are in the box exist only as prints and have not yet been scanned and therefore
have only been seen by the Jagla family’s members. As already described in the
first chapter, the images depict the family attending different public occasions such

49 Hirsch, “Family Frames”,, p. 6

50 Hirsh, “Family Frames”, pp. 23- 24.
51 For more information about photocollage albums see: Patricia Di Bello, “Women’s Albums and

Photography in Victorian England: Ladies, Mothers and Flirts”. London: Ashgate, 2007.
52 Sandbye, “Looking at the family photo album”, p. 2.
53 Marien, “Photography”, 445.

26
as the Polish Constitution Day celebrations on the 3rd of May. Additionally the box
contains typical private family snapshots; for example a photograph of the twins
soon after they were born, being proudly presented to the camera by a nurse. There
is also a third type of imagery, depicting what could be described as general life of
the family and their friends living in the settlement, picturing them working or posing
with Ugandans and Indians. Additionally, Mr. Jagla shared a few colour images of a
recent trip to Uganda that was undertaken by his twin brother. It is worth noting that
these images lack basic compositional skills and it seems that their perceived value
lies mostly in their record of the visit rather than in the manner that they have been
taken. Unfortunately at this point this information is all that is known about the
collection, because of communication issues with the owner. The additional
information about what the photographs depict comes from email conversations
and the way information was saved in the digital files. I cannot assume how the
captions where kept- physically, as is the case with Figure 1, or perhaps only in
someone’s memory.

As observed by Holland, any attempt to explain contemporary personal

photography is a complicated task. 19th century photographs are beyond living
memory and therefore they can be treated according to their content, either as
documents, as aesthetic creations or as someone else’s story. Mid and late
twentieth- and twenty-first century pictures, however, are still part of lived
experience and “hint at meanings which are tantalizingly within our grasp”. Even
though “the album” serves as a general term, a family collection of photographs can
be kept in many different forms. Photographs taken on film may be organized in
packets or negative drawers; some may be in albums, while others are scattered
around in a disorderly fashion. Still more may be stored in a box, as is the case with
Mr. Jagla’s pictures. However they are kept, it is often the case that these
photographs carry great emotional value and are near-impossible to throw away. 54

Marianne Hirsh has observed that an attempt to translate a photo album or a

private collection stored in a box might prove an impossible task. “Words, like
photographs, are furious multipliers, a thousand for each picture, or so the saying
goes. To match the photograph, every element in the picture (every propagator of
codes) must be measured, weighed, and entered on a mental list, and this is just

54 Holland, “Sweet it is to scan”, pp. 168-69.

27
the beginning. A close reading of a photograph is like a stone dropped in a pond,
with its ever-expanding inclusions, occlusions, and allusions. A book of
photographs layers surface upon surface of real and virtual intersections; clusters of
breaks and spaces associated with meanings must be take into account.”55 This is
even more true when very little information is availed to a researcher. In addition,
according to Morton and Newbury, individual images organized in a collection, be it
an album or a box, “are understood within visual systems; in which they gain their
meaning in relation to other images. As visual systems in their own right, archives
are also subject to such an analysis, establishing networks of relationships between
image-objects over time that have directly affected the way in which we understand
visual history.”56 Catherine Whalen takes that claim further and suggests that the
photographic album, understood as a form of evidence, offers unquestionable
interpretive opportunities. Principally, it provides a intentionally-chosen selection of
photographs arranged in a particular sequence, which implies a narrative or story
that unfolds in front of viewers’ eyes page by page. Moreover some albums might
include captions, notes or comments, which further improve the narrative’s legibility.
In addition, the genre of the photographic album or private collection itself encodes
a storytelling function. 57 Even though the collection of the Jagla family might seem
not to be displaying these qualities (rather than turning pages of a book-like album
one has to dig through a pile of photographs), it still forms a visual system not just
as a single collection but also when placed into a wider context alongside other,
similar collections from the same period.

One could suppose that the pictures in this particular collection might not
always be intentionally “selected”, but rather gathered and archived with no “filter”
in terms of the quality of the images. But this interpretation overlooks the purpose of
the collection. For the owners these pictures represent a different value altogether,
measured in sentiment. According to Anne Marie Garat, the album acts to fill a void.
She claims that “the family album, in its naïve and defective way, certainly satisfies
the immense need for the “story (le dit)” which for lack of written documents (l’écrit)
haunts each family”.58 That theory seems to be supported by Martha Langford who

55 Hirsch, Family Frames, p. 4.

56 Morton, Newbury, “Relocating The African Photographic Archive”, p. 7.
57 Whalen, “Interpreting Vernacular Photography”, p. 79.
58 Garat cited in and translated from French by Hirsch, “Family Frames”, p. 5.

28
offers a convincing argument that such private photographic collections act as
encouragements for oral performance.59 In other words, the act of viewing our
albums or, in this particular case, photographs from a box, which often happens at
home, also encourages the telling of stories about the people and events depicted
in them. Often older family members act as interpreters who can narrate what
others look at.60 Mr. Jagla served as such an interpreter for me, an outsider, and
was able to use the content of his images to describe the story of his family via
emails.

For Richard Chalfen, an American anthropologist and a pioneer of the study

of family photographs, this genre is “primarily a medium of communication”. He
defines the family album as “a site of cross generational exchange and cultural
continuity, transformative and moderating as family members are exposed to the
external pressure of acculturation”.61 In other words the family photo collection
helps each family to preserve their individual identity within a broader society.
Sandbye, too, claims that albums are about social and emotional communication.
According to her they can be interpreted as ways of understanding and coming to
terms with life, and at the same time they document sociological aspects of daily
lives that we do not have access to from other historical sources.62 Indeed, as the
case study demonstrates, not only can it function as the Jagla family’s preservation
of their Polish identity, first during the migration and now in the UK, but it also
shows the every day lives Polish refugees led in Uganda.

2.3 The role of the family photo collection in remembering

A summary of the thoughts of several writers on the topic could be that

photography becomes a direct way through which our experience of the past is
structured, and that its function is a direct guarding of family memory. According to
Mette Sandbye, a family photo album is a globally-circulating system of archiving
that not only takes locally-specific forms but also produces localities and by
consequence creates and negotiates individual stories.63 The wish to make a

59 Whalen, “Interpreting Vernacular Photography”, p. 79.

60 Hirsh, “Family Frames”, p. 5.
61 Chalfen, cited in Hirsch, Family Frames”, p. 4.

62 Sandbye, “Looking at the family photo album”, p. 5.

63 Sandbye, “Looking at the family photo album”, p. 3.

29
photograph or to document an event or occasion is, according to Okwui Enwazor,
directly related to the aspiration to produce an archive.64 He also points out that
“the assumption that the archive forms specific mnemonic functions and hold a key
to the door of historical experience also pertains to what may be designated as the
archive’s ethnographic condition. (…) domestic photography allows us to see the
archive as a site where society and its habits are given shape.”65 Thus personal
photographs and collections perform a function of memory within the family
context, but also in a more general sense they play a role in remembering on a
wider scale, addressing the need to include images and perspectives that were
formerly denied a presence in official archives. But by extension, family images
taken and kept with a purpose in mind, such as the images belonging to the Jagla
family, often become the only way that the past can be experienced, officially or
otherwise.

The present trend of nostalgia for the past brings a question to mind– do we
remember because certain images remind us about certain events, or does the
presence of our records, that after a while start functioning as a constructed past,
replace our memory and tell us what to remember? Robert Hewison for example,
argues that “heritage is gradually effacing history, by substituting an image of the
past for its reality.” According to Price and Wells, nowadays the archive is
researched not for photographs as aesthetic objects, but rather for images
understood as representing the past. “Blown up from their original proportions,
sepia-toned and hung on gallery walls, or recycled as advertising imagery,
photographs retain their implicit claim to authenticity. ”66 The scholars point out that
this continued process of treating vernacular, archival images as commodities raises
convoluted questions about how history is constructed and how images are
employed to visualize the past.

For Sekula “(…) the archive constitutes the paradigm or iconic system from
which photographic ‘statements’ are constructed. Archival potential changes over
time; the keys are appropriated by different disciplines, discourses and specialties.
(…) The pictures became available to history”67. Even though we know that he was

64 Enwazor, “Archive Fever”, p. 12.

65 Enwazor, “Archive Fever”, p. 40.
66 Price, Wells, “Thinking About Photography”, p.74.
67 Sekula, “Reading an Archive”, p. 445.

30
writing about institutional archives, it could be said that the same is true for family
albums. Additionally, as observed by Cross and Peck, even though it is not always
entirely clear how we should react to vernacular imagery, it has become particularly
important as a form of personal history. Snapshots offer a way of bearing witness to
perspectives that were previously marginalized in history and now have become
significant archives of cultural knowledge.68 However it is important to remember
that every private collection is different, and every example specific. Therefore,
according to Holland It is no longer adequate to outline a social history of those
images because of the need to include analysis and contextual background that
can only be supplied by their owners and users. The meaning of the pictures is
enriched by the information that owners can add to them. Private archives are only
a part of accumulated history.69

In his book Spoken Image: Photography and Language, Clive Scott considers
how photographs convey their messages with or without the aid of language. He
writes “With the passage of time photographs gradually lose their indexical
reliability- we cannot say exactly what the circumstances of their taking were- and
thus are compelled to fulfil a representative role. Individuals can recover trauma and
punctum 70 from them, but this is all that is left from the originating indexicality.
Correspondingly, their generalized, educative, cultural value, their studium,
increases. All photographs become with time documentary.”71 Scott’s statement
gives an explanation of what is happening with family photographs, like those of the
Jagla family, and offers a reasoning for why the private family album seems to be
ever more valuable and worthy of inclusion in formal archives, and therefore in how
we remember the past. This family photo archive attests to the existence of
personal and shared histories, and even physical places, that are very specific and
of which the traces have almost ceased to exist in the physical world.

It is also worthwhile to mention here the importance of the contribution that

the invention of photography has made to the relationship between memory and
history. In his article “The Memory of Photography” David Bate builds his argument
about photography’s relationship with collective memory around the work of French

68 Cross, Peck, “On Photography, Archive and Memory”, p. 129.

69 Holland, “Sweet it is to scan”, pp. 168-69.
70 Punctum is a term introduced by Ronald Barthes in “Camera Lucida”. I will address this term to a

greater extend in Chapter 3.

71 Scott, “The Spoken Image”, p. 33.

31
historian Jacques Le Goff. Le Goff places photography amongst the many
inventions and cultural forms and storage of collective memory. He argues that it
has revolutionized memory not only because it is democratic and precise, but most
of all because it makes it possible to preserve time despite chronological
evolution.72 Le Goff lays the foundation for his belief in the importance of
photography for collective memory by drawing on work by French sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu on amateur photography and social use of family albums. In Bourdieu’s
opinion “the family album expresses the truth of social remembrance. (…) The
images from the past arranged in chronological order, “the natural order” of social
memory arouse and transmit the remembrance of events worthy of preservation
because the group sees a unifying factor in the monuments in its past unity (…).”73
Such a family archive enables those specific social groups, often previously
unrepresented, to obtain identity within a specific common visualized memory.
Therefore it could be said for example that I, as a Pole, also living in Uganda, can
identify with the histories of other Poles who were here in the past with the aid of
photographs. The images from Mr. Jagla’s album help me remember our shared
past as a nation, and add depth to my understanding of the present through that
memory.


It is somewhat recent that scholars exploring the history of photography

began to acknowledge the significance of the family photographic archive,
regardless of physical format, as a complete entity. Nonetheless it is possible to
observe in recent scholarship that the notion of personal photographs and therefore
the album has been changing and their possible meanings and the perspectives
that they bring to the discourse are beginning to be better acknowledged and
theorized. While theoreticians such as Tagg and Sekula were critically addressing
the role of photography in social institutional context, others, among them Batchen,
Smith or Edwards, emphasize the importance of transforming the critical
perspective and approaches to the concept of the family album and personal
photography. They postulate that an acknowledgement of the persistence and

72 Le Goff, as quoted in Bate, “The Memory of Photography”, p. 247.

73 Bourdieu, as quoted in Bate, “The Memory of Photography”, p. 247

32
scope of the visual records that a family album encompasses is in itself a reason to
assign importance to them.

Private photographs are rooted in the lives of the people whom they belong
to, or of those who put them to use. For users, their own images constitute an
elaborate system of memories and meanings. The images of the Jagla family were
taken to preserve moments in time in a certain place. On the other hand, as
convincingly argued by Clive Scott, with the passing of time the images gathered in
albums or other kinds of private archives slowly lose their specific indexicality as it
relates to a specific place and time, and in parallel their educative, cultural and
general value increases. Therefore they all gradually become documents of a shared
past.74 These documents, originally a family’s memory-preserving device, begin to
also offer counter or alternative narratives to what had previously been offered as
official truth by institutions, and thus their power increases as their linkages begin to
be established by scholarship. Consequently, by their role alongside and often
complimenting or questioning the formal and official function of archives as state-
run vessels for memory and history, family archives form an important part of the
process of knowledge creation and retention. When trying to understand a
collection like the Jagla family one, it becomes extremely important to understand
its importance not only for the family but also for others.


74 Scott, “The Spoken Image”, p. 33.

33
Chapter 3: Materiality and affect in decoding meaning

The previous chapters focused on the content of the image and the idea of
the family album as an archive and a context, guiding or dictating how photographs
can be interpreted. In this chapter I will concentrate on exploring the ways in which
humans as users engage with photographic images as objects. Therefore the focus
will shift more towards a phenomenological consideration of the performative
functions of images, and also the processes that images can be subjected to. I will
consider the role of affect and how it can aid the understanding of vernacular
photography. The images of the Jagla family archive, and specifically their function,
continued usage and circulation, will still serve as a case study.

According to Tinkler, “when scholars analyze what a photo means they often,
explicitly or implicitly, make assumptions about how these photos contribute to
what viewers know and think”75 . Of course it is possible to identify probable
interpretations; however images can also affect viewers in many unforeseen ways,
often subjective and dictated more by what is sensed or felt rather than known. The
position of Tinkler is supported by, amongst others, Edwards and Hart, and
according to those two scholars it is worth noting that while researchers have
analyzed the taxonomic meaning and functions of images and their archives within
institutions or private albums, their physical materiality that actually makes up those
collections has been largely unnoticed.76 As observed by Mette Sandbye, “until very
recently the history and theory of photography have been especially concerned with
what a photograph is, rather than looking at what a photographs does”.77 Therefore,
to propose yet another, complimentary perspective and approach present in the
discourse surrounding vernacular photography, this last chapter will attempt to
demonstrate the added value that affective and material thinking represent. Hence
the attempt to look beyond the intention, to the making and the storing, distributing,
using and reusing.

I will start by focusing on examining the Jagla family photograph collection

from the perspective of its affective operations78 as well as their materiality and

75 Tinkler, “Using Photographs”, p. 30.

76 Edwards and Hart quoted in Price, Wells, “Thinking About Photography”, p. 72.
77 Sandbye, “Looking at the Family Photo Album”, p. 2.
78This term was used by Ernst Van Alphen in his seminal essay from 2008, in which he discusses affective op-
erations of art and literature. See: Van Alphen, “Affective Operations of Art and Literature”, pp. 21- 30.

34
what can be learned by looking at them not only as images but also as objects. I will
first look into photography’s affect and consider how can it be used as a productive
line of enquiry when thinking about the relationship between affect and
photography. I will then consider the material aspects of an image-object, looking
closer at its surface and clarity. How and why does our understanding of images,
particularly vernacular photography, change when we consider what they do, rather
than only about what they are? What responses can be triggered? Lastly, to
complete my investigation I will briefly look into the influence of new technologies
on archival prints and the understanding that digitalizing and online sharing
generates. I will be basing my arguments on the writings of scholars such as
Patricia Clough, Brian Massumi, Ronald Barthes, Elizabeth Edwards, Christopher
Pinney and Joanna Sassoon among others.

3.1 A closer look at affect in photography

To begin with, it is important to acknowledge that there is no scholarly

consensus concerning the definition of affect.79 The theory of affect is built around
the writing of critics and theorists such as Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson and
Gilles Deleuze.80 The noun ‘affect’ first appears in German in the 19th century, and
according to the Oxford Dictionary it is defined as “emotion or desire as influencing
behaviour”. It is derived from the Latin noun affectus, which translates as
‘disposition’, and from the verb afficere- ‘to influence’.81

The concept has become crucial to what we now term the ‘affective turn’ in
the humanities, which can be dated back to the mid 1990s,82 following after the so-
called “linguistic turn”, which was influenced by semiotics and rhetoric. The study of
affect turns away from signification and instead explores other, somatic aspects
such as encounters, physical responses to a cultural object, and sensational, bodily
experiences, feelings and senses. Theorists have arrived at several definitions that
vary, but according to Deleuze affect is an “intensity embodied in autonomic
reactions on the surface of the body as it interacts with other entities. It precedes its

79 See: Brown, Phu, “Feeling Photography”, p. 6 or Phu, Steer, “Introduction”, p. 236.

80 See: Clough, “The Affective Turn”, p. 1.
81 Oxford Dictionary, accessed June 10th, 2018 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/affect.
82 Clough, “The Affective Turn”, p. 1.

35
expression in words and operates independently”.83 In other words, affect gives
prominence to the bodily, somatic experience over the disembodied one.
Consequently, since affect is felt and experienced rather than understood in a
cognitive way and is often associated with the personal perspectives of an
individual reacting in different ways, it poses certain challenges from a scientific,
academic perspective.

Firstly, it turns away from rationalist traditions of critical thought, cognitive or

reason-based approaches as proposed by Plato, Descartes and Kant. Simply put, a
turn to affective thinking means the turning of attention away from the philosophical
separation of mind and body. And secondly, the turn to affect within critical theory,
as explained by La Caze and Lloyd, is also a change within the dualist framework of
mind and body, away from the former and towards the latter.84

The affective approach towards research can serve as a point of departure in

photographic theory and visual anthropology too. Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu, in
the introduction to “Feeling Photography”, point out the tensions that exist between
the materialist theoretical approaches, as produced within institutions, constructed
through discourse and promoted by Victor Burgin, Alan Sekula or John Tagg, and
the feeling and affect-laden theory of photography introduced by Roland Barthes.85
For Barthes affect lies at the heart of photography, as he is determined to be guided
by conscious feeling while writing his reflections.86 Burgin, on the other hand, in his
book Thinking Photography, is interested in the role that photography plays as
representation in the process of creating meaning.87 John Tagg, too, rejected
Barthes’s ponderings on the feelings caused by looking at photographs, and stood
instead for the return to studying semiotic processes and discursive systems. For
Tagg a photograph “is not a magical ‘emanation’”, as Barthes seems to be seeing it,
but rather “a material product of a material apparatus set to work in a specific
context.” He argues, as he continues, that “neither experience nor reality can be
separated from languages, representations, psychological structures and
practices”.88 However, as has already been pointed out in the previous chapter,

83 Deluze quoted in Van Alphen, “Affective Operations” , p. 23

84 La Caze, Lloyd, “Philosophy and the Affective Turn”, p.6.
85 Brown, Phu, “Feeling Photography”, p. 2.
86 Barthes, “Camera Lucida”, p. 10.
87 Brown, Phu, “Feeling Photography”, p. 2.
88 Tagg, “Burden of Representation”, pp. 3-4.

36
Tagg’s position seems to be rather radical, and only by allowing other perspectives
can a more complete picture can be seen.

How, then, can the exploration of the relationship between affect and
photography aid to our understanding of images? According to Elizabeth Edwards it
is not possible to understand photographs just by considering their visual content.
She argues that apprehension happens through an “embodied engagement with an
affective object world”.89 The materiality of a photograph becomes a form of “figural
excess”, which cannot be tackled with linguistic and semiotic practices alone. An
image becomes a social object that can be held, touched, viewed together, talked
about, printed, framed or posted online. Material approaches shift our
understanding of photographs towards subjective and emotional reactions and
interpretations, and as a result comprehensions based solely on visual content
becomes impossible. Edwards argues that what we do with photographs are “key
registers through which photographic meanings are negotiated”.90 Further, she
claims that photographs are objects defined in part by their reproducibility and
potential for repurposing, and for that reason they are objects with active
biographies, existing in a constant state of flux.91

Theorists such as Walter Benjamin or Rosalind Krauss have convincingly

argued that the most typical reactions to photographs are associated with
identification rather than an aesthetic value of an image, therefore beholders are
fascinated by what the photographs stand for more than by any formal qualities
they represent.92 Without doubt, affect, feelings and emotions share a special
relationship with photography. Apart from its more obvious role of being a medium
that depicts and represents emotion, it could be argued that in addition
photography has a significant role in producing them. Brown and Phu explain that
by taking feelings into account we are able to focus on the practices of viewing and
to be more receptive to a wider range of interpretations. This approach thus enables
the viewer to be more perceptive towards formerly-marginalised histories while
investigating the production of photographic meaning. In other words, affective

89 Edwards, “Objects of Affect”, p. 221.

90 Edwards, “Objects of Affect”, p. 224.
91 Edwards, “Objects of Affect”, p. 224- 225.
92 See: Phu, Steer, “Introduction”, p. 236. The authors are referring to arguments presented by Walter Benjamin
in “A Small History of Photography” (1931) and “ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Introduction” (1936)
as well as an essay by Rosalind Krauss titled “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View” (1982).

37
looking is crucial because it seeks a reengagement with specific historical
circumstances that are not associated with the spectator nor form part of an official
shared cultural history.93 Similarly, according to Massumi: “there seems to be a
growing feeling within media, literary and art theory studies that affect is central to
an understanding of our information and image-based late-capitalist culture, in
which so-called master narratives are perceived to have foundered”. 94 That is to say
that affective looking can arguably be key to understanding our history and culture
and to addressing previously marginalised subjects. It could be argued that the
Jagla family’s photographs and the story of displacement that they represent
become a much more tangible part of that story, because of their position as a
personal insight into the much larger history of a group of Polish refugees in Uganda
and East Africa. In that same time, those personal images, which allow for different
readings and connections to be formed, allow the personal to become collective
and to become more accessible. What had been universally presented as a master
narrative has been proven by postcolonial studies, among others, to be partial. The
images in question, and the body of documentation it is drawn from, represent a
part of the history of both Poland and Uganda that has been overlooked. It is
important for collective as well as personal history to include them, and that can
only be done, at least initially, because of the compassion we feel as we experience
the strong intention of people whose lives they represent to not allow themselves to
be forgotten.

Aside from the collective aspect, there is also a more personal level in
individual images in which the affinity of photography with affect can be observed.
In his reflections on photography in Camera Lucida, Ronald Barthes introduced the
concepts of punctum and studium. His idea of the punctum is perhaps best
understood as a way of opposing the subjective, unconstrained and illogical
reaction to a photographic image and to the objective aspects that are associated
with the studium.95 While the studium is an indication towards social, historical and
cultural meaning produced through semiotic analysis, the punctum is that rare detail
that attracts one to a photograph and evokes a certain emotional response.96

93 Brown and Phu,”Feeling Photography”, p. 6.

94 Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect”, p. 27.
95Brown and Phu, “Feeling Photography”, p. 5. Additionally according to Brown and Phu, the punctum is a
powerful concept because it introduces the theory of feeling photography.
96 Barthes, “Camera Lucida”, p. 26.

38
Throughout his reflections Barthes systematically develops his understanding of
punctum, from a detail to time. The indexicality of a photograph and the realization
that it shows moments and people frozen in time, too, plays a role in its affective
force. According to Shawn Michelle Smith, for Barthes critical consideration of a
photograph, including noticing, observing and thinking about it, can only begin after
feeling it. Smith argues that the punctum disturbs the site of photographic meaning,
allowing the viewer’s affect to appear. A photographer doesn’t have the power to
determine the punctum in an image; “the mystery and power of the punctum lie in
its unpredictability; a viewer never knows what, if anything, will strike her.”97 To
illustrate what Smith is arguing about I will use my interactions with the case study
as an example. When I looked for the first time at the Jagla family photographs,
seeing the crocodile was my punctum, an unexpected element in a family
photograph that was otherwise quite usual, at least at first sight. It is possible that
no one else would have the same reaction to that image. Additionally the time and
place in those images represents a world that does not exist anymore, which made
me even more interested. The strong urge described by Deleuze soon followed, an
urge to know more about the people and the story of that photograph that
eventually led to writing this thesis.98

3.2 The materiality of vernacular photography

If one agrees with Batchen, that “vernacular photographs exploit the fact that
the photograph is something that can also have a volume, tactility, and a physical
presence in the world”99, then it stands to reason that a photograph is just as
important as a three-dimensional object as it is as a two-dimensional image. Taking
another, even closer look, but also consciously holding and touching the image-
object of Mr. and Mrs. Jagla (Fig. 1),100 one immediately registers the surface of the
image. The edges of the photograph, pinked in a decorative way that was common
at the time when the image was printed, have been damaged over time, probably

97 Smith, “Photography Between Desire and Grief”, p. 35.

98 Deleuze, as quoted in Van Alphen, “Affective Operations, p. 22.
99 Batchen, “Each Wild Idea”, p. 60.
100The images that form the corpus of the case study are digitalised versions of their originals. I have never held
the original images in my own hands, but for the purpose of this argument I approach the possibility of being
able to hold, touch and look at them in their material form.

39
while moving from place to place. Though it could be said that the print is generally
technically competent, it can also be observed that the original negative appears to
have been a little underexposed as the face of the man is not very clear against the
sky behind. Additionally it can be seen that some emulsion has been scraped off,
on the right side and the top left corner of the photo. It can probably be safely
imagined that this is as a result of the manner in which the collection has been
stored101- perhaps the prints may have gotten stuck together as a result of damp or
humidity, and later, when pulled apart, some of the photograph’s emulsion surface
was damaged. The photo is covered in thin lines from where it has been creased,
crumpled and damaged. Generally one could conclude that the physical state of
this image is poor.

For Barthes that very condition of the print, showing its age and the life lived,
would be reason enough to go as far as to destroy it. “The only way I can transform
the Photograph is into refuse: either the drawer or the wastebasket. Not only does it
commonly have the fate of paper (perishable), but even if it is attached to more
lasting supports, it is still mortal: like a living organism, it is born on the level of the
sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment, then ages... Attacked by light, by
humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes; there is nothing left to do but throw it away”,
he writes in Camera Lucida.102 Laura Marks notes that Barthes finds the mortality of
his photographs, their blurriness, fading, and degeneration, a dreadful experience.
However she claims, in contrast to the French theorist for whom unreadability is a
reason for rejection, that the very blurriness and illegibility of the photograph may
instead support the process of memory. In writing about the surface of a cinema
screen Marks argues that an image “that is grainy, indistinct, or dispersed over the
surface of the screen invites a haptic look, or a look that uses the eye like an organ
of touch”. The same could arguably be observed of still photographs. She explains
that a “tactile look” depends on a connection between viewer and object more than
an optical or cognitive look does. Haptic looking,103 since it does not necessarily
anticipate the recognition of figures, allows identification with the deterioration and

101 As explained in Chapter 2, the collection has been and currently is kept by the family in a simple box.
102 Barthes, “Camera Lucida”, p. 93.
103 Haptic looking, visuality or criticism are terms introduced by Laura Marks in “Touch”, as a way of addressing
a need of creating a specific theoretical and cultural vocabulary that will be able to address and deal with affect.
It was pointed out by Massumi that the existing vocabulary is insufficient and lacking, because it originates in
approaches and theories of signification. Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect”, pp. 26-27.

40
partialness of the image, which according to Marks, results in evoking a feeling of
melancholy. In consequence the resulting reading is loving and not dreadful. 104 It
could also thus follow that we cherish those images more because of their material
value to us. They represent something more than just a visual memory.

Marks talks about a moving image, while art historian and anthropologist
Christopher Pinney confirms that the surface of an image can create a tactile and
emotional connection between the image and the viewer. The surface of this old
family photograph (Fig. 1), sometimes referred to as its skin105, is covered in
wrinkles and other visible signs of its age and the lives it has lived. In Pinney’s view
this creates an entry point between two very different spaces. The first one is the
space of transparency, created when we look through the surface of the photograph
into the world that has been presented to us by the image. Simply put, and using
the main case study image as an example (Fig. 1), we look at the shores of Lake
Victoria. In the second space, referred to as the occlusion space, the window that
the image creates is being blocked; it “clouds over, and its opacity reaches out
toward the beholder”. Therefore the first space could be compared to
“mathematical certainty and knowability”. The second space, on the other hand, is
a zone of embodiment and mutuality, the sense of sharing a feeling with others.106
This space can come into existence while looking at family pictures together with
others. Seeing, according to James Elkins, is not an emotionally neutral or purely
physical process. While it is often considered to be the most rational of all the
senses, our consciousness cannot always be in charge of it. Quite on the contrary, it
can be accompanied by unconscious affect, closely connected with our feelings
and emotional reactions.107 Therefore that link to the viewed image is a personal
one and the images that touch us or relate to our life in one way or another resonate
more strongly with us, a good example being the way in which the Jagla
photograph has affected me. Only then can that embodied and emotional reaction
that Pinney is describing come into existence. Photographs are not only content but
also form- they are both images and material objects in the same time. As such, the
photographs in the Jagla collection have lives of their own and so they age and their

104 Marks, “Touch”, pp. 105-106.

105 For example see Abel, “Skin, Flesh and the Affective Wrinkles of Civil Rights Photography” in “Feeling Pho-
tography”, pp. 93- 142.
106 Pinney, “Sepia Mutiny”, p. 70-80.
107 James Elkins, as quoted in Haustein, “Regarding Lost Time”, p. 6.

41
skins wrinkle. Moreover photographic prints are tactile objects- they display
emotional and sensory impact that goes beyond their content alone and they bear
physical signs of their social lives that viewers can experience and respond to.

3.3 Digitalising and online sharing

French film theorist André Bazin, too, thought about photographs as objects
in their own right. He argued that “no matter how fuzzy, distorted or discolored, no
matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of
the very process of it’s becoming, the being of the model of which it is the
reproduction (…). Hence the charm of family albums. Those grey or sepia shadows,
phantom-like and almost undecipherable, are no longer traditional family portraits
but rather the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration,
freed from their destiny (…).”108 According to Deepali Devan, family and studio
portraits in particular raise interesting questions about affect, because of the genre’s
visual conventions, such as repetition of pose, certain props or framing, that can be
universally recognized. This specific type of affect, described by Devan as
‘cumulative’, describes emotional reactions triggered by a photographic portrait. As
has been established in Chapter 1, I classify the photographs that form the case
study as portraits, and the affect they create is not necessarily a result of each
individual image (though it’s noted that this does happen) but rather because of the
qualities that each shares with a similar body of images that is already recognizable
by the viewer. Moreover affect is produced not only by the image itself, but also by
the way in which it is used. In other words it is also the cumulative affect created by
the image’s circulation and genre-context that creates its meaning and affective
responses to it.109

Recent developments in digital cultures have created yet another space for
photographs to be circulated. The process of digitalization, a change long predicted
but whose actual effects are only now beginning to be examined in critical
discourse, facilitates the possibility for images like those from the Jagla collection to
also be eligible for a further, separate and different life and circulation through online
sharing and usage. As observed by Joanna Sassoon, throughout their lives

108 Bazin, “The Ontology”, p. 14.

109 Dewan, Hackett, “Cumulative Affect”, pp. 338-339.

42
photographs, both as images and objects, have the potential to move across a
number of spaces, including the sites of production, use, reproduction and
preservation. Each change in ownership and context of the image accumulates the
past uses and introduces new meanings.110 While the notion of the photograph as
an object that can have a unique value and meaning is generally accepted, it is
worth considering what happens when that image-object undergoes digitalization.
As humans we comprehend the world in two distinct but related ways; we use
language to derive meaning and describe the world we see, and we experience the
world through our bodies and senses, feelings and emotions. However digital
information offers a third, more abstract way, in which our sense of sight is given the
task of replacing language and bodily experiences. When looking at Fig. 1 and Fig.
2 we experience an affective response as we can imagine quite clearly what the
physical object looks like, despite not being able to touch it.

Sassoon points out that the process of digitalization cannot be seen as

simply changing the physical state of a photograph from a material form to a pixel.
She explains that “if a photograph can be seen as a more complex object than
simply an image, digitizing can be seen as more than simply a transformation of
state, or a transliteration of tones. The process of digitizing involves a more complex
cultural process of translation- or a change between forms of representation.”111 It
might appear that the process of translating a photograph from a material form to a
digital form is neutral and unmediated. When thinking about the case study, one can
conclude that the digital scan is not so much different from its original, possibly
besides a diminution of image quality. However as Sassoon points out, basing her
argument on the writings of Walter Benjamin, it is crucial when determining the
translatability of a photograph to explore the specific, pronounced nature that is
intrinsic to the original. These can only be identified by looking at “the materiality of
the photographic object as well as its sources of meanings and contexts.”112
Sassoon’s argument is that digitization reduces the complexity, subtlety and
readability of the photographic object, because it flattens it to a single dimension.
“Thus it can be argued that digitization is limiting understanding of photographs to

110 Sassoon, “Photographic Materiality”, p. 202.

111 Sassoon, “Photographic Materiality”, p. 198.
112 Ibid.

43
their being an aesthetic medium rather than a document of evidence.”113 She further
explains that as much as transformation into a digital image marks a new stage in
the life of a photograph, it also means the loss of context. She talks about custodial
institutions who are directly changing the meanings of photographic objects. One
example of this could be the misplacement of the relationships between
photographs as determined by original owners when sequencing images in their
albums as discussed in the second chapter. When taken out of the album’s pages
and digitally presented as individual image, an original meaning of the image is
lost.114 However there seems to be another interpretative possibility, namely when
digitisation enables quite the opposite, enriching both the life and the meaning of
the photograph. In the case of Mr. Jagla’s family collection, for example, not all the
photographs were scanned. Of those that were digitalized a few were shared online,
on a web page dedicated to the history of Poles in Africa (Fig. 4). By scanning and
sharing Mr. Jagla indeed gave the images yet another life and purpose as well as
deepening their understanding and meaning, by making the images public and
allowing more people to see them and to react to them. This suggests that even if
the individual meaning of an individual image diminishes by sharing in in the online
space, the collective meaning that the image represents, increases.

It should be pointed out that hand in hand with digitalization and sharing
comes a change in access to images, as well as (perhaps even more importantly) a
change in the perception of ownership. As observed by Nancy Van House, a
researcher interested in digital technologies, photography and archives, while
printed photographs and negatives are solely under the control of their owner,
digital images, because of the change in format that allows them to slip the bounds
of materiality, may have a life of their own, without the control of their owners.115
Even the act of my writing this thesis is a perfect example of this happening.
Although I asked Mr. Jagla for permission to use the images and write about them, I
found the images before I knew him and could have written this without ever
contacting him. I first saw the images online on a website called “afryka.org”, and in
my quest to find out more about the family in the photographs, I started searching
for ways of getting in touch with the person who posted them there. Mr. Jagla owns

113 Ibid, pp. 200-201.

114 Sassoon, “Photographic Materiality”, p. 202.
115 Van House, “Personal Photography, Digital Technologies”, p. 125

44
the prints of the photographs taken in Uganda that have now been digitized and
uploaded online in an attempt to find out more information about his family’s history.
However by the act of uploading the photographs online, Mr. Jagla has given up
control over how other people will use the images; in this particular case what I’m
writing or who will read and see this thesis. According to Van House, “current
developments in image-related technologies are changing the publicness,
temporality and volume of personal photography”.116 She argues that with digital
technologies taking over we see shifts in the collection of processes, the
accumulation of objects, practices and meanings, that we group together and call
family photography. To be more specific, vernacular photography is becoming
public and temporary, less private and long-lasting and more functional as objects
of communication rather than depositories of memory. 117 In the presence of new
technologies and electronic information archives, like family albums, are becoming
fluid and memory becomes more of a performative process that can be revised and
updated to include changing preferences of the personal past. In the same time the
concurrency of new technologies and photography can be beneficial to
communities who have been struggling to maintain familial ties and maintain their
cultural identity. That phenomenon can be observed when looking at online usage
of the previously private photographs of the Jaglas and other families, and the
effect is has on a community of people who share the same story and can now
better place that within the historical, collective past. When photographs can be
accessed and are allowed to circulate they can support the remembrance and
telling of alternative stories, but the meanings that they will offer will be again new,
stripped of their materiality and rendered ageless, again frozen, this time at the
moment that they left their paper behind. 118

As has been demonstrated, the study of affect in relation to a photographic

image can inform our knowledge, and trigger critical enquiries into the process of
understanding photographic meaning not only on the indexical level, but also on a
wider, somatic level of perception. The friction between the materialist way of
thinking about images, formulated through discourse and popularized by Alan

116 Ibid.
117 Ibid, p. 128.
118 Cross, Peck, “On Photography, Archive and Memory”, pp. 132-133.

45
Sekula, John Tagg or Victor Burgin, and the thinking of Roland Barthes, who was
arguably one of the first who placed feeling and affect at the center of photographic
theory, typifies the wider turn in academia’s approach to objects that took place in
the last thirty years. The content of an image arguably still remains the basis through
which the image is understood, but affect and material tools add yet another,
broader dimension to our cognitive processes. Additionally, with digital culture’s
ongoing and rapid developments continuing as I write, yet another space has been
created in which photographs may be circulated and exist. This evolution merits
consideration as it also has been demonstrated to have affective qualities. Although
the process of digitalization has begun to be examined critically only recently, the
act of scanning and online sharing, too, are becoming an important part of the lives
of an image. The Jagla photographs that this thesis refers to are objects but now
exist in digital form too. Each of them is a piece of paper, that was cut and covered
with light-sensitive emulsion and chemicals and is now stored somewhere in a box,
aging with each passing day. Over time, as the material characteristics change and
the photographic print gets older, the impact on the way the image is read and more
importantly felt, changes too. As the photos are held in somebody’s hands and their
faded surfaces touched and felt under the fingertips, one can relate and respond to
them in ways that cannot be understood by means of language, discourse or power
alone. Family photographs contain emotional and affective qualities that have an
ability to reach much further and wider than just their individual owners. However,
as pointed out by researchers such as Sassoon or Van House, that process of being
able to affect collective readers rather than just single users is changing and
expanding with the exponential growth of digitalization and the possibilities offered
by online sharing and how images are communicated in contemporary society. The
lives of these photographs, taken in Uganda almost seventy years ago, were
extended when they entered an unpredicted online space. Consequently new
meanings were created as the Jagla images were freed from their physical form and
began a transformation as the ownership over them eroded, changed and became
a shared, collective value. Their role as social documents and as tools for creation
and retention of Polish identity and history has been extended too, outside of
personal and into collective meanings.

46
Conclusion

This thesis has given an account of an investigation into the meanings of a

specific image, the photograph of Jan and Karolina Jagla with a crocodile by the
shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda. As stated in the introduction, my aim was to
draw on existing research into vernacular photography from within the field of
photography, cultural and visual theory frameworks, and apply those theories and
approaches in order to dissect an image, understand it and then reassemble it
again. Image content is the most familiar and basic way of thinking about vernacular
photographs and it could be said that image content is why photographs were
produced and kept in the first place. However as the layers of meaning are peeled
back and the photograph is considered in the context of its origin and means of
production, the way it has been archived and finally the way it now functions as an
object, the process brings interesting outcomes.

In chapter one my investigation concluded that the image I selected for my

case study could be classified as a vernacular photograph and at the same time fall
under the genre of portrait, that will have certain consequences for the perceptions
of the readers of that image. Additionally the chapter highlights the way in which
family photographs, once overlooked, have become a valuable subject of academic
research because of their ability to make history personal, offer counter-narratives
and invite us into the lives of their creators. Further, it was demonstrated that the
photographs of the Jagla family do not merely record reality, but rather construct it
and represent it in what could be argued are ambivalent ways. The example of the
case study is evidence that images have an ability to convey personal and collective
memories. Even though the Jagla family images are not transparent windows into
the world of the Poles in Uganda but a particular representation of it, each of them
is a valuable historical document.

Considering the larger context of archiving and ownership of the

photographs, the second chapter focused on the archive and its formats and
institutions from a historical perspective. The family photo collection, in this case
the Jagla collection, acts as a form of archive and can, as was shown with the
particular example of the case study, serve to highlight the disconnect between
those who wrote the history and those who lived it. Thinkers such as John Tagg or
Alan Sekula critically addressed the role of photography in the context of social

47
institutions, but in their writings they have omitted the role of family photographs
similar to the Jagla collection. Geoffrey Batchen, Lindsay Smith or Elizabeth
Edwards, on the other hand, draw attention to the importance of modifying critical
perspectives and approaches to the concept of the family album and vernacular
photography. The acknowledgement of visual records, in this case of Polish
refugees in Uganda, can be an informative source of additional meanings that
inform our thinking about a photograph, but also about often little-known histories.
An image of the Jagla family in Koja, when viewed in the context of an album or a
broader collection kept in a box, accompanied by other, similar images and notes,
can be understood in much fuller way.

Finally, as the third chapter demonstrated, turning to affect can open up

many new avenues to understand vernacular photographs. I have approached the
photographs not merely as images but as material objects, made in Uganda, to be
kept by a Polish family who now live in the UK and exhibited online in an effort to
find out more about the family history, and which prove able to create affective
responses in both their material and digitalised forms. With my argument I
demonstrated that the meaning of photographs depends not only on the
circumstances of their making or archiving, but also of their materiality and
subsequent exhibition and reproduction. The theory of affect in literary studies had
been discussed by many scholars and an increasing amount is being written about
affective photographs and the role of our senses in understanding an image. The
deliberation about the renewed life of the Jagla family photographs in the online
space and the consequence of digitalising for their materiality and affectiveness
takes as its foundation writings by Nancy Van House and Joanna Sassoon.

It has to be acknowledged that the study was limited by sporadic contact

with the owner of the photos and therefore, especially when it came to considering
the family album, or in this case box, as archive, this lack of information obscured
the findings in some ways.

To summarize, the meaning of photographic images, as has been

demonstrated, does not come from the content alone, but rather it is constructed
from fluid connections, most notably between its contexts of production, archiving
and viewing as well as its material forms, ownership, exchange and consumption.
Those connections could be understood as a metaphor for the photograph as a

48
living object that has both spatial and temporal qualities. The image of Jan and
Karolina Jagla was sent to their family in Poland with a note on the back, and was
later returned to the sons so that they could keep it to cherish the memory of their
parents. Further the conclusion I came to is that vernacular photographs contain a
combination of documentary and affective qualities that reach far beyond the
individual owner, and this aspect deserves greater emphasis in future histories of
photography, also because an image can also be regarded as an ongoing creation,
not as a dead object. It seems that as humans we try to access the past to better
understand our present. An image showing a specific place and time might, at first
sight, seem completely unrelated and yet it is capable of triggering unexpected
associations. An engagement with an image is different for each person who looks
at it. Certainly the journey of trying to solve the riddle of a picture of a couple and a
crocodile has been fascinating, not just in terms of learning more about my
countries’ collective history but more importantly in terms of understanding how
much depth and meaning are contained within a simple family photograph.

49
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Jagla, John “Family May 3rd in Koja”. 2014. JPEG file.

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III. Websites

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53
Appendix

Figure 1. A scan of a photograph depicting Jan and Karolina Jagla in Koja with Lake
Victoria in background. The photograph was most likely taken in 1947 or 1948.

54
Figure 2. A scan of the back of Figure 1. The translation reads: “We live amongst
creature like this one is a crocodile, it is 12 meters’ long him who consumes people
is lying dead here”.


55
Figure 3. A scan of a photograph depicting the Jagla family: Jan, Karolina and the
twins, Zbyszek and Karol, in Koja with lake Victoria in the background. 


56
Figure 4. A scan of a photograph depicting the Jagla family photographed on May
3rd, Polish Constitution Day in Koja, Uganda.


57
Figure 5. A screenshot of the “afryka.org" website, which has become a platform for
many Poles who were and still are looking for more information about their relatives,
friends as well as general history of Polish Refugee Camps in East and Southern
Africa. Captured here is the post by John “Zbyszek” Jagla, who posted the photo that
sparked my interest. He introduced his family and their story and is asked for more
information from people who still might remember something more about his family.

58