Photo Archives VI: Transports of Vision: Frederic Edwin Church's Photographic Collection of the Mediterranean and Middle East

The 19th-century American painter Frederic Edwin Church’s photographic collection is an object lesson in archival curation. It does not fully illustrate or inform a viewer about place so much as it assembles (and excludes from vision) a controlled locale. Church’s collection embodies a variety of uses of photographic imagery in the context of a mobile subject, located within a larger network of cultural authorities and visual purveyors. It also presents a view of the porous boundaries between other visual media that photography inserted itself within, which works to problematize or fracture their claims to objectivity and invites new ways to theorize them.