Counter-archives as heritage justice: photography, invisible labor and peopled ruins

Abstract

This article critically engages with photographs, the institutions that archive and curate them, and the uses to which they are put in the work of heritage preservation, with particular attention paid to the ways in which these have been mobilized in Middle Eastern heritage debates. Photographs, often depicting uninhabited rather than populated heritage landscapes, in effect weaponize heritage preservation, ignoring the fact that individuals and communities have always had their own ways of preserving and engaging with the material past. The authors therefore seek to reconsider the disciplinary genealogies embedded in a photographic archive shaped by instruments of Western ideology and power – archaeological fieldwork, surveys and museum-building – to question the uncritical use of photography for the assessment of heritage significance, the construction of heritage value and management of heritage assemblages today. They argue that identifying and creating counter-archives is necessary to contribute to more inclusive narratives fostering heritage justice, including a deeper engagement with archaeology’s long-standing entanglements with exploitative labour.