Counter Memories: Seeing Empire through the National Trust, c. 1895 - c. 2020

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This research project seeks to better understand the colonial heritage of national trust properties through the study of a photographic collection held at a country house. A specific property is yet to be specified, but for any house the same fundamental approaches would apply. The project aims to further conceptions of the British "imperial gaze" through a "visual archaeology" which will demonstrate how this form of material culture created and reinforced European imaginings of the colonial Other. The personal images of colonised peoples and places collected by Britons will be investigated, rather than official or formal photographic collections created for government purposes in the colonies. By focusing on a regional context rather than the metropole, the project builds on existing research by asking how visions of the colonies may have varied outside of London. The project seeks to assess how these images were collected, stored and used by those who lived in the house, and what effects the collection may have had on perceptions of the colonised, and how perceiving the colonised may have affected viewers. Photography is associated with modern European colonialism as it was constructed and understood through post-Enlightenment ideals which priviledged the empirical, particularly that which was visual. Photos were understood to be direct windows to other places and times, which is particularly relevant to this study as it suggests that those viewing them would have believed themselves to be transcending metropole and colony (Ryan, 1997). Terms such as "image-Africa" are useful to refer to the perceived colony as opposed to the reality (Landau and Kaspin, 2002).The project is interdisciplinary, with Professor Hicks' and Doctor Kefalas' supervision providing expertise in archaeological and anthropological methods and my own background in history merging these disciplines which already have blurred boundaries, particularly within imperial and material studies (Gosden, 1999; Hicks and Beaudry, 2010). As a collaboration with the National Trust, this project's findings will both benefit from the expertise within the Trust and contribute to understanding of its collections, with the hope that public visitors can be given greater access to the colonial histories of its properties too.The photos studied will be assessed in terms of their materiality as much as for their contents, informed by Edwards' conception of the photograph as a physical object (Edwards and Hart, 2004). Both the creation and reception of the photographs will be equally important to this project, as both their physicality and the context in which they were viewed fundamentally shaped what they told viewers about their subjects. Insights from historians and archaeologists of the senses may be valuable in further understanding this, as those who were being shown the photographs were only seeing black and white, still images, without the access to the sounds and smells of the places they were learning about. Where they had access to other artefacts, such as foods, fabrics or musical instruments, these were highly curated, luxurious commodities and still provided limited access to the colonies thenselves. Consideration of the contexts in which the photographs were being seen and consumed will be important in gaining an accurate understanding of their meanings. This project will also take an intersectional approach, considering the ways in which, race, gender and class affected both the colonisers and the colonised's images of themselves and each other. Whilst drawing on a source-base which was created and owned by the coloniser, every effort will be made throughout to draw out the voice of the colonised from the images. This research provides an opportunity to address the role of colonialism in creating the wealth attached to many country houses, and to contribute to a more informed understanding of its relevance to the social lives of the families.