This text accompanies the performance A Foot, A Mouth, A Hundred Billion Stars, which premiered at the Lapworth Museum of Geology in the United Kingdom on 18 March 2023, as part of the Flatpack film festival. It includes both the text and a film version, developed during a residency at the museum. Over 18 months, I had full access to the collection and archives, selecting objects that served as prompts for stories about time and memory. A central theme of the work is slippage – misremembering and misunderstanding – as a generative methodology for exploring the connection between the collection, our past, and possible futures.

A Foot, A Mouth, A Hundred Billion Stars combines analogue media and digital technologies to examine our understanding of remembering and forgetting. I used a live digital feed and two analogue slide projectors to explore the relationships between image and memory. This article does not serve as a guide to the performance but instead reflects on the process and the ideas behind the work. My goal is to share my practice of rethinking memory through direct engagement with materials. In line with the performance’s tangential narrative, this text weaves together diverse references, locations, thoughts, and ideas, offering a deeper look into the conceptual framework of the work.

Drawing on ethnographic research from Amami Ōshima, southern Japan, this paper documents the ways in which contemporary societies, from the hamlet to the nation state, are wrestling with opposing forces of environmental and economic sustainability and discusses the fractures this creates for people and ecosystems. It uses as a case study the protest to stop the construction of a seawall being built in Katoku, an ocean hamlet in Amami, based within the buffer zone of the island’s United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Natural Heritage Site. Rather than being built with the primary aim to protect “people and property,” I suggest this infrastructural intervention is a symbolic declaration of risk management and repository of huge economic value for the island and prefecture. The background to the paper is the return of a cache of color photographs taken by an American anthropologist in the 1950s and the 70th anniversary of the reversion of Amami in 1953 from US military to Japanese control. The paper considers the contemporary ramifications of policy instituted in the post-World War II period, that has sought to maximize the potential of “remote” areas and continues to favor growth and development at the expense of the health of multispecies island communities.

This article examines a collection of colour portraits housed in the Archives de la Planète in Paris. The portraits depict a group of Indian pan-Islamists who spent several months in Europe in 1920 advocating for more lenient terms for the Ottoman Empire—the seat of the Caliphate—in the peace settlement that followed the First World War. Europe, and particularly Paris, provided these Indians with opportunities to encounter numerous other Muslims from across the so-called ‘Muslim world’, some of whom also sat for portraits that now form part of the Archives de la Planète. By drawing on recent scholarship on colonial photography, global embourgeoisement, and interwar world-making, this article contextualises these portraits within a broader historical framework. While surface similarities between the images might suggest this was a moment of growing convergence, the Indian pan-Islamists’ textual accounts of their European encounters reveal deep intellectual and political divisions. In this moment of heightened global mobility and connection, the Muslim world emerges as a heterotopic space, containing and reflecting a multitude of competing realities and intersecting subjectivities.

Photographs are seldom at the centre of Greek historical research, despite their frequent use as illustrations. Despite this neglect of photography, modern Greek history would seem unimaginable without photographs, highlighting photography's integral role in our thinking about the past. In this article I offer some theoretical reflections on the impact of photography on historical imagination. Thereafter I take a closer look at some examples that do consider photography's role in the practice of Greek history, showing how photographs have been both mistrusted and embraced in historical research.

This paper critically investigates the photographic representation of the US military presence in 1960s-80s Korea by Kuwabara Shisei (1936-), one of the most eminent Japanese photojournalists who has worked in Korea since 1964. The paper specifically discusses a collection of images of the United States Forces Korea (USFK) in his 1986 photobook Kankoku gen'ei (Korea 1964-86) which features the most comprehensive work he produced in Korea. Through close visual analysis and examination of the pictorial narrative that Kuwabara presents throughout the collection of USFK images in the photobook, the paper explores how Kuwabara's images tap into the different kinds of Cold War imaginaries from the existing visual iteration of the USFK in more widely circulating mass media, novels, and movies in Korea at the time. In addition, it underscores USFK images of Kuwabara as his staunch statement against the global presence of the US military. Kuwabara crafts his argument with the hindsight of a Japanese veteran photojournalist who had gained keen insight into the global American military base network through his experiences in Japan, Vietnam, and Cambodia during the 1960s and 1970s. Overall, through close analysis of Kuwabara's photographs, the paper sheds light on the value of looking at photographic representations of the US military for building an understanding of cultural implication of the US military presence in Cold War Korea.

This translation of photographer and critic Nakahira Takuma's (1938-2015) 1972 essay, “The Illusion Called the Documentary: From the Document to the Monument,” illuminates a crucial shift in Nakahira's understanding of both the profound limitations—as well as the radical potential of—photography. The essay's contemporaneous insights into the role of photography during the infamous Asama-Sansō Incident in 1972 offers a crucial counter-perspective that remains absent from existing accounts of this incident. Nakahira's essay demonstrates a pivotal moment within the development of a radical discourse of media power in the year of Okinawa's Reversion to mainland Japanese rule, shedding light on an undercurrent of critical perspectives that continue to resonate in the contemporary moment.

This article examines photographs taken by U.S. Marine Joe O'Donnell, who was tasked with documenting bombed urban centers immediately after the Asia-Pacific War. O'Donnell's photos document not just the physical damage wrought by U.S. bombing raids, but the human suffering as well. While most published images at the time projected the U.S. military's destructive potential through mushroom clouds or razed cities, O'Donnell shifted the visual focus to the struggles of Japanese citizens in the ruins. In doing so, O'Donnell disrupted notions of American superiority by giving voice to those rebuilding their lives in the war's aftermath.

Chronology is an important framing mechanism in history and changes significantly based on who defines historical eras. The area studies field has recently grappled with the need to decenter perspectives and reconsider the sources that scholars use. This article uses deep learning artificial intelligence methods to process 169,634 images from the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive (RGAKFD), a major archive of photography in the region, as containing a statist chronological logic, one defined by political change in the center. By peering under the hood of the algorithm’s predictions, by thinking with the machine, it is possible to see patterns in the images that may not seem crucial to the human eye. Looking at RGAKFD as a potential source of data for AI raises parallels between algorithmic bias and the Moscow-centric bias of sources, while also providing opportunities to use such methods as a tool for exploratory research.

Indonesia's volcanoes are places of recreation, aesthetic production, and scientific knowledge-gathering, as well as sites of pilgrimage, spirituality, and natural disasters for locals as well as international travellers. In this article, I focus on volcanoes as historic sites of labour to demonstrate the entanglement of colonial tourism and science with local forms of work and knowledge, and to reveal the origins of the porting and guiding work that takes place on Indonesia's volcanoes to this day. Using Tina Campt's method of “listening to images,” I show how colonial photographs, albeit partial sources, make modes of subaltern labour visible that written sources routinely minimised, restoring porters, guides, and what I call “camp domestics” to histories of service, science and geotourism in Indonesia. Recognising the homosocial setting of the colonial scientific expedition and the peculiar physical challenges of the volcano environment, I also examine the negotiation of Indonesian and European masculinities and their intersection with class and racial hierarchies on the volcano. The article thus reflects on how Javanese workers’ spatial and social mobility entailed the negotiation of opportunity as well as exploitation on tour.

Colourised photographs have become a popular form of social media content, and this article examines how the digital sharing of colourised colonial photographs from the Sápmi region may develop into a kind of informal visual repatriation. This article presents a case study on the decolonial photographic practices of the Sámi colouriser Per Ivar Somby, who mines digitised photo archives, colourises selected photos, and subsequently shares them on his social media profiles. The article draws on a qualitative, netnographic study of Somby's Colour Your Past profiles in Facebook and Instagram and demonstrates how Somby and his followers reclaim photos of Sámi people produced during historical encounters with non-Sámi photographers. Drawing on Hirsch's (2008, 2012) concept affiliative postmemory, the analysis examines how historical information and affective responses becomes interwoven in reparative readings of colonial photos.