Abstract:
Based on research in a range of UK museums, this paper explores the visibility
and invisibility of the photographic legacy of colonial relations and the
representation of the colonial past in museum galleries. It explores the conditions
of the ‘invisibility’ and ‘disavowal’ of the colonial past in the historical narrative
developed by museums, and the anxieties that cluster around such narratives in
a postcolonial and multicultural society. The paper argues that the photographic
legacy of the colonial past offers a way into those histories, but it is one that can
only be realized through the critical engagement with photographs themselves
and the work they might be made to do in museums. As an example, it examines
the active and complex role of photographs played in the galleries of the British
Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol. It concludes that the failure of
museums to integrate colonial pasts into their narratives has worked against the
wider liberal agendas to which museums subscribe, and that photographic
invisibility is both a symptom of and metaphor for the ‘invisibility’ of the colonial
past.
