Convened by Charlotte Bigg (CNRS, Centre Alexandre Koyré, Maison française d’Oxford) & Christopher Morton (Head of Curatorial, Research & Teaching and Associate Professor, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford)

Colonial photographic archives have increasingly been acknowledged as ‘contested, critical sites of collection, reflection and re-invention’ (Tamar Garb), raising issues at the intersection of heritage, research and politics. How these issues have been formulated and addressed in museums, universities and societies has sometimes differed across locations and cultural traditions. This informal workshop brings together curators, historians and anthropologists to take stock and compare perspectives on photography in French and British colonial contexts, taking as a focus photographic archives kept at the Pitt Rivers Museum as well as those constituted by the Instituts Français d’Afrique Noire that operated across French West Africa in the middle decades of the twentieth century.