Photographs decontextualize whatever they show, with artefacts made visible in a new image, one that has a history of its own. Does the tourist photo, for instance, simply reproduce this decontextualisation, even as it aspires to capture a particular time and place? Or is the former the condition of the latter – offering an example of the ethnography of modernity? What “knowledge” of colonialism becomes manifest in this expression of a cultural unconscious?

Similarly, is Malraux’s “museum without walls” the reproduction of a decontextualised anthropology of art (as is typically claimed); or a specific anthropological instance of the history of images? An Atlas of the re-enchantment of the dis-enchanted, perhaps? Or, perhaps, the renewed enchantment of the disenchanted in the aura that survives through the technologically reproducible?

In becoming montagable as a photographic image, distinct from the materials that compose an artefact in other culturally specific idioms, what is ethnographically distinct about European phantoms? What of the power, or the potential, of the material images collected and conserved in European museums is transmitted or transformed in being assimilated to the almost universal medium of the photograph? What of their own technologies is reproduced or repressed? What is supposed of the condition of “visibility” within this encounter and its involution of conceptual practices?

And what becomes of the temporality of the image – of what is imagined – in the temporal composition of voiced narrative, as an appeal to what may be thought of after the film has “finished”? What are the “walls” that make the museum visible – that give image to its modes of thinking, to its practices; not least, in exhibitions? How are they recognised in the essay-film – in the thought-figure of reflections on the glass walls of vitrines, for instance, which become screens fleetingly capturing the time and space of transforming images? What becomes of the trace of an apparently impossible reflexivity – of the viewer-viewed – echoing the paradigm of the ethnographic project: to see oneself from another’s point of view, at least in the modern “idea” (or phantasm) of the tourist photo and its digital avatars?

In this two-part project, “European Phantoms” juxtaposes images taken at an exhibition in Ostend with extracts from an essay by TJ Demos.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/21277