@book{publication-5725,
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {Diaphanes},
  isbn = {9-783035-803969},
  edition = {1},
  url = {https://www.diaphanes.com/titel/archive-matter-6710},
  address = {Zürich},
  title = {Archive Matter. A Camera in the Laboratory of the Modern},
  author = {Liliana Gómez},
  abstract = {The establishment of the United Fruit Company as a global political agent with its banana plantations met with considerable resistance. The Company’s resurgent photographic archive is at the center of this book’s considerations on the historical and political agency of photography as a field. By exploring a set of practices, institutions, and relationships, as well as the aesthetic and epistemic contexts of the images in botany, archaeology and tropical medicine, this book argues that the overlooked but important photographic archive made the expansion of corporate capitalism into the Caribbean possible. “Since photographic archives tend to suspend meaning and use; within the archive meaning exists in a state that is both residual and potential,” Allan Sekula maintains.
Reading the photographic archive against the grain, this book examines the images from within their “optical unconscious” and via the archive’s silences and omissions; as residues they attest to the (in)visibility and cultural implications of the violence of the radical man-made environmental alterations. The archive’s powerful imaginaries, envisaged as a chronotope of the eternal transition towards modernity, a promise of modernization itself, have effectively brought the Caribbean into modernity. Yet, the aftermath of the photographs helps scrutinize this modernity and recognize the violence embodied as the foundational act of the archive.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Forward by Jens Andermann
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Archive matter and photography
Modern visual economy and agriculture
The chapters
1. Camera and Capitalism: The United Fruit Company
The corporation and its photographic archive
Camera and capitalism
Slow violence: capital, labor, technology
The archive’s chronotope
2. The Crossroads of Science and Discourse Networks
The crossroads of science
Colonialism and landscaping
Discourse networks
Company towns
Imperial debris
3. ’The World Was My Garden’
The world as garden
Photography and botany’s modern materialities
The political economy of agriculture
Visual epistemology and botanical matter
4. Ethnographic Eyes and Archaeological Views
The archaeological expeditions to Quirigua
The Keith collection or the magic of the Company’s Pre-Columbian objects
Foundational images: “The Maya Through the Ages “(1949)
Animated materiality
Epilogue. Upheavals and the Resurgent Photographic Archive
Civil contract and the materiality of the image
The banana massacre and “One Hundred Years of Solitude”
The resurgent photographic archive or the ethics of seeing
The struggle for human rights},
  keywords = {Medien-/Kulturwissenschaft,Sprachübergreifend},
}
