Philip Carabott

Yannis Hamilakis

Eleni Papargyriou

While written sources on the history of Greece have been studied extensively, no systematic attempt has been made to examine photography as an important cultural and material process. This is surprising, given that Modern Greece and photography are almost peers: both are cultural products of the 1830s, and both actively converse with modernity. Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materialities fills this lacuna. It is the first inter-disciplinary volume to examine critically and in a theorised manner the entanglement of Greece with photography. The book argues that photographs and the photographic process as a whole have been instrumental in the reproduction of national imagination, in the consolidation of the nation-building process, and in the generation and dissemination of state propaganda. At the same time, it is argued that the photographic field constitutes a site of memory and counter-memory, where various social actors intervene actively and stake their discursive, material, and practical claims. As such, the volume will be of relevance to scholars and photographers, worldwide. The book is divided into four, tightly integrated parts. The first, ’Imag(in)ing Greece’, shows that the consolidation of Greek national identity constituted a material-cum-representational process, the projection of an imagery, although some photographic production sits uneasily within the national canon, and may even undermine it. The second part, ’Photographic narratives, alternative histories’, demonstrates the narrative function of photographs in diary-keeping and in photobooks. It also examines the constitution of spectatorship through the combination of text and image, and the role of photography as a process of materializing counter-hegemonic discourses and practices. The third part, ’Photographic matter-realities’, foregrounds the role of photography in materializing state propaganda, national memory, and war. The final part, ’Photographic ethnographiesâ

Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materialities

First published in 1997, Carabott creates a volume exploring the struggle between the forces of modernity and those who resisted and denied it, providing the underlying theme of this volume. Using a wide array of sources, and drawing parallels with processes elsewhere in Europe, the contributors focus on such topics as secularization and the church, education and irredentism, shifts in the language of political contention, the feminist awareness in prose. Historical writing on Greece in this era has tended to concentrate on facts and on the roles of individuals and foreign powers. The papers here, which derive from research presented to a conference at King’s College London in 1995, aim rather to look at the potency of social forces and groupings, and offer a critical and often revisionist account of the fundamental changes in society that marked the period from the 1860s to the start of the present century.

Philip Carabott

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