The Afterlife of The Object
European Summer School In Cultural Studies

An object causes passion, as in the figurative notion of a loved object. “The Afterlife of the Object” 2019 summer school will contemplate how we establish narratives of the past and the self through objects.

We will view objects, not only loved, but also hated, ignored, collected, thrown away, performed, written, rewritten, translated, lost and found. The “object” of our study will be considered broadly, including but not limited to art, books, collections, fetishes, poems, letters, songs, and beyond.

The summer school week will feature keynote lectures from Carol Mavor, Rune Gade, Ursula Andkjær Olsen, Jane Blocker and Page duBois, as well as short papers presented by PhD candidates and other young scholars.

The ESSCS is an annual network-­‐based event offering interdisciplinary research training in the fields of art and culture. The network comprises the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, University of Copenhagen, University of Giessen, Goldsmiths College, Université de Paris VIII, the Lisbon Consortium, Ljubljana Institute for Humanities, University of Trondheim and Catholic University Rio de Janeiro.

Organizers: Frederik Tygstrup, Rune Gade and Carol Mavor.

Location Partners: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, SMK (the National Gallery of Denmark), Glyptoteket, Copenhagen University.

Sponsors: Novo Nordisk Foundation

Newhaven Madonna

Hill's Newhaven fishwife…has something that cannot be silenced, something that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there.
WALTER BENJAMIN, 1931

David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson’s 1844 calotype portrait of Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall is a foundational work of photography, and one of the first to have been self-consciously presented as art (Stevenson, 1981:23). The history of photography has long been told in such a way that many of the living, breathing participants of its earliest period remain unknown. Principal among them are women. We are only now coming to terms with how the discipline was gendered from its very inception. Photography’s close association with the female body has been accompanied by the historical erasure of the agency of actual women: their hands, their thinking and self-activity that helped shape the medium through its fin de siècle phase.

This paper explores the history of women in early photographic practice in Victorian Scotland through the subject Elizabeth Johnstone Hall - one of Hill and Adamson’s Newhaven ‘Fishwives’. It takes a forgotten, long-ignored ‘studio’ outtake of Johnstone Hall, the Newhaven Beauty / Newhaven Madonna, and explores the ethics of recovering one of photography’s ‘unknown women’. Entitled “Maggie Johnstone”, the portrait depicts Elizabeth Johnstone Hall just moments before (or after) the ‘iconic’ shot that caught Benjamin’s attention. In this extraordinary version, Hall stares back, and in doing so, disrupts a century of analysis of her ‘seductive shame’.

What are the limits and possibilities of getting close to Johnstone Hall? Can her labour, her life, be accessed? How can practice-led research, in particular re-enactment, enhance the afterlife of the forgotten calotype object? And how might our understanding of early photography be enriched by examining the medium through the lens of this working class, fisherwoman sitter, about whom, we know so very little?