Mundane Myths: Heritage and the Politics of the Photographic Cliché

Abstract

This paper considers the impact of photographic clichés on the management, conceptualization, and experience of heritage. Working along the grain of pejorative readings of ‘snapshot’ photography, this account views the repetitiveness and redundancy of the cliché as a critical point of departure, rather than a cause for reproach. Taking the World Heritage Site of Angkor as a core case study, three intersecting axes of political concern are sketched out to elucidate the broad social, material, and affective implications of clichéd photography for heritage. First, processes of dehistoricization and depoliticization are interrogated in relation to the role certain images play in constructing a mythic sense of the past in the present. This leads directly in to the second strand of analysis, which examines the various ways in which individuals negotiate these myths through the production of their own highly personalized photographic clichés. Here I develop the concept of an embodied politics of heritage photography to grasp the multivalent resonances of tourist clichés in particular. Finally, the implicit and explicit forms of spatial control that permeate sites such as Angkor are examined in relation to the photographic clichés they respond to and help shape.

Keywords:

• heritage
• photography
• cliché
• mythscapes
• ideology
• affect
• Angkor

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Photographic History Research Centre Annual Conference, De Montfort University, and Photography in (Con)text at University College London. I would like to thank discussants for helping to shape the direction of this work. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers, whose insightful comments helped sharpen some of the arguments put forward in this paper.

Notes on contributor

Colin Sterling is a postdoctoral Research Associate at University College London. His current research investigates the implications of posthumanist thinking for cultural heritage. Prior to this, Colin was a Project Curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects and a Research Associate with the heritage consultancy Barker Langham. His PhD, which was awarded in 2015, examined the interrelationship of heritage and photography with specific reference to historic sites in Cyprus and Cambodia. He is currently completing a monograph on photography, heritage, and affect to be published by Routledge.

Notes

1 A plan of Angkor Wat was drawn by a Japanese pilgrim in the early seventeenth century, and earlier written accounts of the temple are known, but Mouhot's were the first images to circulate widely.

2 This is despite the presence of wooden walkways across the site, originally constructed for the filming of Jean-Jacques Annaud's 2004 film Two Brothers.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number 1034333].