The voices of images: photographs and collective provenance

Abstract

This paper presents how the concept of provenance is expanded and reconceptualized from being an organizing principle to an interpreting community that describes, contextualizes, and breathes life into photographs. As social objects, photographs warrant a nonlinear, collective provenance because of their intrinsic ability to transcend time and space while bringing various entities to come together, form a community and relationships, and reflexively exercise memory work and meaning-making. Collective provenance includes various individuals who are not necessarily in the same locale or setting, but are united through a shared identity, a common past, and an imagined future in relation to the phenomenon portrayed and documented by the photographs. This study, which is based on my PhD project on archival photographs during the martial law years in the Philippines in the 1970s–80s, draws on Chris Hurley’s parallel provenance, Tom Nesmith’s societal provenance, and Jeanette Bastian’s co-creatorship of records. I use the case of one photograph taken during the 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution that ended the dictatorial rule of the Marcos, Sr. regime in the Philippines. Through oral history interviews enabled by photo-elicitation, the collective provenance interacted with the photograph, interpreted both the photograph and the event depicted, and positioned themselves in the wider and more dominant narrative of EDSA.