Photocorinthia: The contingency of archaeological photography in the Corinth excavation archives

In this chapter, I explore the photographic archives of the American excavations at ancient Corinth during the period 1896–1940, examining how the visual record of an archaeological mission is contingent upon institutional circumstances and personal interventions. In explaining a drastic shift in the Corinth project’s photographic strategies in the late 1920s, I consider the changing intentions of the people making and using images of this site, highlighting the role of the photographer Hermann Wagner and assessing the administrative environment of the American School of Classical Studies. By attending to these factors at a single site over several decades, this analysis provides a view of chronological change that has not been available to other recent studies of photographic practices at shorter-lived excavations. My discussion also presents a more firmly situated perspective on historical change than surveys of archaeological photography — diachronic overviews that draw upon a distributed variety of contexts — have provided. Beyond demonstrating the importance of photographic practices in the study of fieldwork archival material and the history of archaeology, this investigation contributes to the scholarly discourse surrounding the subjectivity and creative power of image-making, emphasizing how the actions of individuals and their situational conditions shape archaeology’s visual constructions of the past.