Family photography archives (HAP Summer Seminar)

This event will be held on Zoom. Instructions for joining the event will be sent to participants via email the day before the event. Please ensure that you enter the correct email and check your spam if you do not receive the email containing the joining link.

About the event:
Join us for the second History and Archives in Practice 2025 Summer Seminar. In this session, we will focus on the popular and ubiquitous visual images produced as part of the fabric of everyday life: family photographs.

Drawing on the photographic family archive of three generations of amateur photographers from Romania covering the inter-war, communist and post-communist transition period of the 1990s, Uschi Klein (Senior Lecturer, School of Art and Media, University of Brighton) explores family photographs as visual narratives that document societal, cultural and political issues in a global context from a personal perspective. She will further investigate the practices, silences and ideologies of this particular family archive and how it constructs a narrative about Romania’s historical past, thereby functioning as the foundation of historical imagination and understanding.

Uschi joins chair Giorgia Tolfo, Collections Researcher at The National Archives, to talk about image-making as a vernacular practice of resistance and survival in the context of political eras.

Please email [email protected] if you have any accessibility requirements. This is the second event in the 2025 'History and Archives in Practice' summer series, co-hosted by The National Archives, the Institute of Historical Research, and the Royal Historical Society.

Other seminars in the series are:

• 1pm, Wednesday 7 May: 'VE Day 80: How we remember the Second World War'
• 1pm, Thursday 24 July: 'Crowdsourcing the past: Memory Projects in South Asia'