The nineteenth century was a century of radical transformation for Europe's multi-ethnic empires. As the “Age of Empires“ saw the continent's major powers embark on an unprecedented rivalry for acquisition and control of new overseas territories, rapid industrialization brought ground-breaking innovations in transportation and communication as well as technological discoveries and scientific progress. Rising nationalism and tremendous social change were other factors that heralded the modern age in Europe's multi-ethnic and multi-confessional empires.
The invention of photography, that concurred with the above-mentioned changes, played a significant role in articulating and shaping the transformation. The new technique, it was claimed, allowed one to capture an “objective” image of the real world. Means of technical reproduction, moreover, offered novel possibilities for circulating visual representations of the world in newspapers and journals or on postcards. Even if we know today that pictures cannot mimetically depict reality, the evolution of photography fundamentally altered the ways people were viewing the world during the nineteenth century. Thus the main question of our workshop is how photography effected visual representations and people's imagination of imperial society and space.
Our project starts with the observation that the socio-economic and cultural changes during the nineteenth century – industrialization, new methods of rule, differentiation of natural, social and humane scientific disciplines – went along with the evolution and rapid spread of photography. Looking at multi-ethnic empires in a comparative perspective, the workshop will examine the relationship between social, scientific, and technological changes on the one hand and the development of photography on the other. Research currently conducted at the University of Basel on ethnographic and industrial photography in the Russian Empire raised questions and hypotheses that shall be discussed in the workshop and compared to similar studies and works on other empires. In addition to ethnographic and industrial photography, we would also like to discuss images of imperial subjects as well as photographic representations of religious and confessional diversity. Finally, in a diachronic perspective, the workshop will discuss the changes in visual representation of imperial society and space before and after the invention of photography. The purpose of the workshop is to establish a forum via which to examine and debate methods of historical analysis and interpretation of visual representations, in particular photographs. We will also discuss the possibilities as well as the limitations of visual historical sources.

The workshop will take place at the Landgut Castelen, a 19th century-industrial villa, charmingly located near the illustrious Augusta Raurica at Augst (fifteen minutes away by train from the city of Basel/Switzerland).