Archives of rescue and rebuilding: photograph albums of relief workers amongst Armenian survivors, 1

The exhibition on the Dildilian family evokes the Ottoman Armenian world which was, to a great extent, lost; this talk will concentrate on other photographic archives, of those who managed to survive. In the period immediately following World War I, many European and American relief workers arrived in the Near East to give aid to the remnants of the Armenian community – and brought their cameras with them. These photographic collections give us a very rich sense of the relief activities, of the desperate conditions of the men, women, and children who managed to survive, and indeed of the relief workers themselves, of their camaraderie and the opportunities they took to combine relief with travel and tourism. One photographic archive in particular stands out, though, as a record of a community in the process of being reborn: that of Karen Jeppe, a Danish relief worker in Aleppo. The talk will set her very distinct photographic archive in the context of other relief workers’, and show how she used photography as both a record of, and a tool to help achieve, Armenian communal survival and rejuvenation after genocide. Becky Jinks is a Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Exeter. Her first book, Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm? (Bloomsbury, 2016) explores the ways in which the Holocaust has influenced the understandings and representation of other genocides. Her current book project, inspired by the research which underlies this talk, is a social history of humanitarians and humanitarianism in the period immediately following the First World War.

Suitable for
18+

Admission
Free but booking essential as space is limited.

Website
http://www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/Whats-On?item=231

Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk/am52233?id=EVENT542856