Essays in Visual History: Making Use of the International Mission Photography Archive

FAIN: HD-51571-12

University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA 90089-0012)
Jon Miller (Project Director: October 2011 to April 2014)

A workshop in the summer of 2012 that would design the template and protocols guiding the creation of visual essays that would draw from the extensive collections of the International Mission Photography Archive.

An extraordinary resource for comparative research in the humanities can be found in the historical images that comprise the International Mission Photography Archive (IMPA). The 62,000 photographs presently in the database represent cultures across Africa, India, China, Korea, Japan, Oceania, the Caribbean, and Papua New Guinea. The requested NEH Level 1 start-up grant will support a workshop devoted to the design of a series of visual essays authored by accomplished scholars who will use images from IMPA to explore topics in their areas of expertise. Called Essays in Visual History, the series will be hosted by the USC Digital Library and featured on the website of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture (CRCC). The workshop will explore relationships with other publication initiatives at USC, specifically those under development by the Center for Transformative Scholarship and The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, which offer opportunities to maximize the visibility of the of the proposed series.