Books by Daniel Foliard
Que fait l'âge numérique aux passés douloureux ? En proposant une entrée par la photographie dans... more Que fait l'âge numérique aux passés douloureux ? En proposant une entrée par la photographie dans les passés contestés et leurs héritages digitaux, ce livre évoque les profondes transformations contemporaines de la mémoire collective et individuelle, de l'histoire et de l'archive. Ecrit pour le grand public, il suit les images du passé dans leur transformation numérique, du scanner à la génération d'images par l'intelligence artificielle.
How does the digital age affect our discussions on painful pasts? Through photography, this book offers a glimpse into contested pasts and their digital legacies, evoking the deep contemporary transformations of memory, history, and archives at both the collective and individual levels. This book follows the digital transformation of images of the past, from the scanning of images to the creation of images by artificial intelligence. It is intended for non-experts and specialists alike.
The Violence of Colonial Photography
Manchester University Press, 2022
The late nineteenth century saw a rapid increase in colonial conflicts throughout the French and ... more The late nineteenth century saw a rapid increase in colonial conflicts throughout the French and British empires. It was also the period in which the camera began to be widely available. Colonial authorities were quick to recognise the power of this new technology, which they used to humiliate defeated opponents and to project an image of supremacy across the world.
Drawing on a wealth of visual materials, from soldiers' personal albums to the collections of press agencies and government archives, this book offers a new account of how conflict photography developed in the decades leading up to the First World War. It explores the various ways in which the camera was used to impose order on subject populations in Africa and Asia and to generate propaganda for the public in Europe, where a visual economy of violence was rapidly taking shape. At the same time, it reveals how photographs could escape the intentions of their creators, offering a means for colonial subjects to push back against oppression.
Combattre, Punir, Photographier. Empires coloniaux, 1890-1914 (Paris, La Découverte, Sept. 2020)
Dès la fin du XIX e siècle, la photographie offre un nouveau médium pour enregistrer fidèlement ... more Dès la fin du XIX e siècle, la photographie offre un nouveau médium pour enregistrer fidèlement le désordre du monde. Véritable archéologie de la photographie de conflit, ce livre est une invitation, et une éducation, à lire l’image-choc pour la désarmer plutôt que la subir. À l’évocation des mots « photojournalisme » ou « photographie de guerre », la mémoire convoque des icônes dont les plus anciennes remontent aux années 1920 et 1930. On imagine ainsi que les conflits d’avant la Grande Guerre n’ont été que peints, dessinés et gravés et ainsi figés dans un héroïsme un peu innocent avant que les violences du XX e siècle ne soient saisies sur pellicule dans leur réalisme cauchemardesque. Des albums privés des soldats coloniaux aux fonds des premières agences d’images, ce livre, véritable archéologie de la photographie de conflit, plonge dans des collections parfois laissées de côté par les récits établis. Ce livre se focalise sur les clichés de la violence physique et de la destruction armée, pris non pas comme de simples illustrations mais comme les supports d’une relation sociale. Il démontre comment la photographie bouleverse le rapport des sociétés de la Belle Époque à l’expansion souvent brutale de leurs propres empires et leur regard sur les guerres menées au loin par d’autres. Dans ce monde de la fin du XIXe siècle, les conflits se multiplient de façon inédite et les abus coloniaux ponctuent les conquêtes. En les capturant, l’appareil photographique, devenu portable et abordable, transforme profondément l’économie visuelle de la violence, et ce bien avant 1914. Au-delà de cette histoire des photographies des corps brutalisés et des violences armées, ce livre est aussi une proposition. Comment présenter des photographies montrant les atrocités indicibles pour les penser et en faire l’histoire ? Loin d’une pornographie du désastre, Daniel Foliard montre que l’observateur, y compris lorsque son regard plonge au cœur des ténèbres, peut retrouver dans les photographies les hommes et les femmes du passé, et non des victimes passives et anonymes figées sur le papier.
Dislocating the Orient. British Maps and the Making of the Middle East, 1854-1921.
Chicago University Press, 2017
Articles by Daniel Foliard
Multimedia Tools and Applications , 2025
This article advances a method to analyze a large corpus of historical photographs using artifici... more This article advances a method to analyze a large corpus of historical photographs using artificial intelligence tools and data modeling. This research was conducted within the framework of the EyCon (Early Conflict Photography 1890-1918 and Visual AI) and HighVision projects, which aim at leveraging the power of digital tools, exploiting both visual and textual information, to investigate the development of war photography at the turn of the 20th century. To do so, one of the objectives of the project was to develop a method to extract robust features and to overcome the challenges posed by the halftone printing techniques, the most common way to reproduce photographs in daily newspapers, periodicals and books at the time. By combining visual and textual similarity measures, the proposed approach enables the identification of significant subsets of similarity within the dataset. The findings from this research hold important implications for the broader field of image analysis and provide insights into the unique characteristics and complexities of historical visual data. This work contributes to the advancement of computer vision techniques in the analysis of historical photographic collections, opening up new avenues for research in visual AI and archival studies.
Monde (s). Histoire, Espaces, Relations, 2020
History of Photography , 2024
Introduction to a guest edited issue of History of Photography that looks at demanding images doc... more Introduction to a guest edited issue of History of Photography that looks at demanding images documenting violent pasts.
History of Photography, 2024
Journal of Open Humanities Data, 2024
The EyCon dataset, comprising nearly 130,000 JPEG images and pages, documents armed conflicts fro... more The EyCon dataset, comprising nearly 130,000 JPEG images and pages, documents armed conflicts from the 1890s to 1918, with a focus on extra-European contexts. The project team aggregated thousands of digitized images and metadata from various institutions, including previously inaccessible documents. To enhance metadata, the team conducted visual and multimodal similarity analyses, as well as human and animal detection. Captions were processed to extract named entities for XML-formatted descriptive metadata. Challenges in identifying and publishing graphic images due to automated tools’ limitations in detecting violence were addressed with human expertise for accurate classification. Available online and on Zenodo for download and reuse, the dataset confronts issues in computer vision for heritage photographs, such as degradation from fading, discoloration, scratches and noise, which impair algorithms reliant on visual features. The under-representation of early photographic cultures in datasets introduces bias in applying standard solutions to archival materials.
Bloomsbury, 2025
This chapter takes a letter published by Austen Henry Layard in Discoveries among the Ruins of Ni... more This chapter takes a letter published by Austen Henry Layard in Discoveries among the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (London: Putnam, 1853) as a case in point to study how mid-19th century archeological encroachments into Northern “Mesopotamia” materialized conflicting perspectives on Mosul Vilayet’s past and future. A rare insertion of a local voice in a book that establishes a very orientalist narrative on the area, the letter was supposedly written by “Imaun Ali Zade”, a “Turkish Cadi”. The letter, which seemingly puts Islam and science (early archeology in particular) at odds with each other, became viral in the late-19th century. Renan famously used it in “L’islamisme et la science” (1883), while Ralph Waldo Emerson mentioned it in his notes. Building upon Dücane Cündioğlu’s analysis of the letter, I will demonstrate how it became a trope that hides the complex local interactions unleashed by the excavations between four Empires (French, British, Ottoman and Neo-Assyrian), local populations, and beyond.
Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2024
In recent decades, archival institutions have digitized an enormous quantity of material under th... more In recent decades, archival institutions have digitized an enormous quantity of material under the rubric of open access, including from colonial archives. However, much of the most sensitive material from these collections remains undigitized or difficult to discover and use. More recently, a critical reconsideration of open digital access has also taken place, particularly when it comes to sensitive material from the colonial archive. Collectively, this has created a situation in which the colonial photography archive risks becoming overly sanitized as well as difficult to navigate and analyze. In this article, we propose that critical and transparent multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) offers a way to improve access to colonial archives for researchers and the public, without losing sight of the need for ethical approaches to sensitive visual materials. The EyCon (Early Conflict Photography and Visual AI) project assembled a large database of sensitive visual materials from colonial conflicts and developed experimental multi-modal computer vision tools with which to analyze it. Though this tool has not yet been applied at scale or quantitatively compared with other approaches, we are able to propose modes of inquiry for other researchers to explore as they create new research tools. On a more hypothetical or theoretical level, we consider how the use of computational tools to facilitate access to and analysis of sensitive historical materials is compatible with or even beneficial for more ethical approaches to such materials. We conclude with several promising areas for critically integrating AI into the digital colonial archive, while also expanding on some limitations of such techniques.
Christine Barthe et Annabelle Lacour (dir.), Mondes Photographiques, histoires des débuts (musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac/Actes Sud, 2023), pp.73-90., 2023
Colonisations. Notre histoire, 2023
Vision distante et archive photographique
Sociétés & Représentations, 2023
This article is based on upcoming research projects that stand at the intersection of deep learni... more This article is based on upcoming research projects that stand at the intersection of deep learning, data visualization, and the history of photography. It questions the application of artificial intelligence functionalities to historical photographs. Recent advances have demonstrated that computation can open new entry points into the analysis of very large visual corpora. However, many specialists in the history of photography and visual studies still doubt the effectiveness of these digital approaches. Image processing and computation favor an erasure of context that can be extremely problematic from a historical perspective. Pre-existing biases in datasets such as Imagenet or those introduced by the re-training of neural networks can also seem to create insurmountable ethical and epistemological issues. Computer vision reflects and intensifies early 21st-century cultural evolutions that range from the supposed end of privacy to digital extractivism by means of automation, which can be detrimental to context-based interpretations of documents. This article will demonstrate how this coincidence offers similarities with earlier articulations between mechanical vision and sociocultural structures. Christopher Pinney has analyzed how photography’s “prosthetic eye” was woven into the fabric of the British colonial habitus in 19th-century India. The article will expand on his suggestion that techniques of vision can work both as a cure and as a poison. On the other hand, the promoters of cultural analytics argue that big cultural data have become legitimate objects of study. In their view, the implied change in scale opens up fruitful new perspectives for specialists in the humanities. This article aims at rebalancing the positive and negative overestimations of what artificial intelligence can do for the history of photography. It argues that computer vision is neither short-sighted nor long-sighted, its “digital eye” can help researchers navigate the ever-expanding ocean of digitized historical photographs.
Sources. Materials & Fieldwork in African Studies, 2023
Photographic material can sometimes pose an overwhelming and distorting presence, especially when... more Photographic material can sometimes pose an overwhelming and distorting presence, especially when it comes to the writing of history. Some of the first visual recordings of African social worlds via photography would long serve as a model for images of the continent. This phenomenon has only been reinforced by recirculations of images from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Intended as a counterpoint, this article will contemplate a paradoxical history of photography by considering it based not on its presence but on its very absence. A work of history supported by photographic and written sources from the years 1870 to 1910, this contribution focuses on photography as absence, as disappearance, and as erasure. This implicit history focuses on various essential phenomena that characterize the (non)production of photographic images of African social worlds in the age of colonial expansion. It first deals with the key question of the material destruction of old photographs of Africa. For a variety of reasons, an entire part of what was photographed is now either lost or in the process of becoming lost. One of the long-standing major effects of this has been a double erasure of African photography pioneers, who are poorly represented or underrepresented in institutional archives and have been deprived of historiographical attention; in many cases, their history remains to be written. The article then raises the question of refusals to pose and potential refusals to take photographs. We will see several scattered traces of such evasions of photography. The problem of self-censorship and the very restricted circulation of certain images, particularly those threatening the stability of colonial narratives, will also be studied at this juncture. Finally, the article will take a closer look at the photographs taken by Alex J. Braham. This individual, a district agent in Ogugu (southern Nigeria) for the Royal Niger Company at the turn of the twentieth century, was an eager photographer. His personal album contains several shots of a secret ceremony that he took without the participants’ knowledge, having hidden with his camera in a tent. This example of concealment (not of the image but of the photographic act itself) is also one of the possible manifestations of the invisibilities that have played a major part in forming and deforming photographic imagery of Africa.
Représenter l'Afghanistan. Portraits négociés de l'émir Abd al-Raḥmān Khān (c. 1840-1901)
Photographica, 2022
English: his article focuses on the surviving photographic portraits of Abd al-Raḥmān Khān who ru... more English: his article focuses on the surviving photographic portraits of Abd al-Raḥmān Khān who ruled over Afghanistan in the late 19th century. This analysis of the emir's portraiture will demonstrate how photographic hybridizations reflected the very invention of Afghanistan as a place. Located within the context of Indian, Persian and Ottoman photographic practices, Abd al-Raḥmān Khān’s portraits and their circulations contradict well established and simplistic diffusionist narratives. These self- representations can be considered as visual zones of contact. They are rich material to write a connected history of photography in the region. They bear witness to local habitations of photography and to cultural dynamics which, between the nascent buffer state that was Afghanistan and the neighboring empires, were much more complex than they appear.
Français: Cet article propose d’étudier les portraits photographiques connus de l’émir Abd al-Raḥmān Khān qui gouverne l’Afghanistan à la fin du 19 e siècle. À travers cette exploration de la portraiture de l’émir, étudiée à la fois dans ses dimensions esthétiques et par ses trajectoires, il s’agira de montrer comment l’idée-même d’Afghanistan émerge à travers des hybridations médiatiques passées inaperçues. Replacés dans le contexte des pratiques photographiques observées sur le sous- continent indien ou en Iran, les portraits d’Abdur Rahman et leurs circulations contreviennent aux récits diffusionnistes parfois établis. Ces représentations de soi par l’Emir sont des images-carrefours qui permettent d’écrire une histoire connectée de la photographie dans la région. Elles témoignent d’appropriations locales de la photographie et de dynamiques culturelles, qui, entre l’état-tampon naissant qu’est alors l’Afghanistan et les empires voisins, sont bien plus complexes que ce qu’il y paraît.
Colonialism and its Regimes of Visibility: Edgard Imbert’s Views of the French Empire
The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2020
This article explores some of the mechanisms underlying the photographic visualisations of the Fr... more This article explores some of the mechanisms underlying the photographic visualisations of the French Empire between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, This study focuses in particular on Edgard Imbert’s photographic work, a collection of albums, glass plates, and loose photographs held at the Etablissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense in Ivry, Franc. Imbert was one of the most prolific photographers of French colonisation in Madagascar and Indochina. The thousands of negatives he made offer a unique perspective on the visual economies of French expansionism in these territories. Through a thorough analysis of what Imbert kept to himself, showed to his family circle, or published with a view to propagandise French colonialism in Asia and Africa, this work shows how careful historians should be in their analyses of colonial-era photographs. Those who were most involved in fashioning the colonial imaginary effectively constructed a visual repertoire to promote their vision, and not just for their contemporaries but also for posterity. A large part of the colonial images that circulate more than a century later are drawn for these registers of self-representation. Leading figures of French colonialism, such as Hubert Lyautey and Joseph Gallieni, were very familiar with the structure of the colonial archive in construction. They anticipated which effect the photographic elaboration of the colonies would have in the long term. The agency of French archives generally favoured the conservation of albums and views that are the direct inheritors from this colonial self-fashioning. Such an archival effect tends to distort heavily the repertoire of French colonial imagery. Imbert’s collection therefore offers a rare insight on the various regimes of in/visibility of French colonial activities in the early twentieth century and their subsequent curatorial itineraries.
« Le flash au magnésium »
Pierre Singaravélou et Sylvain Venayre (dir.), Histoire du monde par les objets du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours (Paris, Fayard, 2020), 2020
Monde(s), 2020
Introduction du numéro thématique de Monde(s)
Monde(s), 2020
En avril 1900, la tête décapitée de Rabah, Sultan de Bornou vaincu par les Français, est photogra... more En avril 1900, la tête décapitée de Rabah, Sultan de Bornou vaincu par les Français, est photographiée puis exposée pendant plusieurs jours après la bataille de Kousséri. Un an et demi plus tôt, ce sont les Britanniques qui détruisent la tombe du Mahdi après la victoire d’Omdurman et prennent son crâne, que l’on envisage d’envoyer à Londres. Cet article reconstruit les trajectoires de ces restes humains et l’évolution de leurs significations, en mettant en relief le fonctionnement du co-impérialisme franco-britannique.
The severed head of Rabah, Sultan of Borno, was photographed and then exposed for days on the walls of Kusseri following his defeat by the French in April 1900. A year and half earlier, British forces had destroyed the Mahdi’s tomb after their victory in Omdurman and had kept his skull with a view to sending it to London. This article analyzes the tra- jectories of these human remains as well as their evolving meanings in the context of Anglo-French co-imperialism.
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Books by Daniel Foliard
How does the digital age affect our discussions on painful pasts? Through photography, this book offers a glimpse into contested pasts and their digital legacies, evoking the deep contemporary transformations of memory, history, and archives at both the collective and individual levels. This book follows the digital transformation of images of the past, from the scanning of images to the creation of images by artificial intelligence. It is intended for non-experts and specialists alike.
Drawing on a wealth of visual materials, from soldiers' personal albums to the collections of press agencies and government archives, this book offers a new account of how conflict photography developed in the decades leading up to the First World War. It explores the various ways in which the camera was used to impose order on subject populations in Africa and Asia and to generate propaganda for the public in Europe, where a visual economy of violence was rapidly taking shape. At the same time, it reveals how photographs could escape the intentions of their creators, offering a means for colonial subjects to push back against oppression.
Articles by Daniel Foliard
Français: Cet article propose d’étudier les portraits photographiques connus de l’émir Abd al-Raḥmān Khān qui gouverne l’Afghanistan à la fin du 19 e siècle. À travers cette exploration de la portraiture de l’émir, étudiée à la fois dans ses dimensions esthétiques et par ses trajectoires, il s’agira de montrer comment l’idée-même d’Afghanistan émerge à travers des hybridations médiatiques passées inaperçues. Replacés dans le contexte des pratiques photographiques observées sur le sous- continent indien ou en Iran, les portraits d’Abdur Rahman et leurs circulations contreviennent aux récits diffusionnistes parfois établis. Ces représentations de soi par l’Emir sont des images-carrefours qui permettent d’écrire une histoire connectée de la photographie dans la région. Elles témoignent d’appropriations locales de la photographie et de dynamiques culturelles, qui, entre l’état-tampon naissant qu’est alors l’Afghanistan et les empires voisins, sont bien plus complexes que ce qu’il y paraît.
The severed head of Rabah, Sultan of Borno, was photographed and then exposed for days on the walls of Kusseri following his defeat by the French in April 1900. A year and half earlier, British forces had destroyed the Mahdi’s tomb after their victory in Omdurman and had kept his skull with a view to sending it to London. This article analyzes the tra- jectories of these human remains as well as their evolving meanings in the context of Anglo-French co-imperialism.