The Arab Image Foundation has long been dedicated to preserving the visual history of the SWANA region, housing an extensive photographic archive that captures complex histories. In its ongoing efforts, the Foundation is developing a searchable online database along with a custom taxonomy reflecting anti-colonial values. This work was presented at the symposium Metadata Outside the Box during the Curationist Metadata Learning & Unlearning Summit on 18th September – a symposium dedicated to tackling biases in archival metadata.
As the line between fact and fiction blurs and cultural institutions face increasing pressure, the discussion has become even more urgent. Selections had a conversation with the Arab Image Foundation team (AIFT) about their work, its significance, and relevance.
Why is it important to digitise our archives?
AIFT: The importance of digitising the photographic collections, to which we have been entrusted to care for, is located in ensuring their preservation and enhancing their visibility. While part of our care for the photographic objects is to slow down the process of deterioration, the aging of a negative or print is inevitable.
As such, the process of digitising a photographic object is a form of conservation. The digital reproduction functions as a surrogate for the photographic object, providing a documentation of the photographic object’s materiality, and content of the image. The digital reproduction isn’t, however, solely a “back-up” for the photographic object. Rather, a digital image gives rise to a particular visibility and experience of viewing. The digital reproduction can reveal specificities within the photographic object. Particular details are, for example, able to be illuminated, negatives can become positives, and it is also possible to trace changes to a photograph’s physicality throughout the vicissitudes of time.
Moreover, the digital file certainly has a mobility that the physical object does not. By virtue of the digital, a photograph – the image practices it displays and stories it tells – is able to be disseminated and transmitted outside of the AIF’s cold storage room in Beirut. The photographs, to which we are custodians, capture moments in time throughout South West Asia and North Africa, and its diasporas, that have been, and continue to be, threatened by erasure. In this way, the ultimate importance of digitising the physical archive is to safeguard, and inspire engagement with, the histories, narratives and lives these images hold.
What goes into this process? How do you ensure the preservation of the analogue in terms of colour or tone of the visual?
AIFT: The photographic items are first processed and cleaned by the AIF preservation team. They are then passed on to the digitisation team to be reproduced. Items are photographed with a colour target to maintain the preservation of the colour and tone of the analogue, and a scale is utilised to ensure that the size of the digital reproduction is the same as the physical object. Camera and screen calibration also play a role in making sure the final result is a faithful representation of the actual item.
How can people access the archive?
AIFT: While collections from AIF’s digital photographic archive were accessible on our previous websites, we are now developing a new digital platform and as such, the photographic collections are currently only accessible via our onsite database or, if outside Lebanon, through image requests facilitated by the AIF team.
About Arab Image Foundation
The Arab Image Foundation (AIF) is an independent association, based in Beirut, that collects, preserves, and digitises photographs from Southwest Asia, North Africa, and their diasporas. Founded in 1997 by Fouad Elkoury, Samer Mohdad, and Akram Zaatari, it holds around 500,000 images spanning from 1860, combining archival care with research into memory and representation.