Cruising Maryam Şahinyan’s photographic archive: Intertwining meanings of the archive between the personal and the public

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2748986_(Table of contents)

Originally produced to be used in personal and private settings, studio photographs from Maryam Şahinyan’s (1911-1996) archive now pursue new lives as they circulate publicly. In this thesis which is mainly motivated by the question of the significance of Maryam Şahinyan’s studio photographic archive in its contemporary contexts, I follow the photographs from this archive in their afterlives. In this respect, the thesis takes Maryam Şahinyan’s archive as a point of departure, and rather than employing a historicist lens to excavate the singular histories that the photographs from the archive evoke, it focuses on the various new meanings they gain within a transtemporal context. Suggesting that the conditions in which the archive had come into being crucially inform the contemporary ways in which it is being received, the thesis focuses first on the socio-historical setting of its formation before investigating the cultural and political contexts within which it was revealed to the public. Emphasising the irreducible gap between the original contexts of the studio photographs in the archive and the belated contexts in which they circulate recently, the thesis suggests that the significance of the archive in the present can only be grasped if it is considered through a transtemporal and trans-spatial lens. It also suggests that we consider such archives as dynamic (infra)structures on which we depend in order to creatively engage with certain pasts, and localities, and to imagine different futures.