Research Statement

Research Questions

What can be researched about a place when the conditions of its photographic representation were deliberately restricted? How does an event’s restrictive image policy shape the historical narratives that can be reconstructed from its surviving visual record more than a century later? How can audiovisual practice make the conditions of evidence – rather than the evidence itself – the object of historical attention?

The project takes as its case the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, an event of unprecedented scale and a turning point in American visual culture. Its official photographic policy granted Canadian-born architect-photographer Charles Dudley Arnold exclusive rights and imposed prohibitive licence fees and equipment restrictions on all others. It has directly shaped what visual evidence of the Exposition survives today. The film tracks one consequence of that policy: the persistent question of whether Edison’s kinetoscope – the motion picture viewer – was present at the Fair. Film historians have debated the presence versus absence for decades. The film reframes it as a question about the evidentiary conditions under which the presence versus absence question can be asked.

Research Context

The project sits at the intersection of three scholarly conversations. The first is archival theory and the politics of the archive, particularly as initiated by Derrida (1995) and developed in Stoler’s Along the Archival Grain (2009). The work reframes archives as epistemological spaces shaped by colonial and institutional logics of accumulation, not neutral repositories. Steedman’s Dust (2002), Sekula’s ‘The Body and the Archive’ (1986), and Hartman’s ‘Venus in Two Acts’ (2008) extend this lineage in directions the project engages: respectively, the affective texture of archival research, the photographic archive as instrument of power, and the question of subjects the archive has failed to record. Mattern’s writing on the ‘scaffolding’ of knowledge production (2018) and Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life (2017) inform the project’s attention to its bureaucratic conditions.

The second is media archaeology and the materiality of the photographic and cinematic record. Gitelman (2014) and Parikka (2012) frame the project’s interest in documents and media as historically conditioned objects rather than transparent windows onto past events. Documents, including administrative forms, function as media technologies shaping what can be known. Copyright registration forms didn’t simply record early cinema; they actively constructed what ‘cinema’ could be in legal, institutional, and historical terms. By treating paperwork as media, this project reveals infrastructure as epistemological: bureaucratic systems we take for granted actively determine which histories can be written. The film's attention to glass plates, photographic policies, copyright deposits, and reproduction protocols is rooted in this tradition.

The third is the scholarship on the 1893 Exposition (Gale, Rydell) and on early cinema, chronophotography, and the photographic invention of motion (Ramsaye, Hendricks, Musser). The project draws particularly on Hendricks’ research archive, now held at the Smithsonian, and on the contradictions in that archive's claims about the kinetoscope's whereabouts.

Community of Practice

The project sits within an emerging community of audiovisual practice that uses the moving image not to illustrate historical research but to perform it. Catherine Grant's videographic work on archival cinephilia, and the methodological framework developed by Keathley, Mittell, and Grant in The Videographic Essay (2019), provide one anchor. Virgilio Tosi’s pioneering work on scientific cinema and the audiovisual essay establishes a longer lineage.

The project also draws on the broader essay-film tradition – Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, Harun Farocki, Agnès Varda – particularly its first-person, provisional, and digressive register. The film’s voiceover does not deliver findings; it works toward them, doubles back, and revises in public. This is a deliberate departure from the documentary register, and a deliberate alignment with a tradition in which the essayistic voice is itself an epistemological position.

What distinguishes this project methodologically from comparable AV essay work is its treatment of the research process as the central object. Many archival audiovisual essays present completed findings in audiovisual form. This project, by contrast, exhibits the conditions under which findings were produced – and unproduced. The pivotal Act 3 reversal, in which the film displays a primary source that overturns its own central premise, is not concealed in the editing. The film’s argument is partly carried by that exhibition.

Methodology 

The film operates as practice research in three connected ways.

First, the work proceeds through autoethnographic narration that makes the conditions of research visible. The first-person voice does not decorate the historical argument; it discloses the position from which the argument is made. The researcher's encounters with the archive are foregrounded – the looking, the not-finding, the doubling-back, the lines that ‘divide me’ from 1893. The film argues that honest historical knowledge of constrained archives can only be produced by registers that acknowledge their constraint. The film’s voice is, in the essayistic sense, working in real time, not a narrator delivering completed findings.

Second, the work proceeds through juxtaposition as analytical method. The film places digitised public-domain images drawn from eighteen institutional collections alongside one another. This is not assembly but argument. The differences in survival, access, reproduction quality, and metadata visible across these collections are themselves evidence of the historical policy the film examines. The viewer encounters the photography policy’s effects in the visual texture of the film itself. Pristine Arnold prints sit alongside the singular, uncatalogued Hammer glass plate. The juxtaposition performs the argument that ‘public domain’ and ‘public accessibility’ are not synonymous.

Third, the work proceeds through a deliberate dramatic structure that mirrors the epistemological structure of the research. The five-act form, native to dramatic argument, places the project's central reversal at the structural turning point of Act 3. Here, the unpublished Spofford letter overturns the connection the film has been constructing. The Act 4 sustained looking at the Hammer plate enacts a second methodological move: the film models looking rather than finding. The audiovisual form is not a vehicle for these moves; it is the means by which they become available to the viewer.

Sound and contemporaneous music function as historicising devices throughout, not as period flavour. John Philip Sousa’s march, originally composed for the Exposition itself and later familiar from a wholly different cultural context, opens the film. It functions as a small instance of the larger argument. It shows how meaning attaches to surviving evidence in ways that depend entirely on the viewer's contemporary position.

Contribution to Knowledge

The project’s contribution operates on three levels.

To scholarship on the 1893 Exposition and on early cinema, the film offers a reframing of a longstanding historical question. The kinetoscope’s presence or absence at the Fair has been debated for decades. The project’s contribution is not to settle this question but to demonstrate that it cannot be settled – the question’s ‘unsettleability’ is itself a historiographical finding. Arnold’s photography policy did not only shape what visitors could photograph in 1893; it determined what could be researched about that summer today. The film makes that determination visible.

To archival theory and the history of photography, the film offers a sustained case study in the operation of evidentiary conditions. There is a sharp contrast between Arnold’s pristine, widely surviving official prints and the singular, uncatalogued Hammer glass plate at the Smithsonian. It was taken in clear violation of the Exposition’s rules, and now identifiable only as ‘#91.’ It demonstrates how copyright, access, monopoly, and institutional cataloguing protocols continue to shape the historical record long after the events they document have ended. The project extends Stoler’s concept of archival grain into the specific terrain of late-nineteenth-century visual culture and contemporary digitisation infrastructures. 

To audiovisual practice research, the film offers a methodological model for working with archival absence. Where much archival audiovisual essay practice begins from what has been found, this project begins from what cannot be confirmed. Its formal exhibition of research reversal proposes that practice research’s distinctive epistemological capacity may lie precisely here. Keeping the Spofford letter in the film enables the moment of not-knowing to be audio visually present, rather than retrospectively narrated. The film models how the moving image can hold uncertainty in a way that text alone struggles to.

References

Ahmed, S. (2017) Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press.

Derrida, J. (1995) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gale, N. (2017) The Midway Plaisance at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. [self-published].

Gitelman, L. (2014) Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hartman, S. (2008) ‘Venus in Two Acts,’ Small Axe 12.2, pp. 1–14.

Hendricks, G. (1961) The Edison Motion Picture Myth. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Keathley, C., Mittell, J., and Grant, C. (2019) The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy. Montreal: Caboose.

Mattern, S. (2018) ‘Scaffolding, Hard and Soft: Critical and Generative Infrastructures,’ in: Sayers, J. (ed.) The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, New York: Routledge, pp. 318–327.

Musser, C. (1990) The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Parikka, J. (2012) What Is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity.

Ramsaye, T. (1926) A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Rydell, R. (1984) All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sekula, A. (1986) ‘The Body and the Archive,’ October, 39: Winter, pp. 3–64.

Steedman, C. (2002) Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Stoler, A. (2009) Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Tosi, V. (2005) Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography. London: British Universities Film & Video Council.

Yorke, J. (2013) Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them. London: Penguin.

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response to what follows

Review 1: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement

The work makes a strong contribution to practice-research through its emphasis and reflection on archive-based media history in the documentary/AV essay form. In general, archive-based AV essays that question the epistemology of archives are few and far between – as one prominent point of comparison the Tecmerin journal’s “From the Archive”-series stands out as an exception. Within this context, the piece sheds light on not only an enigmatic moment in photography and moving image history tapping into hitherto under-researched archival visual records, the piece also raises broader, thought-provoking questions about the epistemology of media historical research in light of source availability and copyright. It is rare to see an AV essay in the scholarly realm that retraces and reflexively approaches a personal archival research process so profoundly. 

The statement and the work combined adequately reference the sources used and, in a particular elegant manner, reminds us of the cultural significance, circulations and meanings of the cultural objects discussed in relation to The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. While the author does acknowledge previous relevant work, it would have been helpful to see the author position the work to a greater extent in relation to other AV essay works or works of audiovisual history that are cited in the piece (for instance Virgilio Tosi’s work) so as to make more explicit how it sets itself, and its documentary approach, apart from such work. 

While the statement does not offer elaborate theoretical context on the piece’s making, the research context is clear and strong.

In my view the work can be published as is, yet it would be helpful to develop the theoretical and methodological positioning of the statement to a greater extent (for suggestions see my answers to the previous two questions).

Peer Review 2: Invite resubmission with major revisions of written statement

The audiovisual work submitted is compelling and displays a high level of creative and intellectual ambition. The film offers a fascinating interrogation of provenance, authorship and the ethics of archival practice in relation to the surviving visual record of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Its use of digitised archival stills to question the power structures behind their original production, circulation, and preservation moves the project beyond conventional documentary practice. The film insightfully probes how institutional decisions about photographic access and copyright shape what histories can be reconstructed, and whose stories are foregrounded or obscured. This conceptual focus on the entanglement of authorship, technological innovation, power, and historical reconstruction, is one of the project’s most valuable contributions.

However, the accompanying research statement requires significant further development in order to meet Screenworks’ expectations for a practice research submission. The current statement is predominantly descriptive: it summarises the historical context of the Exposition and the filmmaker’s previous research but does not sufficiently articulate the research questions, methodological interventions, or scholarly contexts that underpin the creative practice. To be publishable, the statement needs to demonstrate a clearer engagement with relevant academic literature and situate the practice within a broader theoretical framework.

Firstly, the statement should follow the Screenworks research statement template more closely identifying the project’s research questions, research context, and methodology, impact, references, etc. At present, these dimensions are implicit rather than explicitly argued.

Secondly, the scholarly context requires substantial expansion. The film itself draws on, and implicitly dialogues with, a range of academic conversations, including the history of photography, studies of the World’s Columbian Exposition, media archaeology, archival theory, and debates about public-domain digitisation. Yet these theoretical and historical lineages are not cited in the statement. Key sources quoted or invoked in the film (for example, Gordon Hendricks, the Edison specialist whose is mentioned in the film) should be cited formally in the statement and included in a bibliography. In addition, scholarship on the technologies exhibited at the 1893 Exposition, on early cinema and chronophotography, and on the archival politics of visual culture should be referenced to demonstrate awareness of existing research. Foundational theorists of archives and historical memory (e.g., Jacques Derrida, Ann Stoler, Carolyn Steedman, or Allan Sekula), as well as scholarship on visual provenance and the ethics of digitisation, would help to position the project within contemporary debates.

Finally, the research dimensions of the practice itself should be articulated more explicitly. How does the filmmaker’s auto-ethnographic approach generate new knowledge? What does the juxtaposition of public-domain images reveal about archival biases? How does the creative method enable alternative historical narratives or decolonising possibilities? These are rich aspects of the project, but they need to be foregrounded rather than implied.

In short, while the film is a striking and thought-provoking piece of practice research, the accompanying written statement does not yet provide the necessary scholarly support or contextualisation. With a fuller bibliography, more rigorous engagement with relevant literature, and a clearer articulation of its research contribution in relation to Screenworks’ guidelines, the statement has the potential to match the sophistication of the audiovisual work.

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response to the above.