Vol. 18 No. 3 (2026): Imagined pasts: photography, colonialism, and archives

This special section, with texts by six researchers, three of whom are also the
volume’s editors, spans diverse geographical spaces – Portugal, Angola, São Tomé
and Príncipe, Indonesia, and the Netherlands – and a long chronology from the
mid-nineteenth century to the present. The authors employ diverse methodologies
to examine the meanings and uses of photographic images and archives within
the Portuguese and Dutch colonial contexts, across religion, medicine, state
bureaucracy, independence wars, ethnology, and private and commercial uses.
Most contributions focus on specific archival collections or on tracing photographic
materials dispersed across different repositories. Together, they examine how
photographic images are produced, circulated, and revisited, and how they shape
intimate, historical, and political understandings of the colonial past. “Imagining”
– the play between image and imagining that inspired our title – reminds us that
the past is always approached from the present, even as the present itself becomes
history.