Visual Legacies is an academic, societal and artistic collaboration between organizers Sandra Khor Manickam, Charlotte Bruns, Lise Zurné . Starting with an event from 2024, we have organized one large event per year exploring salient issues within photography and history. 

Visual Legacies 2026 – Family and Photographic Archives: Symposium on colonial photographic archives

Building on earlier sessions of Visual Legacies that centre colonial photographic archives and their contemporary afterlives, our 2026 event examined the family as a site through which colonial visual legacies can be revisited and reworked. Focussing on scholarly research and artistic practices, we explored how family narratives, personal archives, and intimate details are mobilised to engage with broader postcolonial and diasporic histories. We asked how researchers and artists engage with their familial photographic archives, and how these private images are transformed when they become part of institutional or scholarly frameworks. What are the ethical, affective, and political questions that may arise? How do practices of writing, collecting, archiving, or exhibiting reframe intimacy, care, ownership and responsibility? By foregrounding visual practices that intersect private and public memories, the event explores how working with and through one’s family attends to inheritance, loss, and nostalgia, as well as creates space for re-imagining the hegemonic patterns of colonial photography.

The symposium began with an introduction by Charlotte Bruns, followed by talks by Kamila Krakowska Rodrigues (Leiden University) who will introduce the archival project, "Keeping/Discarding",  which uses digital storytelling and visualisation to rethink some of the premises of archives. Two speakers from this project will reflect on their interventions in relation to the theme of ‘Visual Legacies –  Family and photographic archives’. Jonathan Tjien Fooh (VU Amsterdam) and Sandra Khor Manickam (Erasmus University Rotterdam, Leiden University) considered their use of photography in reshaping family histories and the questions such interventions raise. Lastly, the symposium welcomed Tenee Attoh, photographer and founder of Mixedracefaces to present a selection of photographs and stories from the visual storytelling platform and cultural organization focusing on themes such as identity, belonging, and labels. After the presentations, we invited the audience to participate in the Q&A and podium discussion, led by Lise Zurné.