How Images Speak: National Museum artefact DVI6030, and its affects

There is an early 20th century photograph in the National Museum collection, which represents a woman of African descent holding a white Danish child. Although she commands the image, and the viewer’s attention, she is not cited or recognised in any of the descriptive metadata. In this way she is both present and absent. How does this photograph articulate a wider politics of representation as it relates to blackness and visible difference in Denmark? This paper will explore some answers to this question.

Dr Temi Odumosu – Living Archives Research Project, Malmö University, Sweden