The Photograph, the Archive, and “Reinterpreting” the Past in a Time of Civil War
Authors: Aung Thin Michelle Diane , May Khin 
Published: November 2024

Introduction
A note on the format: This article is written jointly by a contributor who lives in Myanmar and another who lives in Melbourne. To ensure the specific concerns of both writers are present in this work, at times, the paper quotes directly from one, rather than both authors. Authors are identified by place of origin in the paper rather than by name. In addition, I use the terms Burma and Burmese to refer to periods prior to the renaming of the country in 1989. The country is now known as Myanmar.
In 2023, the Myanmar Photo Archive (MPA) and the Goethe-Institut Myanmar announced an open call for “writers, visual artists, filmmakers, scholars, and anyone engaged with Myanmar’s history” to apply for grants to “reinterpret the images from the Myanmar Photo Archive” (MPA Website). The call was part of a project entitled Reinterpret Myanmar’s History. Applications were due 30 June 2023, successful recipients announced 14 July 2023, and final artworks were to be submitted by 14 October 2023. Submissions were invited from “writers and visual artists of any form and kind” and “interpretations” could include “fictional writing, historical analyses, imagined photo series … narrative films, print series, collage works, drawings, prints, etc.” (MPA Website). In fact, The MPA and the Goethe-Institut, funders of the two-year project, positively encouraged “both factual and emotionally based responses to the images in order to gain a broad reflection on these largely uninterpreted materials” with the aim of “provid[ing] a historical context to the materials within the archive” (MPA and Goethe-Institut). Works selected and submitted would be published or exhibited and ultimately become part of the archive.
This call was unusual by Australian standards. While the MPA is the largest holding of Myanmar’s “vernacular” photography, it was founded and compiled and is currently housed (in physical format) by an artist who is from and mostly lives outside of the country. The Goethe-Institut is also a cultural organisation external to Myanmar. Despite this, respondents were encouraged to “reinterpret” Myanmar’s history through imaginative renditions of the past, including fictional ones. This recounting of social histories, facilitated by “outsiders”, could well be considered fake or artificial, potentially even a counter-narrative to “legitimised” national histories of belonging.
Myanmar’s military governments have tightly controlled historical narratives. The country’s national curriculum privileges the dominant ethnic group, the Bamar, and does not cover the ethnic conflicts that have raged since the first coup in 1962. Broadcast, print, and digital media are similarly biased, despite the ostensible lifting of censorship in 2012. Media coverage is limited to large centres, such as Yangon and Mandalay. Prior to online dissemination (from 2014), news was only distributed through government channels. Even during the period of relative openness (2011 to 2021), people in Myanmar knew little about their own history or current affairs. In 2021, the military staged a coup—what the Goethe-Institut diplomatically refers to on its Website as “recent local events”. Initially resisted through a campaign of protest and disobedience, the country is now mired in a vicious civil war. Offering an account of history that dissented from the official military view was once punishable with a prison sentence in Myanmar. Today, presenting an alternative history, even from outside the country, feels dangerous.
A major outcome of the Reinterpret Myanmar’s History project was the show Rethink. Combining images, film, and written work—all creative responses to the call—the show was presented at the Goethe-Institut gallery in January 2024. It was a remarkable success, tapping into a rich vein of interest in a city whose population were exhausted by years of conflict.

Fig. 1:Rethink show. Photo Courtesy of Myanmar Photo Archive.
This paper considers how the Reinterpret Myanmar’s History project shapes a sense of connection and belonging. The paper focusses on the preparation, consequences, and reflections inspired by Rethink. Originating from a series of conversations between the paper’s two authors, both creatives involved in Rethink, one inside and one outside of the country, this article will draw from the archivist Verne Harris’s ideas around “the decolonising impulse” and Hal Foster’s ideas around archival art, and compare the MPA with an example of a locally owned, decolonised photographic archive to ask: how do archives and the “artificial” versus “real” social histories shape belonging in a country mired in civil war?
In The Trouble with the Archive, South African archivist Verne Harris writes that archives are perceived as stable, durable and reliable, with the “colonial archive” as a default model (Harris, Ghosts 19). For Harris, “the impulse to decolonise [the archive] is …. not unrelated to the call of justice” (ibid. 19). In his view, if the archive is to be truly decolonised at a conceptual level, it must “accommodate material culture and cultural practices” (ibid. 18). Such accommodations would then “accept shared narratives of a particular collective and polity as a form of archive, not as an expression of collective memory waiting to be, or needing to be, archived” (ibid. 18). In his Follett lecture A Time to Remember, A Time to Forget: Fred Hampton, Nelson Mandela and the Work of Memory, Harris problematises this idea of archive as collective memory, writing that while memory can be “an instrument of resistance to the systemic forgetting and other forms of erasure deployed by oppressive regimes” (Harris, "A Time" 8), it can also be destructive, such as when “national” memories are evoked to justify hardline political responses (ibid. 8). Instead, Harris urges personal memory as a form of “intelligent reconstruction” where “the flourish of imagination and of story are dominant” (Harris, Ghosts 8, 9). Such forms of remembering through the archive are “necessary, functional and healthy” (ibid. 8, 9) because they allow one to dig more “deeply” into the materials of the archive which must inevitably be “complex” and “contradictory” (ibid. 9).
Harris’s “intelligent reconstruction” captures something of the possibility archives hold for artists and writers. The art historian and critic Hal Foster probes the practice of archival art in his seminal article An Archival Impulse. He writes that “archival artists seek to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present” (Foster 4). To this end, they elaborate on the found image, object, and text” (Foster 4). At times, artists may gravitate towards what is “readymade”, drawing from the “familiar … the archives of mass culture”, with the aim of “disturbing” their “legibility” or meaning, favouring instead a “disturbed or detourné” or roundabout approach (Foster 4). Sources may also be “obscure” and “retrieved in a gesture of alternative knowledge or counter-memory” (4). Foster considers that “archival art is rarely cynical in intent” and that instead, artists aim to transform viewers into “engaged discussants” (6).
Harris and Foster describe archival interpretation as “complex” and “contradictory”, “disturbing” and “alternative”, which seem in contrast with the default values of archives as stable, durable, and reliable. Yet what connects these interpretations is a non-cynical kind of remembering: a sincerity that stands in direct contrast to the insincerity or artificiality specifically of “national” justifications. One that allows for the personal connection to history.
Working with the visual archive as a writer begs an ekphrastic approach, that is, using words to create a word picture of an artwork. Poets Cassandra Atherton and Paul Heatherington observe that an archive offers “a rich repository to inspire the ekphrastic process” and that such writing often allows people to explore their “connection to the world” (Custom’s House What’s On Website). The root terms for Ekphrasis, a Greek term, are “ek = out” and “phrazein = to speak”. The term therefore carries a meaning akin to that of “speak[ing] out” (Rippl 16). There are further connotations for an ekphrastic approach, which turns the viewer, listener, or reader into a “quasi-eyewitness” (Rippl 16). In “postcolonial and transcultural contexts” the process of ekphrasis can also “accommodate or even celebrate” ethnic and cultural “otherness”, allowing the writer to “insert” the “other” into the historical narrative (Rippl 16). Therefore, the ekphrastic process enables an archival remembering that is personal, sincere (as opposed to insincere and so, artificial), and uses context to reveal what may be obscured, dismissed, or erased.
Reinterpret Myanmar’s History drew from the MPA’s collection of over 30,000 physical images taken between 1889 and 1995. While the respondents to the call could choose any photograph from the archive, arts workers for the project pre-selected photographs, grouping them together by themes such as Architecture, History, Fashion, Birth Life and Death (with sub-themes Family, Wedding, Death), Buddhism, Family Albums, Gender / Feminism, Postcards, Hand Coloured, and Individual Images. A respondent could work with a single image or all the images under a theme.
Melbourne Contributor: I sent a proposal to the MPA open call because I wanted to tell the story of my own community, the Anglo-Burmese. We are a mixed-race group of Myanmar, Indian, and European descent which evolved into a community during the period of colonisation. I saw my contribution as a kind of “alternative knowledge” or “counter-memory” that would be perfect for a reinterpretation of Myanmar’s history. It would give me a chance to insert myself into history; to include my community in the historical context; to add myself to an archive and to demonstrate my belonging to the past.

Fig. 2: Architecture. Photo Courtesy of Myanmar Photo Archive.
I selected an image of two Burmese boys reading a comic book together while seated beneath the marble columns of the bank of India building in Rangoon. The photograph was part of a series called “Architecture”. I chose it because it reminded me of my mother’s stories of how she would receive comics every week from a Rangoon bookshop.
What also attracted me to the image was its emotionally charged juxtaposition of colonial imperial power against the power of youth and, of course, time. To me, the image told of British decline and Burmese resurgence. It compared coloniser with colonised and, in a single frame, seemed to tell the story of the colony’s independence. The image also presented an artificial, binary view of Burma, eliding those in between or in excess to the categories British and Burmese. In my reinterpretation of the image, I aimed to make present and visible those who straddled the border. I used the series title – Architecture – as a metaphor for social and racial hierarchies in colonial and post-colonial Rangoon. About the Anglo-Burmese, I wrote:

our history is concurrent with the moment of colonialism and yet we warp and destabilise Rangoon’s carefully constructed social architecture. Perhaps this is why our history is mostly hidden.  

My reinterpretation began as an ekphrastic description of the image itself, making visible the “invisible” but also “artificial” racial borders that were implicit rather than explicit in the photograph. My writing took the reader on a “detour” into a history of my family and so, an alternative history of colonial Rangoon with the Anglo-Burmese community at its centre. A story, or counter-narrative, it evidenced the “fakeness” and illegitimacy of racial borders (for example, race was not a barrier to sexual relationships).
While my reinterpretation aimed to reveal what was obscured and, in so doing, the artificiality of racial borders, Rethink used “fakeness” to contextualise and, ironically, underscore the legitimacy and “truthiness” of the written works. The Myanmar Contributor arranged for all the writing from the open call to be published in the format of a newspaper. As they explained, Myanmar newspapers are inevitably “fake” news, not to be taken seriously because owners are mostly connected to the military. Publishing these pieces in a “faked newspaper” was a kind of provocation: the obvious artificiality of the Rethink newspaper questioned the nature of “real” news and “legitimate” newspapers and therefore “real” and “legitimate” histories. Being published in a fake of a fake endowed a form of legitimacy quite separate from what I had written. This offered context, a counter-narrative to the expectation that a newspaper reports truth. Placing my alternative history into this contextualised archival artefact was also evidence of belonging.

Fig. 3:Rethink 'fake' newspaper. Photo Courtesy of Myanmar Photo Archive.
My experience was not the only example of a “counter-memory or “alternative knowledge” of Myanmar’s history creating a sense of belonging. As the Myanmar Contributor puts it:  

the Rethink exhibition concept was that you were free to reinterpret the works and use them as you see fit. The artists saw different things in the images, and you can also reinterpret the images and their context in those ways. We are not like a national museum just showing things that sit there, but more come and see and just see as you see what you want to see. So, it’s a different reinterpreting work.

For most of the members of the public attending the show, Rethink valorised their memories, their own personal connection to history, and so, made them present in a historical narrative of Myanmar that was connected to an “archive”; whether this archive was “fake” or “legitimate” did not matter to them.
To me, a participant from outside, the project and the archive itself clearly had value to the people of Myanmar; the project encouraged and enabled alternative histories, publishing with all the freedom of expression that entails. The exhibition played with the idea of “fake and “real”, using overt artificiality to throw the sincere, the affective, the personal, and the story based on a flourish of imagination into sharp relief. This, in a country where people are long used to holding multiple truths and realities at the same time, privately separating the real from the artificial; the sincere from the faked, the truth from the deception. My impression of the MPA itself is that it holds value, given it is vast and one of few such archives dedicated to a specific moment in the country’s visual history. It was astonishing that it existed at all.
However, for the arts workers, curators, artists, and writers in the country, the project raised deep and complex questions about the ownership of archives and how this too shapes a sense of belonging. Who is entitled to own an “archive” that holds an important part of a nation’s history? Or put in a more personal way, should the archive that holds part of your identity be held by someone who shares that identity?  Should archives be decolonised? Is such a thing possible? If so, then who might take charge of them? Fund them? And in a country where access to the National Library or the National Archive was reserved for mostly academic scholars visiting from abroad, and the barriers for entry were prohibitively expensive, what kind of practical support might there be for a “formal” decolonised archive that was widely and publicly accessible?
Reinterpret Myanmar’s History reflects many of the complex qualities associated with the archive. The project can be said to reject the idea of “stability” in its insistence on using MPA content to question the context and meaning-making of Myanmar’s historical narratives—content that uses “artificiality” as a way of throwing the “true” and “real” into ironic contrast. Yet, the MPA collection itself is held privately by a European, whose “ownership” assumes the “stability, durability, reliability” of storage and stewardship. Like many archives, it relies on grants and other forms of public funding, most of which are not available to people within Myanmar.
The MPA Website notes that the collection began in 2013. In August 2014, the introduction of cheap SIM cards meant mobile telephony became widely available in Myanmar. Previously, access to the Internet, landlines, and mobile phones was prohibitively expensive (in relative terms, a single SIM card was equivalent to the cost of a luxury car), and so, limited to the elite. Smartphones with high-quality digital cameras had already made physical cameras less popular and hastened the obsolescence of the physical photograph. The beginning of the archive also coincided with a moment when Yangon itself was being recognised as an artefact, a virtually intact colonial capital, something genuine, to be preserved through the auspices of cultural organisations such as the Yangon Heritage Trust.
There are also questions inherent to the “organic” nature of the MPA, and its collection methods. Most of the photographs were sourced through markets in urban areas—such as Yangon, Mandalay, Bago—, areas that were easily accessible and attractive to a European tourist or traveller. This means that the archive tends towards materials by the Bamar majority, and does not collect materials from the many ethnicities, races, and original peoples as well as established diaspora or mixed-race, colonial groups. This too seemed to delegitimise the archive as it did not hold up to the assumed values of inclusion and diversity as espoused by European institutions (although as the Goethe-Institut collaboration evolves, the MPA has begun to extend the archive to include other ethnicities and groups, including those not necessarily recognised in the Myanmar list of official races and ethnicities). Could the MPA, then, be considered a “legitimate” archive? Or was it an “ersatz” collection, an archive in name alone, disconnected from the nation whose history it amassed?
Regional examples of successful locally owned archives include The Nepal Picture Library, a digital archive that “strives to create a broad and inclusive visual archive of Nepali social and cultural history” and holds “over 120,000 photographs from various private and organizational sources across Nepal” (NPL Website). The Nepalese archive is an initiative of photo.circle, and both the archive and the photo.circle are run by locals.
Unlike Myanmar, Nepal is a country of relative political stability, and better equipped to house such an archive. In addition, the Nepalese archive is digital, while the MPA is a physical archive, one that concentrates on a very specific moment of photographic and therefore cultural history, pre-dating the digital. Physical photographs are fragile and susceptible to heat and moisture. Myanmar is a tropical country, one in which it is necessary to preserve photographs, yet the technology and physical resources are prohibitively expensive. How then to decolonise and preserve a visual archive of national significance when the nature of that nation is itself in question?
After the Rethink show, the MPA and Goethe-Institut ran digitisation workshops early in 2024. Attendance was low given the recent conscription laws, which have chased many between the ages of 18 and 35 from the country. However, at a recent panel discussing collecting versus archiving, it emerged that many ordinary people are starting their own collections of photography as well as other objects. Like the artists and writers of the Rethink, they found their own collection methods for telling these stories, cultural histories that diverge from the official narrative that they learn in institutions. These informal, community archives may be far from “legitimised”, nor do they evoke the “national” memory; however, they do represent a sharing of history, offering the personal “flourish” of imagination and story.
As the Myanmar Contributor observes: these collectors love to research images they find. People who are motivated to tell this kind of story also find ways to connect with the public who have a hunger for this actual history that was not told by the states or hidden by the states.
In this article, we considered how archives and the “artificial” versus “real” social histories shape belonging in a country mired in civil war. We discussed how archival art in Myanmar may engender a sense of belonging, even when such creative work is not sanctioned by a national institution. We have asked whether it is possible to decolonise an archive during conflict. In conclusion, we have found that archival art that engenders a sense of belonging is synonymous with non-cynical remembering; that personal connection and a sincerity of archival interpretation stands in direct contrast to the insincerity or artificiality of “national” histories. However, in a nation such as Myanmar, where government sources routinely “fake” information, the overtly artificial may also be used ironically, as part of the contextualisation that throws “reality” into relief. Finally, we found that “fakeness”, in the sense of the fictional and the story, also had a role to play in the imagining of how an archive may be decolonised but also developed and maintained during a time of conflict.
References
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