Rebekah is completing a Collaborative Doctoral Award with supervisors from the University of Oxford and the National Trust. Her research considers the intersection between coloniality, visuality and heritage and uses the National Trust's collections to explore the ways in which country houses and their aesthetics were formulated in the early twentieth century, with a particular focus on photography. She is particularly interested in how colonialism shaped the ways in which imaginings of the past were formulated through the National Trust and how these impact perceptions of its properties today.
Her new article, coming out in the Archaeological Review from Cambridge's latest issue 'Text and Image', is titled 'Overexposed: Looking around Photographic Texts and Images in the Archive'. This paper suggests that the ways in which photographs are (and are not) seen can be articulated using the term ‘exposure’. Focusing on a photograph taken on a tiger hunt in India in 1902, the author uses multiple ‘exposures’ to explore the image in several formats, without ever seeing the original print, in order to move beyond and counter the intended narrative of the original.
