This year, Peckham24 explores photography’s complicated relationship with history through the theme BACK TO THE FUTURE. The artistic programme brings together diverse perspectives to reflect on themes of memory, family history, migration and the archive, as well as projects that take moments from the past as inspiration to restage, reimagine or rethink existing narratives.

Our present moment can feel characterised by a sense of history repeating itself. Spectres from history—authoritarian governments, nuclear threat, genocide and the invasion of sovereign nations—are rematerialising across the world. Livestreamed atrocities, citizen photojournalism and the insidious creep of AI-generated imagery have complicated our understandings not just of photographic truth, but our trust in the media, platforms and institutions of the image economy. This year’s festival proposes strategies for unlearning the history of photography, and problematising the role of photography in the “preservation” of the past. It conceives of photography as a time-based medium and of the photograph as, in the words of theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, an “event”, made up of an infinite series of encounters that unfold in a non-linear chronology.

Today’s digital tools have allowed us to reappraise the visual archives of the past and identify gaps and agendas. The role of photography in the construction of history is now better understood and increasingly contested. The artists participating in this year’s festival share a consciousness of the camera as a tool for the perpetuation of global systems of power and the protection of the status quo. They also understand its radical potential in the reclamation of narratives—both personal and cultural—and in the correcting of historical wrongs.

Many of the exhibiting artists apply critical feminist, race and decolonial theories to the practice of archiving and the reappraisal of archival material. They recognise that archives are not merely collections of historical objects but active protagonists, alive with ideology and conjecture—as significant for their omissions as they are for their content. A number of projects adopt strategies from trauma therapy such as reliving, a process of revisiting traumatic moments in order to cognitively restructure and reprocess events. These methodologies of reliving, re-enactment and re-photographing are used to navigate significant moments from history and resurrect or reprocess forgotten stories.

As well as looking back, this year’s festival attends to the future and ideas of futurity, exploring the contours of developing technologies and their associated dogmas and anxieties. Projects employing digital processes and manipulation open up space for speculative futures to materialise, and propose the glitch as a site for unexpected moments of intimacy.

“The event of photography is never over,” writes Azoulay. “It can only be suspended, caught in the anticipation of the next encounter that will allow for its actualisation.” The archival and counter-archival impulses displayed in this year’s festival disrupt the authority of received histories and instead propose “potential histories” that collapse the past, present and future, restoring diasporas to their lands and possessions, and connecting the living and the dead across time.

Text by Lillian Wilkie for Peckham 24