Image & Identity will be an exhibition displayed at the Museum of Oxford in late 2022.
The exhibition will use colonial period photography from Ceylon/Sri Lanka and Oxfordshire as a springboard for contemporary discussions and explorations.
Throughout the project, people of different backgrounds will engage with colonial period photography and together reflect on the links between those and current conversations around identity, post-colonialism, decolonisation, and the impact of the British Empire on private lives, both in Oxfordshire and globally.
This website is a companion piece to the physical exhibition. We will use it to collect digital versions of photographs from private and community archives, not just from Oxfordshire and Sri Lanka, but from across the world, from the period 1845-1930.
We are collecting images of individuals, communities and places. Our aim is to showcase both similarities and differences, in this way celebrating our beautiful diversity as human beings, as well as everything that we have in common and which connects us with each other.
We invite everyone to contribute their photographs and stories behind those photographs.
About us
The Museum of Oxford is the only museum dedicated to telling the story of Oxford and its people.
We work with community based heritage practitioners on projects which highlight particular aspects of our local history.
'Image & Identity' is a project which puts a spotlight on photography and how we use it to project an image of a place, a person or a group of people to others.
Working with scholar and cultural commentator Shalini Ganendra, we also use this opportunity to pose questions about the visual links between Oxfordshire and the British Empire in the 19th and early 20th century. Taking photographs of Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka) and Oxfordshire as our departure point, we ask if echoes of those links are still present today, and how the visual messages constructed then impact on our understanding of people and places now.