How do researchers move from viewing a historical photograph to understanding the people, places, and ideas behind it?

Join us for a hands-on workshop introducing archival research through the Sidney D. Gamble Photographs Collection. While thousands of Gamble's photographs documenting life in China between 1908 and 1932 have been digitized and made available online, the photographs are only one part of a much larger archival record. The collection also contains correspondence, notebooks, scrapbooks, writings, and other personal papers that illuminate how and why these images were created. 

This workshop explores how archival materials provide critical context for visual sources. Participants will work with original collection materials and digitized photographs to learn how researchers connect images to personal papers, reconstruct historical contexts, and develop research questions from archival evidence.

Topics include:

• Reading photographs alongside correspondence, notebooks, and field notes
• Connecting digitized materials with the broader archival collection
• Developing archival research strategies for visual and historical scholarship

This workshop serves as Part I of a two-part program on the Sidney Gamble Collection. Participants are also invited to attend Part II, the following day's lecture, Missionary Photography, Missionary Modernity: Transnational Imaging in Republican China, presented by Joseph W. Ho of the University of Michigan. The talk examines the photographic cultures of missionaries and Chinese communities in the first half of the twentieth century, offering broader historical and interpretive perspectives on the visual world in which Gamble's photographs were produced.