Maria Veronica Cuomo: Reframing Travel Photography in the Fifties in Switzerland. The Peter W. Häberlin Archive: A Decolonial Perspective through African Encounters
Bio
Born in Argentina and based in Switzerland, Maria Veronica Cuomo is a doctoral candidate at the Chair of Modern Art History at the University of Zurich. She holds a Master’s degree in Art History with a minor in Theory and History of Photography from the University of Zurich and a Licence in Psychology from the University of Geneva. For more than a decade, she has been working as an independent curator alongside her academic activities. Cuomo also maintains a private psychological practice. Together, these experiences inform the interdisciplinary perspective that shapes her research. As a member of the Association of Art Historians in Switzerland (VVKS), she remains actively engaged with the field.
Research Project
This doctoral project examines the photographic legacy of the Swiss photographer Peter W. Häberlin (1912–1953) to reframe dominant narratives of Africa produced through Swiss travel photography in the late 1940s and 1950s. The dissertation approaches photographs as archival objects embedded in complex networks of contextualization, shaped by multi-actor collaboration and archival classificatory practices. It investigates their meaning construction and stabilization through archival practices, captioning, editorial mediation, publication, and circulation, transforming individual photographs into a coherent narrative. In this context, photographs are understood as active agents in the production of meaning, and more specifically in shaping colonial representations, contributing to the Othering of African subjects, while editorial and archival processes produce conditions of visibility and invisibility through which these representations are rendered legible. Methodologically, the dissertation adopts a decolonial perspective centered on African encounters, informed by an explicit reflection on the researcher’s positionality and colonial background. The archive is approached not as a neutral repository of historical evidence, but as an active site of knowledge production where historical narratives are organized and legitimized. Particular attention is given to the processes of Othering embedded in archival formation through which representations of Africa were shaped and incorporated into collective memory through the archival processes of selection, preservation, description, and access within Western frameworks. By placing Häberlin’s work in dialogue with African photographic practices and forms of self-representation from the late 1940s and 1950s, the dissertation seeks to bring into the discussion forms of African agency that remained largely absent from dominant Western narratives. Rather than treating the photographed subjects solely through the lens of European travel photography, the project engages with contemporaneous African photographic practices to broaden the interpretative framework through which these images have traditionally been understood. This project draws on extensive archival research conducted mainly at the Swiss Foundation for Photography in Winterthur, the Museum of Cultures in Lugano, and the City Archives of Zurich. It is further developed through an ongoing collaboration with the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Benin City, Nigeria, and through an effort to foster dialogue between Swiss and Nigerian institutional contexts. Moreover, a forthcoming research residency at MOWAA represents an intentional act of delinking, creating opportunities for reciprocal engagement and shared reflection grounded in a West African archival and institutional context that belongs to the geographical scope of Häberlin’s photographic work in Africa. Through these photographic, archival, and institutional engagements and encounters, the study seeks to contribute to a multi-layered and multivocal reframing of colonial photographic narratives.
Reseach Focus
• Art History
• History of Photography
• Photographic Archive Formation
• Captioning
• Editorial Mediation
• Publishing and Image Circulation
• Collective Memory
• Conditions of Visibility and Invisibility
• Archival Knowledge Production
• Processes of Othering
• Decolonial Theory
• Representations of Africa