The lecture entitled “Archiving Historical Photographs: Principles and Challenges” was delivered as part of the Cultural Season activities of the Hamad bin Mohammed Center for Historical Studies. It aimed to approach the photographic image as a source of historical writing and to probe the most significant challenges raised by the process of archiving it, as well as the ways to confront these challenges within the context of rapid technological transformation—particularly in the age of artificial intelligence.
Professor Ahmed Obaid opened his lecture with a conceptual grounding of the photographic image, defining it as a vessel of knowledge and a historical document parallel to the written text. He traced the technical evolution of photography since its earliest beginnings with primitive cameras. He also examined the position the image occupies in the writing of modern history, questioning the meanings and messages it conveys—whether to specialized historians or to the broader public. He pointed to the methodological shift in approaching the image historically, where interest has moved from narrow political usage toward history in its comprehensive and multifaceted sense.
The lecturer reviewed selected photographic examples from diverse places and subjects in order to reveal the multiple levels of interpretation that images allow, and the differing perspectives through which they may be viewed according to various disciplinary lenses—from the political to the social, from the historian to the anthropologist. He explained that reading an image proceeds through two complementary stages: the first involves observing the visible, natural signs within the image; the second is a cultural, interpretive reading that relies on context, language, ideological references, and the symbolic charges carried by the image. He further noted that both archiving and interpreting images are guided by the methodology of the five questions: who, how, why, and where.
Ahmed Obaid also paused to highlight the features that distinguish the image from the written text: its visual nature, the duality of public and private dimensions within it, the multiplicity of meanings shaped by the viewer’s culture, and the diversity of contexts and manifestations it may assume. He then moved to discuss the transformations accompanying the circulation and analysis of images in the environment of social media and the web, indicating that the upcoming battle in the field of image studies will be fundamentally “semantic,” centered on the interpretation and direction of meaning.
He concluded the lecture with a profound reflection on the problem of archiving photographic images in the age of artificial intelligence, warning of its deep impact on both the form and content of images, and the potential manipulation or falsification that may affect them—an issue that inevitably influences the possibility of objective analysis. The professor emphasized that the coming war will be “semantic.” In the context of archiving, this means that AI tools no longer merely produce images; they are now capable of reading, analyzing, and even reinterpreting historical images according to probabilistic logic. This places historians and archivists in a dilemma: should the image be left to machine interpretation, which may be misleading? And how should automatically generated “interpretations” be archived alongside the original image? Archiving is no longer confined to what is fixed; it has become a space of contestation over meaning between human and machine.
The lecture was attended by a distinguished group of specialists and practitioners in the fields of history and archiving, who enriched the discussion through substantive interventions, resulting in recommendations grounded in rigorous scholarly context.
