This project examines the photographs and diaries of María de las Nieves de Braganza y Borbón (1852–1941), preserved in the Bourbon de Parme archive at the Katholiek Documentatie Centrum (Radboud University). The broader archive, which entered the university’s holdings in 2022, contains extensive documentation of the Carlist movement and the Bourbon-Parma family, central to understanding the persistence of monarchical and traditionalist networks in Spanish history. Within this collection, María de las Nieves’s visual and written materials stand out as the record of a woman who participated in war, exile, and global travel during a period when female authorship and mobility were still exceptional.
Between the 1880s and the 1930s, María de las Nieves undertook long journeys through Europe, North Africa, Asia, and Latin America, keeping detailed diaries and creating hundreds of photographs. Her camera accompanied her in Algeria, where she purchased and later baptized a young servant named Mabrouka; in Japan, where she photographed temples, markets, and domestic interiors between 1901 and 1902; and in Chile, where she documented landscapes, religious processions, and urban life in 1904. These images reveal an observer shaped by aristocratic privilege and Catholic devotion, attentive to the unfamiliar yet constrained by inherited hierarchies of vision.
The project approaches this corpus through the lenses of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, whose concept of the imperial shutter exposes the power relations embedded in photographic acts; Mary Louise Pratt’s analysis of the contact zone as a space of negotiation between travelers and the colonized; and Roland Barthes’s reflections on the affective and subjective dimensions of photography. Together, these perspectives allow for a reading of María de las Nieves’s archive as a site where desire, authority, and curiosity meet.
A central goal of the project is to build a digital research environment that allows these materials to be studied relationally—linking the photographs with her travel diaries and with the historical, geographic, and social contexts they depict. By treating the archive not as a closed collection but as a network of encounters, the project tests how digital humanities tools can help to decenter imperial archives and propose new ways of understanding visuality, gender, and mobility in the late nineteenth century.