!! Draft October 2023 to be substantially updated with reference to my own location archives for ‘Places in Time’
There are a myriad of exponentially-expanding photographic archives of the state, media, arts, social groups and also individuals in the attempt to record and freeze memories – lest we forget what happened.
Archives are often used a a vehicle by which to explore core themes in photography, objectivity and subjectivity, particularly:
- the partiality of the photographic frame and photography’s relation to reality
In assessing the ‘truth’ or otherwise of archival footage – as in any photography – we have to think carefully about:
- why did the photographer frame this particular image? (photographer’s aims? aims of the commissioning agency? what preconceptions about history and society do each bring to this?)
- whose perspective does the image represent? what other perspectives are possible? is one more valid than others? by what criteria? who decides?
- how reliable are our understanding and reactions to photographs? how is this influenced by the techniques used by the photographer to guide our interpretation? by our own preconceptions, memories, recent experiences and current mood? does this matter? or do we accept multiple interpretations all of which we can learn from?
These questions could hold equally for any media. With photography, because they portray one specific slice in time, this slice has to be either very carefully thought through in its taking, selection and/or editing or one image has to be carefully contextualised in a narrative together with other photographs or media.
“What did photography do for memory and what contribution has photography made to the practice of memory in human culture? Has photography affected or changed the constitution of individual or collective memory, in what way, what are its effects, on whose memories, how and why?…“As sites of memory, photographic images (whether digital or analogue) offer not a view on history but, as mnemonic devices, are perceptual phenomena upon which a historical representation may be constructed. Social memory is interfered with by photography precisely because of its affective and subjective status…in terms of history and memory, photographs demand analysis rather than hypnotic reverie’“
David Bates: ‘The Memory of Photography’ !! find full ref. cited Alexander, Jesse OCA Landscape Photography
“Clearly archives are not neutral; they embody the power inherent in accumulation, collection, and hoarding as well as that power inherent in the command of the lexicon and rules of a language. Within bourgeois culture, the photographic project itself has from the very beginning been identified not only with the dream of a universal language, but also with the establishment of global archives and repositories according to models offered by libraries, encyclopaedias, zoological and botanical gardens, museums, police files, and banks. […] Any photographic archive, no matter how small, appeals indirectly to these institutions for its authority. […] Archival projects typically manifest a compulsive desire for completeness, a faith in an ultimate coherence imposed by the sheer quantity of acquisitions.”
Alan Sekula [1986] ‘Reading an Archive: photography between labour and capital’
in EVANS & HALL, 1999: 184-185 cited in Module presentation
!! find quotes from Sontag and others
Instability of Memory
Freud‘s discussion of the nature of memory, particularly childhood memory and distinctions between:
- natural (mnemic) memory – the normal human capacity
- artificial memory – technical devices (including photography) invented by humans to support their mnemic ability to inscribe things in memory.’ “In the photographic camera he [sic] has created an instrument which retains the fleeting visual impressions”
“All the forms of auxiliary apparatus which we have invented for the improvement or intensification of our sensory functions are built on the same model as the sense organs themselves or portions of them: for instance, spectacles, photographic cameras, trumpets. .. these devices to aid our memory seem particularly imperfect, since our mental apparatus accomplishes precisely what they cannot: it has an unlimited receptive capacity for new perceptions and nevertheless lays down permanent – even though not unalterable – memory-traces of them.”
FREUD, Sigmund “The ‘Mystic Writing-pad’” p 430)
“reprogramming popular memory, which existed but had no way of expressing itself. So people are shown not what they were, but what they must remember having been”
FOUCAULT “Film and Popular Memory.” 1974. Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Foucault Live. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989.
Location Archives
Found Photography
Family Snaps
Countless photographers and artists have used family archives as source material for making work.
These archives are often used a a vehicle by which to explore:
core themes around the partiality of the photographic frame and photography’s relation to reality
Inspiration
Sara Davidmann
Silvia Rosi
Further Reading
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill, 1981.
———. La Chamber claire: note sur la photographie. Paris: Gallimard Seuil, 1980.
Foucault, Michel. “Film and Popular Memory.” 1974. Reprinted in Michel Foucault, Foucault Live. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989.
Freud, Sigmund. “Childhood Memories and Screen Memories.” 1901. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1980, 83–93.
“Civilization and its Discontents.” 1930. Civilization, Society and Religion. Pelican Freud, vol. 12. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989. 243–340.
“The ‘Mystic Writing-pad.’” 1925. On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. Pelican Freud, vol. 11. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. 427–433.
Whitehead, Anne. Memory. Oxford: Routledge, 2009.
Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. London: Pimlico, 2001.