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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">A number of questions and musings arose for me during the previous postings...</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">To Rodney: are you suggesting that it is possible to consider that the documents may be very public, as you say, but that the internal provenance (i.e. the relational quality of the documents) render them at the same time personal? </FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">In your article you cast personal photographs as catalysts to retell past events and personal reflection. They are a launching pad for oral history. I also sense that the narrative and mythology surrounding photographs is multi-directional. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Where do we get ourselves as archivists when we consider the socially-encoded aspects of photography and the endless possibilities for narrative? Is the archivist approaching the fray as re-naturalizer or as chaser of phantoms? </FONT></P>
<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">I am reminded of Luciana Duranti's statement from her early articles on diplomatics:</FONT><SPAN LANG="en-gb"> <FONT COLOR="#000000" FACE="Times New Roman">“[T]he inner freedom of human beings is such that a strict observance of rules cannot be expected in a personal context, so that a diplomatic study of forms may reveal little about the real nature of, for instance, an amateur photograph or a mother’s message.”</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"> </SPAN></P>
<P><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">There is a general tension in archives between seeing personal documents as socially constructed or personally viable when in fact they are both, although the first is more easily traced and might be more useful within archival appraisal methodologies (how archivists decide what to acquire based on set criteria). Implied in Duranti's statement is the sense that the "real nature" is a personal one. Implied in our readings is that the two locations of private and public are awash with one another….</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Alison's questions she listed to interrogate the materiality of the photographic object link to Martha's statements about the tacticity and specificity of photographs (p. 91). In reference to the work of Michael Snow, Martha, you show the artist Snow "honestly locates photographic experience in the personal" because he retains what you call the "auratic" qualities of the archival photograph album. </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">On the one hand, I suspect is it this kind of motivation (to honestly locate photographic experience in the personal) which underlies much archival acquisition of personal photographs. It is difficult to know how far our naturalization of photography and our interpretations of material culture as truthful interfere with or overlay the 'archival view' because of the expectation of neutrality which pervade traditional archival practices.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">On the other hand, photography provides us with real possibilities of discerning visual information about people and how they lived within the spaces they inhabited. For example, was x shorter than his brother y? Does this shed a different light on their rivalry? Did y slouch to overcompensate? How does the sitter or subject exert agency or control from withint he photographic frame? I am reminded of a famous cultural figure who, it was reported by his biographer, 'always put his left face to the world' because of a glass eye resulting from a teenage accident with dynamite. Then we have the control which the photo-taker exerts (or thinks s/he is exerting). I liked the example in Martha's article of the blurred hand of the Bruno Rosier example: these unexpected happenings within the technology which assert themselves (as when there is a double exposure). </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Following your reference to imagination, Martha, reminds us that, however briefly, the picture-taker is exerting conscious and unconscious composition and editing to the image. Further than that he/she is also involved in a narrative process of composing one image after another and then, reflecting on the images through narrative. </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Looking forward to tomorrow,</FONT></SPAN>
<BR><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">Catherine</FONT></SPAN>
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