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<TITLE>Re: [Personal_archives] Wednesday morning</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'>( Forgive me for responding to many threads and out of order.)<BR>
<BR>
I fear Martha has misunderstood a critical nuance of my longish earlier post.<BR>
<BR>
What I said was “They <B>look like</B> truth and <B>feel</B> like memory because they <B>appear</B> so inclusive and informative.” ( my emphasis) <BR>
<BR>
The critical point on which we both agree is that memory is neither inclusive nor true, but is a constantly shifting and continuously re-negotiated story that generally has very little to do with either “history” or “what happened”. I was trying to point out the risk of equating photographs as facts, time machines, historical illustrations or objective statements, although many people ( especially, I fear, historians) often do.<BR>
As archivists we often assist researchers who understand photographs only in this simplistic and misleading way. How can we encourage them to undertake a more complex approach?<BR>
<BR>
Alison<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
On 10/29/08 8:50 AM, "Martha Langford" <mlangford@qc.aibn.com> wrote:<BR>
<BR>
<FONT COLOR="#0000FF">> Wednesday morning
Alison's note deserves a longer reply than I can give it <BR>
> right now. I
just want to add a few thoughts.
Alison, I have to question the <BR>
> terms of your correlation with memory -
memories may sometimes strike us as <BR>
> truthful, but memory as we know it
on everyday basis is pretty patchy, while <BR>
> copious (only one of the
paradoxes within). Mis-remembering is an everyday <BR>
> occurrence
(especially, it seems, in political life). So 'inclusive and <BR>
>
informative' are not memory's characteristics, as Lorie Novak's layered
and <BR>
> often mysterious oeuvre has shown. When artists work with the
fluidity of <BR>
> memory, something pretty interesting happens, as I have
tried to argue about <BR>
> Johnson and her confessors, Feldmann, Rosier, and
the two Snows. I also want <BR>
> to say that this argument does not privilege
artists' uses, but uses them as <BR>
> case studies writ large to interpret our
everyday responses to similar <BR>
> objects. They are subjective responses, to
be sure.
Use and context are no <BR>
> more scientific. They are very evocative,
especially when they summon the <BR>
> other senses, touch, smell, hearing the
crinkle of the paper. We are not <BR>
> forensic scientists, though, but
historians. The trajectory you speak of is <BR>
> highly speculative, a way of
narrating the life of the object 'before now'. <BR>
> Archivists are also
storytellers, and often very good ones because they have <BR>
> so much
enriching information at hand. The Sassoon article is very good at <BR>
>
laying out the materiality question, I agree, and it sounds an alarm
that <BR>
> few of us are capable of responding to (don't we all love to
discover 'great <BR>
> images' on line).
Your illustration of your daughter's use of photography as <BR>
> a social tool
in the present is just what I was getting at when I wrote about <BR>
>
'entertainment'. Cartes-de-visite also show us clearly that people were
not <BR>
> exclusively intent on engraving their images on history, but on
making <BR>
> fashion statements in the present, participating in the modern
culture, <BR>
> climbing the social ladder or theatrically slumming, and
generally having a <BR>
> good time. The album appears to pour these events in
amber, but that's only <BR>
> our bookish backward look. Albums have been
connected to Family Bibles; they <BR>
> are more usefully linked to novels and
poststructural novels, from the likes <BR>
> of Calvino, Ondaatje, and Sebald
(actually, there's a lot of fiction in the <BR>
> Family Bible too, but that's
another discussion).
Alison, thanks for a <BR>
> longish note that allowed me to respond (I hope not
too provocatively) to <BR>
> keep the larger conversation going.
To everyone: I am really enjoying the <BR>
> anecdotes from the archival desk -
images! as I said last night and stories <BR>
> about the public/private
divide. And I was very touched by the attention paid <BR>
> to the personal
genealogist - they are a dedicated lot and they do invest <BR>
> emotionally in
their photographic knowledge.
Off to <BR>
> school.
Martha
Alison Nordstrom wrote:
> (Having some difficulties posting <BR>
> this from the road. This was written Tuesday night)
>
> Let’s remember that <BR>
> photographs are inherently slippery. They look like truth and feel like memory <BR>
> because they appear so inclusive and informative. Yet their meanings shift <BR>
> repeatedly as they are used, viewed, moved and altered by the people whose <BR>
> hands they pass through over time. Of course, then “everyday photographic
> <BR>
> experience [is] transferable to art” ( see for one of many examples, Lorie <BR>
> Novak’s site Collected Visions) A variety of photographic genres, including <BR>
> photojournalism, documentary, anthropology, commercial, amateur, and family <BR>
> have found their way ( or have been dragged kicking and screaming) into the <BR>
> world of art. For our purposes however, I’m not sure that this is important. <BR>
> It would be a pity if we privileged the photographs now understood as art over <BR>
> those that are not, as all of them have a lot to tell us.
> I continue to <BR>
> emphasize use and context because these are things we can pin down. Marks of <BR>
> use ( the fuzzy black circles of glue and paper on the back, or the folds that <BR>
> show it was crudely sized for a wallet) indicate a photograph’s trajectory. <BR>
> One of the reasons I value albums is that they offer photographs in something <BR>
> like the context (order, juxtaposition, annotations) their original owner <BR>
> intended. One of the reasons I value archivists is that they understand the <BR>
> importance of preserving this context, along with the correspondence, official <BR>
> documents, diaries and other material that can reveal a life.
> As for the <BR>
> digital turn, we continue to benefit from paying attention to what people do <BR>
> with their pictures whatever their form. Which ones get printed? Sent? Posted <BR>
> on MySpace, Facebook, Flickr? How are they organized, sequenced, annotated? <BR>
> This is harder to track, read and preserve than is the case with paper things, <BR>
> but it still matters. Our biggest problem with digital photographs is that <BR>
> there are so very many of them. Joanna Sassoon has very intelligently laid out <BR>
> a number of these concerns in “Photographic Materiality in the Age of Digital <BR>
> Reproduction” in Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, eds. Photographs Objects <BR>
> Histories, New York: Routledge, 2004
> In a completely unscientific study, I <BR>
> observe that my 20 year old daughter is likely to take a picture ( on her <BR>
> ‘phone) of her friends at, say, a restaurant table, share it with them by <BR>
> physically passing the ‘phone around and then delete it. This is the <BR>
> photograph simply as enhancement of the present, a far cry from the tradition <BR>
> of the photograph as something made in the present to enhance the future with <BR>
> a vision of the past. Does this mean the photographic act will become as <BR>
> ephemeral and product-free as dance and oratory? I don’t personally think so. <BR>
> The need to keep photographs as markers of memory seems so entrenched in the <BR>
> human psyche that I don’t see it going away any time soon, but paradigm shifts <BR>
> do happen and they are hard to spot from the inside.
>
> <BR>
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