[Personal_archives] Personal archives

[Alison Nordstrom]

Greetings

Let me echo Martha¹s thanks to the organizers. I look forward to a
productive week.

I am intrigued by the emphasis on place that we are bringing to this
discussion. In our graduate program we have developed a series of questions
to interrogate the materiality of any photographic object. The ³place²
questions include:

Where was it made?
Where was it found?
How did it get there?
(Nick Thomas¹s notion of ³trajectory² may be useful here.

There are ³time² questions too. Perhaps most important are:

What are the marks on the object that indicate its use (s) over time?
What, if any, changes in ownership, condition, and function have occurred
over time?

I like Martha¹s addition of our own emotional/psychological response to this
material, since that is part of its present day context.

It may be helpful too to consider some definitions, especially in light of
Catherine¹s request that we emphasise consideration of the private versus
the public spheres. I believe most family albums are made for consumption
beyond the eyes of their maker. It behooves us to consider what an album¹s
original audience may have been, how that audience may have changed over
time, and at what point ( by circumstance) does the audience change
radically, departing from the maker(s) Œs original intent.

It might be useful for some to look at my description of a group of 19th
century albums made up almost entirely of commercial mass-produced
photographs used to construct a very specific narrative a Brooklyn family¹s
multi-year travels in Europe, North Africa and the Holy Land.

see:
"Making a Journey: The Tupper Scrapbooks and the Travel they Describe,² in
Photographs,Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images Elizabeth
Edwards and Janice Hart, editors, London and New York: Routledge, Spring,
2004 


Is this a ³family² album? If not, how does it relate to family albums? How
might the questions we devlope to interrogate this album be applied to
family albums?

Enough for now.

Alison

PS As Catherine knows, I am in New York today and Toronto tomorrow and
Wednesday. I am shooting for two posts a day until Thurs-Fri. When I can be
a bit more involved. Onward!




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