[Personal_archives] thoughts

[Hobbs, Catherine]

A number of questions and musings arose for me during the previous
postings...

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?  
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. 
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?  

I am reminded of Luciana Duranti's statement from her early articles on
diplomatics: "[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." 
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....

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.  

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.

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).  

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.  

Looking forward to tomorrow,
Catherine

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