[Personal_archives] Tuesday evening

[Martha Langford]

Hello everyone,

What a rich set of responses! It's been a long teaching day, so I will 
have to be highly selective and brief.

I liked what Jane said about archivists knowing more about the donor 
families than some of the members do. A family's stories are no more 
cohesive than any group's memories. What seems normal to me is that 
there are secrets and narrative fragments that might come together as a 
whole were the family to be assembled. We hear this when people say: 
"you should ask my cousin about that, he knows." The album likewise 
functions as an art of memory - there are bits and pieces of stories 
secreted under every frame. I can't agree, however, that the early 
compilers were complacent in their sense of always knowing and being 
known. We ought to reconsider the idea that our forebears photographs 
and photographic albums were intended for posterity. This is a back 
formed notion. We might just as legitimately think of these things as 
present-based entertainments.

Kristan, the incident you describe is a sketch. I wonder is the 
daughters' sense of invasion might be connected to the maker of the 
films, as opposed to the photographer.

Sylvia's comments about the life of the object - the photograph that has 
to fend for itself in the real world of artists and archivists - are 
fair enough, I suppose, as long as neither artist nor archivist makes 
any claims to deep knowledge or universal connectedness.  I do think 
that sensing that a photograph was once of interest to /someone/ is 
rather moving, even if that interest cannot be fathomed.

Judith, the postmortem photographs you mention are of great interest to 
at least one follower of this discussion and you'll likely hear from him.

Jeremy, thank you for putting some images before us! And what a 
remarkable pair that is - the father, or so we guess, being in uniform 
works on me as a punctum. As Barthes said, What a novel!

And so to bed.

Martha