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[Alison Nordstrom]

(Having some difficulties posting this from the road. This was written Tuesday night)

Let’s remember that photographs are inherently slippery. They look like truth and feel like memory because they appear so inclusive and informative. Yet their meanings shift repeatedly as they are used, viewed, moved and altered by the people whose hands they pass through over time. Of course, then “everyday photographic 
experience [is] transferable to art” ( see for one of many examples, Lorie Novak’s site Collected Visions) A variety of photographic genres, including photojournalism, documentary, anthropology, commercial, amateur, and family have found their way ( or have been dragged kicking and screaming) into the world of art. For our purposes however, I’m not sure that this is important. It would be a pity if we privileged the photographs now understood as art over those that are not, as all of them have a lot to tell us.
I continue to emphasize use and context because these are things we can pin down. Marks of use ( the fuzzy black circles of glue and paper on the back, or the folds that show it was crudely sized for a wallet) indicate a photograph’s trajectory. One of the reasons I value albums is that they offer photographs in something like the context (order, juxtaposition, annotations) their original owner intended. One of the reasons I value archivists is that they understand the importance of preserving this context, along with the correspondence, official documents, diaries and other material that can reveal a life.
	As for the digital turn, we continue to benefit from paying attention to what people do with their pictures whatever their form. Which ones get printed? Sent? Posted on MySpace, Facebook, Flickr? How are they organized, sequenced, annotated? This is harder to track, read and preserve than is the case with paper things, but it still matters. Our biggest problem with digital photographs is that there are so very many of them. Joanna Sassoon has very intelligently laid out a number of these concerns in “Photographic Materiality in the Age of Digital Reproduction” in Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, eds. Photographs Objects Histories, New York: Routledge, 2004
In a completely unscientific study, I observe that my 20 year old daughter is likely to take a picture ( on her ‘phone) of her friends at, say, a restaurant table, share it with them by physically passing the ‘phone around and then delete it. This is the photograph simply as enhancement of the present, a far cry from the tradition of the photograph as something made in the present to enhance the future with a vision of the past. Does this mean the photographic act will become as ephemeral and product-free as dance and oratory? I don’t personally think so. The need to keep photographs as markers of memory seems so entrenched in the human psyche that I don’t see it going away any time soon, but paradigm shifts do happen and they are hard to spot from the inside.