[Personal_archives] Wednesday morning

[Martha Langford]

Wednesday morning

Alison's note deserves a longer reply than I can give it right now. I 
just want to add a few thoughts.

Alison, I have to question the terms of your correlation with memory - 
memories may sometimes strike us as truthful, but memory as we know it 
on everyday basis is pretty patchy, while copious (only one of the 
paradoxes within). Mis-remembering is an everyday occurrence 
(especially, it seems, in political life). So 'inclusive and 
informative' are not memory's characteristics, as Lorie Novak's layered 
and often mysterious oeuvre has shown.  When artists work with the 
fluidity of memory, something pretty interesting happens, as I have 
tried to argue about Johnson and her confessors, Feldmann, Rosier, and 
the two Snows. I also want to say that this argument does not privilege 
artists' uses, but uses them as case studies writ large to interpret our 
everyday responses to similar objects. They are subjective responses, to 
be sure.

Use and context are no more scientific. They are very evocative, 
especially when they summon the other senses, touch, smell, hearing the 
crinkle of the paper. We are not forensic scientists, though, but 
historians. The trajectory you speak of is highly speculative, a way of 
narrating the life of the object 'before now'. Archivists are also 
storytellers, and often very good ones because they have so much 
enriching information at hand. The Sassoon article is very good at 
laying out the materiality question, I agree, and it sounds an alarm 
that few of us are capable of responding to (don't we all love to 
discover 'great images' on line).

Your illustration of your daughter's use of photography as a social tool 
in the present is just what I was getting at when I wrote about 
'entertainment'. Cartes-de-visite also show us clearly that people were 
not exclusively intent on engraving their images on history, but on 
making fashion statements in the present, participating in the modern 
culture, climbing the social ladder or theatrically slumming, and 
generally having a good time. The album appears to pour these events in 
amber, but that's only our bookish backward look. Albums have been 
connected to Family Bibles; they are more usefully linked to novels and 
poststructural novels, from the likes of Calvino, Ondaatje, and Sebald 
(actually, there's a lot of fiction in the Family Bible too, but that's 
another discussion).

Alison, thanks for a longish note that allowed me to respond (I hope not 
too provocatively) to keep the larger conversation going.

To everyone: I am really enjoying the anecdotes from the archival desk - 
images! as I said last night and stories about the public/private 
divide. And I was very touched by the attention paid to the personal 
genealogist - they are a dedicated lot and they do invest emotionally in 
their photographic knowledge.

Off to school.

Martha



Alison Nordstrom wrote:
> (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.
>
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