[Personal_archives] Photographs, narrative, context & archives

[Rodney Carter]

So many wonderful threads of this discussion could be followed....

The issue of context has been brought up a number of times and I think we
could say much more about this. Context is, after all, central to the
archival endeavour. But, as Martha pointed out this morning, it can be hard
to pin down. The uses and meanings of photographs change in each viewing -
even when the same image is viewed by the same person in different times or
circumstances. While rather a rather pessimistic outlook, realistically
speaking it is impossible to capture all these different meanings and
contexts and uses in archival descriptions. We are lucky if we are able to
apply know what the photographs meant to the last owner, let alone the
creator and all those who used the images in between. And, of course, the
photos continue to have a life once they are in the archives, continuing to
accrue new meanings as new users apply them to new contexts. Yesterday I
launched a nursing alumnae gallery at the Hotel Dieu Hospital in Kingston.
Naturally, I installed quite a few photographs in the displays. It was
remarkable to hear the discussions and anecdotes sparked by the images on
the wall and in the cases. I made my own connections to the images but the
relationship was very different for the nursing grads who found themselves
and their friends on the wall, as well as for the women who found their
great aunts, grandmothers etc. in the class photos, and for the gentleman
whose father was a doctor at the hospital in the 1940s and who spent his
younger days "terrorizing the Sisters" as he put it. While we cannot hope to
capture all of this, we, as archivists, must do are best to capture as much
of it as possible. It is just far to important (not to mention entertaining)
to let it go unrecorded. As I tried to suggest in my article, photographs
are catalysts for narrative, a point which definitely proved itself to be
true yesterday.

The possibilities afforded by presenting photographs online in a Web 2.0
environment are quite exciting from this perspective - although as Alison
pointed out following Sassoon's wonderful article, much can be lost as well.
Connections can be made and appended digitally and the images can easily can
be incorporated into new contexts, works of art, etc.  This can be seen as
photos in Flickr become part of different streams and pools, gaining new
meaning by being linked to different sets of images. But as technology
evolves so does the relationship of people to images. Photographs are
becoming less formal (the everyday increasingly being documented in ways
that would have been considered almost taboo a short time ago). I do shudder
to think what photographic holdings of the future will be made up of - will
they exist at all? Without carefully attending to acquisition of digital
photographs archival collections may have a very large gap in their
holdings. Perhaps those photos that are most valued by people - and which
are printed - will be the ones that are saved and transferred. But what of
the rest? There sadly will be no digital flea markets where those wonderful
yet abandond albums and prints will be able to be found.

Quickly, in relation to Alison's daughter's practice of taking a photo on
the camera/cell phone and sharing it, this has been discussed here:
Daisuke Okabe, "Emergent Social Practices, Situations and Relations through
Everyday Camera Phone Use," paper presented at *Mobile Communication and
Social Change, the 2004 International Conference on Mobile Communication in
Seoul, Korea, October 18-19, 2004*, p. 2 <
http://www.itofisher.com/mito/archives/okabe_seoul.pdf>

And Michael's comment from the first day of the discussion regarding family
photographs having "a greater public life" is discussed here:
Luc Pauwels, "A private visual practice going public? Social functions and
sociological research opportunities of Web-based family photography," *Visual
Studies*, vol. 23, no. 1, (April 2008).

It appears that some of the most interesting scholarship on current
photographic practices is coming out of Sociology departments and that we
(as archivists, historians, etc.) could learn a great deal from their
methods in examining how photographs are used in peoples lives for
furthering our understanding of the contexts of creation and use of
photographs (past and present).

All the best,

Rodney

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Martha Langford <mlangford at qc.aibn.com>wrote:

> 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
>
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