[Personal_archives] Photography and Personal Archives

[Barriault, Marcel]

This posting has made me pause to think, and overall I think Rodney's argument is both persuasive and founded. At the same time, I think there may be some exceptional cases where personal photographs are definitely not intended for public consumption. At least one extreme example comes to mind.
 
When I attended the GLBT Archives Libraries Museums and Special Collections (GLBT ALMS) Conference in New York City in the spring, one speaker, Nicholas Matte, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, spoke about his research into transgender and transsexual archives. He explained that some transitioning people keep photographic evidence of their physical transformation through hormonal therapy and sexual reassignment surgery. These photographs of the subjects' bodies are intended to keep a record of the physical transformation process, and also to help the transitioning individuals see the often minute changes that occur in their bodies over time. These photographs are sometimes shared with other people who are going through sexual reassignment, but only as a means to help them better understand the process they are about to experience, and the photographs, as a rule, are never intended to be shared with the general public. In fact, privacy issues and access restrictions for these records become key points in negotiations with archival repositories.

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De : personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] De la part de Rodney Carter
Envoyé : 27 octobre 2008 10:53
À : Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu
Objet : Re: [Personal_archives] Photography and Personal Archives


I have been long fascinated by the private/public nature of personal photographs, snapshots in particular. While these images often appear to be giving viewers glances into the intimate and private worlds of those depicted, they are created for consumption - to be placed in frames and albums to be viewed by others who may not necessarily be a member of the familial circle of those depicted in the images. While there are certain treasured photographs that do not get put out for public display, I think that the majority of photographs are created for public viewing and this greatly effects the types of images taken and the poses adopted by those depicted. Sitters are purposefully creating certain types of depictions of themselves to be viewed by others . This process might very well be unconscious but it certainly occurs - which Catherine, following Chambers, points out - look to any archival collection of personal photographs and you will see the same motifs and types of images appearing over and over, across a large period of time.  

Would it be too far to state that photographs are inherently public documents which only have the sheen of the private? I think it is this appearance of privacy is what makes them so compelling, so arresting, and which uniquely imbues them with Barthes' punctum. The appearance of privacy makes us overlook how these photos may have displayed or otherwise used by their creators. We feel, coming across them in archives, that we are given access to something secret or intimate.

I have to cut my response short for the moment but will definitely return to the idea of personal photographs as prompts for conversations.

Rodney

 

	
	First I want to thank Catherine Hobbs for this kind invitation into the
	archivists' realm, a place where I have made many fruitful discoveries
	in the past, having found the subject of /Suspended Conversations/ in
	the Notman Photographic Archives here in Montreal. Her welcoming remarks
	about the navigations between private and public realms take me back to
	those days, and the first recognition that we should not consider
	photographs and albums in a public collection as private, but as
	inhabiting and informing a space between the private and the public
	realms. So the first question that I am considering is: how do we frame
	that space; how do we define it? I would like to establish a framework
	that has some solid features, before we begin to talk about its porous
	boundaries, shifts, and fissures. Barthes helps us to understand the
	sense of loss that inhabits that place, but if it were strictly morbid,
	always as sad as /Camera Lucida/, I don't think many of would want to
	stay there, work there, root our lives there. There is pleasure in this
	place. Can we also talk about that, as a product of the imagination, as
	a prompt for conversation? After all, that's what we're having.
	
	Martha


Welcome to our second SISPA listserv discussion on the topic of Photography and Personal Archives.  
I'd like to give a very warm  welcome to our guest experts Martha Langford (of Concordia) and Alison Nordstrom (of George Eastman House).  We are also happy to be joined by a number of their graduate students.  

The readings for this week were not explicitly directed at archivists though there are a number of archival concerns and criticisms of archival practices which are hinted at within the articles or which hover as a ghostly presence.  More than that, though, the articles and the website raise a wealth of concepts and practices which we can take and debate in terms of dealing with archival creators and their personal photographs and perhaps extend these to look at their fonds' more broadly.  

I'd like to start by acknowledging that at the basis of many of these discussions is the very visceral way in which people react to photographs (acknowledged at many points:  particularly in Chambers' article and in the mentions of Barthes' concerns).  This is, obviously, one of the primary factors differentiating photographs from other types of archival material created by people, for people and often about people.  

As a way in, I'd like to invite further discussion on the emphasis on the private vs. the public sphere.  This emerges strongly from Chambers' discussion of encoding private space and the family with broader social/cultural norms.  She mentions the use of very similar sets of poses, photographing "important" events, interior space, the "feminine sphere" of the home (though a home without housework) and photographing images of our consumerism.  The references to Barthes in Martha's paper lead us to a very different 'privacy' that of the punctum:  the realm of private feeling.  In particular, the feeling of the temporal punctum in which the individual feels a shock that the person in the photograph is very likely dead.  Very broadly, these two realms of public encoding of the private life and the private encountering seem very central to the archival concerns with respect to photographs.  

Looking forward to this week and to hearing what you have to say... 
Warmly, 


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