[Personal_archives] Wednesday morning

[Alison Nordstrom]

( Forgive me for responding to many threads and out of order.)

I fear Martha has misunderstood a critical nuance of my longish earlier
post.

What I said was ³They look like truth and feel like memory because they
appear so inclusive and informative.² ( my emphasis)

The critical point on which we both agree is that memory is neither
inclusive nor true, but is a constantly shifting and continuously
re-negotiated story that generally has very little to do with either
³history² or ³what happened². I was trying to point out the risk of equating
photographs as facts, time machines, historical illustrations or objective
statements, although many people ( especially, I fear, historians) often do.
As archivists we often assist researchers who understand photographs only in
this simplistic and misleading way. How can we encourage them to undertake a
more complex approach?

Alison



On 10/29/08 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 Alison Nordstrom wrote: > (Having some difficulties posting
> this from the road. This was written Tuesday night) > > Let¹s 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 ³everyday photographic >
> experience [is] transferable to art² ( see for one of many examples, Lorie
> Novak¹s 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, I¹m 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 photograph¹s 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 ³Photographic Materiality in the Age of Digital
> Reproduction² 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
> Œphone) of her friends at, say, a restaurant table, share it with them by
> physically passing the Œphone 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 don¹t personally think so.
> The need to keep photographs as markers of memory seems so entrenched in the
> human psyche that I don¹t 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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