[Personal_archives] end of the week

[Alison Nordstrom]

I won't presume to summarize this rich and wide-ranging conversation except
to thank all writers and lurkers for their involvement and to wish it had
been longer. Special thanks to Catherine for making it happen and trying to
keep us on track.

I agree that the issue of private things made public by a re-situation from
home to archive is worthy of its own discussion and may be particularly
germane to photographs because of the immediate ways we respond to them. We
should also recognise that the meanings of most things will change over
time; generations from now, researchers may value the intimate details about
people who are no longer remembered as living beings and for reasons we
cannot imagine.

The teaching function of an archivist is something we did not directly touch
on, though I think it is essential. Your specialized knowledge of
photographic processes for example may be useful to researchers who lack
this but there are many sources for such things. I think the most critical
juncture is archivist-researcher-object and if you can stress object,
especially to someone who thinks he or she is interested only in the content
of the image, you are conveying a very important research approach.
Materiality: placement, layout, sequence, juxtaposition, caption, condition
are the context that generally remains bundled with a group of photographs.
Preserve it. Note it. Point it out.

I am more cautious than Martha is about intuiting meanings from objects we
don¹t know much about, but I do know that what often looks like instinct can
actually be the result of years of observation and analysis, recalled so
quickly that it appears to supercede logic. When you have seen hundreds of
apparently banal and predictable baby pictures, wedding pictures graduation
pictures and the like, you will immediately spot even the subtlest anomaly
or nuance. 

Finally, I want to suggest that all of us pay attention to how we research
this special kind of material. Here¹s an example of a direct qualitative
research technique that could, I think be adapted to intake interviews with
donors to archives:
Gillian Rose
³Everyone¹s Cuddled Up and It Just Looks Nice: An Emotional Geography of
Some Mums and Their Family Photos² Journal of Social and Cultural Geography.
Routledge  Vol 5, Issue4 pp 549-564

I wish you all happy research!

-- 
Alison Nordström, Ph.D
- Curator of Photographs, George Eastman House, International Museum of
Photography and Film
- Director, M.A. In Photographic Preservation and Collections Management,
Ryerson University
- International Editor, Photography and Culture, University of the Arts,
London

Office  585 271 3361 x 367
Mobile 603 731 7947
<anordstrom at geh.org>
WWW.eastmanhouse.org




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