[Personal_archives] Thanks so much and au revoir

[Hobbs, Catherine]

Hi Everyone,

Thank you for your many considered thoughts of the past week concerning concepts raised by the readings and as well issues and examples raised by your experiences.

The discussions have spidered out in numerous directions which I”ll just touch upon in point form:

-the concepts of “public” and “private” in particular Rodney’s notion that personal photographs are, for the most part, created for public viewing:  “inherently public” with the  “sheen of the private”

-social performance

-products of the imagination

-the carnivalesque

-made for consumption beyond the eyes of the maker and an audience which changes over time

-physical changes and indications of changes of use

-contexts of creation

-narrativity and memory

-family vs. personal or amateur photography

-circulation of family photographs: their currency within the digital realm

-agency

-intention in donating photographs

-the public-ness of archives

-the mandates of the archivist and the artist as re-interpretors

-idealized projections (including within church contexts) vs. monster barring

-funereal images and postmortem photography

-gains and losses within digital media

-ideas from museology regarding artifacts inherently changing through time

-communicating with researchers to encourage a more complex approach regarding context and meaning

-privacy and the original intent of the creators/donors and how archivists might change their behaviours based on social mores or personal feeling with regard to what is private about an image

-opening the dialogue out to other professions

Please forgive me if I have glossed these ideas and/or left any out.  There may have been others missed by our server this afternoon.

Of course, the listserv is always there if you have additional thoughts, perceptions, questions or new ideas on these or topics related to this discussion.  Despite the fact that the week of official discussion is now over, I hope that those of you who have found little time to respond over the past few days will provide us with some additional comments over the next 10 days or so.

Martha and Alison have led the discussion in some very fruitful directions.  They have responded to our diverse questions and comments with very keen observations and commentary.  Thank you to both of you for your significant contributions to the week’s discussion.  It has been a great pleasure for me to hear what each of you has had to say and to reflect on writings on the topic by yourselves and others.  Given the fact that most of the archives I deal with are predominantly textual (and I know I’m not alone here), the discussions from the perspective of photographic materials has led me to realize new subtleties and questions I might ask myself.  Both of you bring knowledge of very sophisticated and multi-layered scholarship concerning photographs.  You are right to suggest that this dialogue could go on much longer than the allotted week.  However, I think what this week has served to do very well is to lead us to the realization of new sources and to new avenues of inquiry for archivists.  You have been a great asset to us in this sense.

Thank you too to Rodney who has been our unofficial guest expert during the week and who was kind enough to share his article and his further thoughts on the topic.  

Lastly, I’d like to invite Martha, Alison and their students to get in touch with the list or with the members of SISPA in the future if it would be helpful to your research or writing.  This certainly has been a fruitful encounter for us.  We hope it leads some of the SISPA members toward new writing on the topic and that your connection with us would be helpful to you in turn.

Thanks to all,
Catherine

(SISPA Chair)