This is something I began to explore last year but abandoned due to time restraints, and it’s something I want to keep going with this year. The source video is my own family tapes (dubbed onto a donor tape that I’ve cut and looped), along with a soundtrack made by me using the audio from the original tape. This type of installation initially was an exploration of decay within the medium of magnetic tape, again looking at ideas of transmission and reproduction. When I first made this loop last year the image was clear and ran fine, however after sitting for over 6 months and being roughly handled it’s already extremely degraded and beginning to be un recognisable.
Right now it’s still in the early stages but will hopefully be something I continue with.
A very obvious start, but hopefully by starting obvious I can work towards a more refined way of working, these are by no means how I see the project looking, merely a starting point. These came about after playing with a cheap digital camera. As I’m interested in transmission and reproduction of the image in all of it’s stages I was ripping the camera apart and experimenting with modifying the image before it is produced. These shots were the result of simply removing the lens, effectively turning it into a extreme macro lens, which was then placed on top of prints.
Although these were shot the day before reading about Zaatari and the idea of transactions, I feel this is in some ways investigating these transactions and reproduction traces.
Throughout the text Zaatari and others often relate archival images with archaeology. I find this analogy quite fitting as we are indeed unearthing artefacts that would otherwise be lost to history, in an attempt to preserve and put on display for the world to see. In the opening essay, we are told about “situating the artist in the role of agent of historic memory, while also propelling the archival document into the realm of contemporary art.”
I think the main difference between actual archaeology and this kind of photographic archaeology lies perhaps in what we do after we dig. Thinking about the term agent of historic memory - we are agents - which implies further involvement than just purely uncovering and displaying an object in a museum setting.
“The power does not lie in the images we choose to preserve, but how we activate them to generate new narratives.”
This lead onto some questions posed to the reader, of which I found three quite interesting to think about in terms of my own practice:
What is the role of the artist in the construction of common history?
What is the place for personal memory within this history?
How can multiple voices be interpreted through one voice?
These are questions I hope to continue to think about and hopefully find my own answers. Thinking back to my project last year I feel these questions could have been extremely helpful had I considered them before starting my project.
Another interesting point brought up was the term post museum condition, one ascribed to the AIF by Catherine David. I like the idea of that term and feel that working without the boundaries of a traditional museum allows the AIF to operate in new and exciting ways, and the idea of a museum “unbound to space”, that could exist physically, online, or through reiterations of the archive made by the artists involved.
In discussing his work Against Photography, Zaatari mentions an interesting term that I find quite fascinating to consider with found photography. He mentions the word transactions when speaking about events that lead to prints or negatives being damaged or marked. He defines a transaction in this sense as “non photographic practices that effect the object or negative”. I find this choice of term interesting as the word transaction implies a two way exchange.
Is this meant to imply an exchange between the object itself - which in the case of analogue process can be a living and constantly changing object - and the current holder of the print who may have altered the object? Or perhaps between the original maker of the object - who authored the image as a tangible object - and the current holder of the print?
Regardless of who it is that makes these marks on the image, it suggests that they are constantly updated and evolving, similar to growth rings in a tree. Zaatari mentions reproduction traces in analogue photography, which I find parallel to digital in the current age of geotagging, metadata, and data tracking.
The images from his Against Photography series are at first glance blank pages that are wrinkled or blank negatives cracked by time and chemical reaction. However we learn that these are images from the archive that have been scanned with an ‘image-blind’ scanner, one which only looks at relief. The result is a somewhat 3D mapping of an image that ignores the subject matter and focuses purely on these transactions, cuts, scratches, tears, folds, cracks, etc. I think the idea of being image-blind is a really interesting way to look when considering the photograph as an object, however without the use of these machines it is nearly impossible to look past the photograph’s subject matter.
At the very end of the book I found a paragraph the really inspired me and made me think about the archive a little differently in terms of how I could image the idea of an archive.
A photograph changes upon the vanishing of its referent. The death of a living person represents a threshold in the life of their portrait. Nahla Haidous’s picture would not have hung in public had she not been killed in the Qana Massacre. When the body vanishes, each of its descriptions is recalled to fulfil a new function. A picture hangs, an anecdote is told, a gesture is re-enacted in memory of. There are so many ways to re-enact significant traits of a description. Each trait would privilege a story over others as if withdrawing those others from description. How about withdrawing the portrait of Haidous from the reproduction of the framed portrait, completely? What would the frame tell us? And what about withdrawing the framed object completely? What would the shadow tell about the object? And if withdrawal continues successively, what would remain? A 4 x 5″ Kodak Ektachrome sheet of an EPP stock type 2252, discontinued in 2009? Or is it simply the number 0113sh? And what if even this Ektachrome sheet was no longer there? Would the memory of a light box surface have anything to tell? Do acid-free boxes in cold storage remember? And if there is an after-image to every image, is it recordable? Retrievable? An after image is ‘a visual impression of a vivid sensation retained after stimulus has ceased’. An after-image is photography.
