Photography Reframing The Archive

Reframing The Archive

“We don’t need the new sentence; the old sentence re-framed is good enough,” – said Kenneth Goldsmith.

Introduction

The last two years have radically altered the way most of us live, work, and create, forcing us to reconsider our connection with our previous photography work. How do we frame our previous work when the world doesn’t appear the same? Images of rush-hour pedestrians or pals lazily flinging their arms around each other have taken on new meaning[footnoteRef:1]. The COVID-19 period and the measures put in place to curb the spread of the disease have had a major impact on art, particularly in the conceptualization of space. This change in how we do things has caused many to reimagine how we can get the common and ordinary things done differently. The archive, which has a pronounced role in our daily life, has been compressed, not just because of COVID-19, but generally as a new concept in modern-day, to a portable space within one mobile phone. The phone as an archive has become the storage for contact information of others, the storage for captured still pictures, storage for phone captured short videos. With the concept of cloud storage, the archive accessible through the mobile device has been extensively extended. However, despite these technological advancements, the concept remains the same, thus the creativity that this is simply a reframing of the archive as we know it. This essay, therefore, is a discussion of the reframing of the archive to suit modern-day users, needs, and contexts. [1: Jaimie Baron. "The archive effect: archival footage as an experience of reception." (2012): 102-120.]

The archive

The archive, both an idea and a physical item, has evolved throughout the last few decades. Although official photographic, film and television archives continue to advertise their collections as the most valuable and legitimate source for historical documentary films, alternative types of audiovisual archives have begun to compete. Online databases and private collections, in particular, are threatening to dethrone official archives as the principal providers of audiovisual evidence[footnoteRef:2]. While amateur photography, film, and video have long had a tense relationship with official archives, the increased availability of still and video cameras, both analog and digital, has resulted in an influx of indexical records outside of official archives. [2: ]

The archive in the context of the modern-day technology

The impact of an ever-expanding notion of the archival, which tends to favor and emphasize modes of operation such as collecting, curating, compiling, editing, ethnographizing, and so on, has had a considerable impact on contemporary art practices. Most of these activities work on revisionist, frequently creative, and occasionally romantic objectives. Exhibits and performances frequently employ techniques such as interrogating current archives, probing their infrastructural chores and (in)accessibility, proposing alternate uses, or establishing new (counter-) archives[footnoteRef:3]. As a result, the archival has proven to be re-contextualizing, re-arranging, re-organizing, re-enacting, re-evaluating, or re-introducing documents, the archive’s content, and critical reflection on the archive’s ontology be cornerstones of contemporary artistic practices in various locations. [3: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. "The archival multitude." Journal of Visual Culture 12, no. 3 (2013): 345-363]

This general trend is likely to become even more evident in the face of a digital culture of search engines and social media whose architecture is imminently regulated by archive logic (and the increasingly customized ‘algorithms’ of data storage and retrieval). The technical formation of the archiving archive additionally determines the archival content structure from its initial existence and in its future relationship,’ as Jacques Derrida[footnoteRef:4] put it in his 1995 essay ‘Archive fever,’ thus ‘archivization produces as much as it records the event.’ [4: Jacques Derrida. Archive fever: A Freudian impression. University of Chicago Press, 1995, 15.]

In contrast to traditional archives, new archival monopolies such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or Tumblr seem to exert the ‘archival violence’ on which Derrida has so much to say by archiving itself as a default modality[footnoteRef:5]. This is especially evident in the current age of new archival monopolies such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or Tumblr, which, in contrast to traditional archives, seem to It’s impossible to overestimate the impact of such always-archived eventfulness on self-and subject concepts and experiences. Facebook as an archive... suffocates privacy, moves socializing into space from place and time, and affects our notions about the self and others’ conception and relationships[footnoteRef:6]. [5: John Roberts, "Photography after the photograph: Event, archive, and the non-symbolic." Oxford Art Journal 32, no. 2 (2009): 281-298.] [6: Basel and Abou-Rahme. "The archival multitude." At, 345-363.]

Reframing the archive

In a time marked by critical examinations of the history, continuation, and resurgence of colonial thought patterns and practices – as well as a resurgence of interest in questions of identity, history, and memory – scholars and artists have rediscovered the archive as one of the places where the above issues collide and condition one another. Archives can help us identify who we are individually and collectively, who we aspire to be, how we become who (we think) we are, and how we want to be seen by others, among other things[footnoteRef:7]. Archives, on the other hand, are systems of exclusion, invisibility, marginalization, and institutions of power and violence that must be critically examined. Archives provide a platform for renegotiating archived records and reconstructing the meaning(s) attributed to them and an opportunity to engage with archival exclusions. When such exclusions are given exposure and the opportunity to engage with official discourses, they can help us rethink our perceptions of the past and challenge our current structures and knowledge systems. [7: Ana Catarina Pinho. (Ed.) Reframing the Archive. Archivo Press, Porto, 2021, 8.]

The way we interact with history is changing because of digital archives. They establish virtual areas where individuals can remark on, discuss, and enjoy specific stories and memories, transforming archived memories into living experiences. Digital archives, in their exploited and appropriated forms, oscillate between writing history and enacting memory, depending on active contribution and sharing. They claim to be contributing to a corpus of historical information, preserving and organizing it while also inviting individuals to add material and stories, comment and provide feedback, and actively engage in a discussion of and about the material. Digital archives refer to online and use web2.0 options, preserve and promote, and stock and share[footnoteRef:8]. As a result, they weaken Nora’s[footnoteRef:9] distinction between institutionalized places of memory, such as archives and museums, and societies that rely on the ongoing re-establishment of (oral) memories. They form a virtual realm between these two antipodes, challenging traditional conceptions about the archive and how memories and histories are defined. [8: Katja Müller. "Between Lived and Archived Memory: How Digital Archives Can Tell History." Digithum 19 (2017): 11-18.] [9: Pierre Nora, "Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire." representations 26 (1989): 7-24.]

Photographs and home videos have long been linked to memories, influencing our perceptions of life events and the development of memories throughout the twentieth century, as shown in figure 1 below. The cell phone is posing a challenge to traditional methods of documenting and storing memories of personal and communal events, as evidenced by its use as a tool for creating and sharing digital mnemonic objects[footnoteRef:10]. The widespread availability of mobile camera phones has arguably increased awareness of the historical aspects of ordinary personal and social experiences, as indicated in figure 1 below. We increasingly see ourselves as historical players rather than links in a chain symbolizing a reasonably steady way of life. [10: D. Keep and M. Berry. "Memories, mobiles and creative arts practice." In The 15th International Symposium on Electronic Art. 2009.]

Figure 1: Home family photo. (adopted from JessiceCatherinePhotography.com[footnoteRef:11]) [11: Jessica Catherine photography. Fine Art Framed Portraits. n.d. < https://jessicacatherinephotography.com/details >]

The coming together of a mobile phone with a digital camera, dubbed the “camera phone,” has possibly reshaped the role of photography in everyday life. Previously, individuals took photographs to commemorate life events such as births, marriages, anniversaries, and trips to exotic locations; however, in recent years, there has been a movement to document ordinary activities, especially through the selfie, as indicated in figure 2 below. The introduction of the camera phone has altered picture capture from a carefully planned activity to one that can occur spontaneously.

Figure 2: Obama selfie. (adopted from Miltner and Baym [footnoteRef:12]) [12: Kate M. Miltner and Nancy K. Baym. "Selfies| the Selfie of the Year of the Selfie: Reflections on a Media Scandal." International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 15.]

This has significant implications for creative activity and memory building; our images and films serve as lieux de mémoire (memory sites) that help us shape our recollections of events, people, and places. Mobile phone cameras are great for creative practitioners studying memory constructs because of their ubiquity and near-constant presence[footnoteRef:13]. The subject was able to record and study these photographs at any moment due to the portability of the mobile phone. Mobile technologies’ mobility and technological capabilities drastically alter relationships with media and creative practice, opening up new options and tactics for artists to probe and analyze the detritus of ordinary encounters, as in figure 3 below. [13: Keep and Berry. "Memories, mobiles and creative arts practice." 2009]