Reframing the Archive: Photography in the Digital Age

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 no longer appears the same? Images of rush-hour pedestrians or friends casually throwing their arms around each other have taken on new meaning.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 common and ordinary tasks can be accomplished differently. The archive, which plays a pronounced role in our daily life, has been compressed — not just because of COVID-19, but as a broader feature of modern life — into a portable space within a single mobile phone. The phone as an archive has become the storage for others' contact information, for captured still images, and for 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 underlying concept remains the same. This essay therefore discusses the reframing of the archive to suit modern-day users, needs, and contexts.

The Archive

The archive — both an idea and a physical entity — has evolved considerably over the last few decades. Although official photographic, film, and television archives continue to advertise their collections as the most valuable and legitimate sources for historical documentary material, alternative types of audiovisual archives have begun to compete. Online databases and private collections, in particular, are threatening to displace official archives as the principal providers of audiovisual evidence.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 institutional control.

The Archive in the Context of Modern-Day Technology

The ever-expanding notion of the archival — which tends to favor and emphasize modes of operation such as collecting, curating, compiling, editing, and ethnographizing — has had a considerable impact on contemporary art practices. Most of these activities work toward revisionist, frequently creative, and occasionally romantic objectives. Exhibits and performances frequently employ techniques such as interrogating existing archives, probing their infrastructural workings and (in)accessibility, proposing alternate uses, or establishing new counter-archives.³ As a result, the archival has proven to be a space of re-contextualizing, re-arranging, re-organizing, re-enacting, and re-evaluating documents, making critical reflection on the archive's ontology a cornerstone of contemporary artistic practices.

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 regulated by archival logic — including the increasingly customized algorithms of data storage and retrieval. As Jacques Derrida put it in his 1995 essay "Archive Fever," "the technical formation of the archiving archive additionally determines the archival content structure from its initial existence and in its future relationship" — thus "archivization produces as much as it records the event."⁴

In contrast to traditional archives, new archival monopolies such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Tumblr exert the kind of "archival violence" on which Derrida has so much to say, by making archiving itself a default modality.⁵ It is impossible to overestimate the impact of such always-archived eventfulness on concepts and experiences of the self and subject. Facebook as an archive, for instance, suffocates privacy, moves socializing away from physical space and time, and shapes our notions of self and others' perceptions of us and our relationships.⁶

Conclusion

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. Our interactions with mobile media give us new opportunities to reflect on prior experiences and initiate new forms of self-expression. However, despite the significant advances made in relation to the archive, the underlying concept remains unchanged. What is happening is simply a reframing of the archive as we have always known it.

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