100 Images: Some refinements

I put aside the blog for a while to attend to other things, namely the class presentation with Ernie and Jermaine, and some work for sound class. This is a shame, because I left an important entry on the “100 Images” project half-finished and unpublished, and will need to recapture the mindset that originally produced it. I begin where I left off:

I spoke with Tori about the project and she made a number of excellent suggestions regarding design, logistics, and ethics. I shall enumerate them here for my own reference.

1. Tori responded in particular to the idea of the photos as “supplemental photographic plates” on temporary lease from a mysterious archive. To emphasize this aspect, it might be a good idea to include brief, one-sentence captions with each picture, captions that serve to interpret (and genericize) the subject and thus to justify their placement within each book. By keeping the captions dryly, benignly informative, it would also lend the recipient tome a pleasing, textbook-like character (whether or not it is, in fact, a textbook). I think it would be best to type out the captions on cue cards. And yes, it would be best to keep like photos together in series: for instance, all the figure skating photos could be placed together in a single book, inside an envelope.    

2. Remaining anonymous is important. For this reason, the envelopes should include an email address only and a request that the finder notify this address if the photo’s lease term has expired. There will be no personally identifiable information with the photos. Furthermore, I probably will have to make B&W photocopies of the book covers inside the library, because if I check the books out en masse for colour scanning, it will allow the project to be easily traceable to me. Not that I feel I am doing anything wrong.

3. Tori agreed with me that a couple photos (those depicting traumatic events) could produce a threatening effect on people who happen to discover them by accident. Perhaps there is a way to exclude them from placement, to avoid causing anyone to be alarmed or distress? Another, smaller ethical concern I had was the issue of violating personality and privacy rights, and wondered about whether to use a black censorship strip to conceal the identities of, for instance, the individuals in the passport photos. This could also produce a somewhat humourous comment on the process by which sensitive or personal information is redacted by archivists before being made available to the general public. But I am not sure that this is necessary; unlike Cheryl Sourkes’ interesting work with webcams, I am not multiplying or broadcasting these images and causing them to be significantly MORE accessible than they were before, since they will each only occupy a single spot in some forlorn library volume. On this issue, we’ll see.

4. The Dewey Decimal System. As I am piggybacking on the library’s system of classification, I’ll need to situate my photos within the Dewey Decimal system that it uses, as opposed to the Library of Congress system described below. I could assign each photo a theoretical number and then try to find a book with a matching number, but since the library only contains a limited number of books and since the last part of a Dewey number apparently reflects a book’s author’s name, in practice I think it will be preferable to identify the relevant book first and to assign its numerical code to the photo, which becomes a (detachable, impermanent) part of the book.

There are other issues, but this is enough to grapple with for now. The next steps in production:

1. Arrange the photos on a canvas in Photoshop and have them printed and cut.

2. Assign each photo a temporary subject heading and then find corresponding books in the library; then, photocopy their covers, record their Dewey numbers, and re-shelve them.

3. Group the photos, produce caption cards, and type relevant information about their provenance and classification on their backs.

4. Put in envelopes and place them in books.

At each stage, I should photograph my process as documentation for the final presentation.

Library intervention: notes on methodology

A night has passed and thankfully, I don’t hate the library intervention idea yet. Which is a good thing. However, I have been thinking about some tricky methodological problems.

1. It is now clear that the covers of the selected books need to be scanned and presented as a grid or catalogue (a kind of photographically indexical card catalogue in which each cover represents a book that contains a related photograph from the V.I. fonds). It would be interesting if the selected books’ covers had similarities of composition, much as the more obvious categories of photos do, but it is OK if they do not. What all this means is that I will have to check the books out, scan the covers and return them before placing the photographs. 

2. I need a method that applies to both keywording the photographs AND identifying the appropriate books. Books generally exist in only one physical place within the library, but they sometimes have multiple subjects listed under the Library of Congress system of categorization. (Something I need to learn more about). I should assign each photo a series of 2 or 3 LOC-style subjects and then, once they’re all listed in a spreadsheet, check for books that match (or come the closest to matching) the primary subjects as I interpret them. For instance, we know that some of the photos of museums are by Thomas Struth. In the Library of Congress, the book Thomas Struth: Museum Photographs by Hans Belting has the following subject headings: 

Struth, Thomas, 1954- — Exhibitions.

Photography of Painting — Exhibitions.

Art Museums — Pictorial Works — Exhibitions.

According to this system, I would assign a Struth photo to a book which shares the same primary subject keyword. The problem, here, is that I am trying to get away from the authorial notion of fonds in my placement of photos, so I should also strive towards a visual interpretation of the most appropriate subject, rather than simply reading the photo’s filename, and assigning it to a Struth book based on authorship. So, I would probably assign a Struth photo to “Photography of Painting” or “Art Museums — Pictorial Works.” I guess the question, then, is do I guess at the LOC-style headings that would apply to the photos, and then revise them if they do not yield any books? 

3. OK, so I will print my little LOC-style keywords on the back of each photo. I will also write the address of the mysterious V.I. fonds to which the photo belongs. Ideally, I would like there to be some incentive for finders to consider sending the photo back to the original fonds. On the other hand, there should be a competing incentive for the finder to assess the relationship between book and photo and consider simply leaving it in place. It might be useful to put each photo in a little catalogue envelope marked “SUPPLEMENTAL PHOTOGRAPHIC PLATE ON TEMPORARY LEASE FROM V.I. FONDS,” or something to that effect. And maybe an expiry date stamped on it, with a note asking that the finder return before [yesterday's date].

4. Now, a few of the photos are rather sensitive in nature, and give me pause. First, there is the fair question of confidentiality/personality rights. I am thinking of the passport photos, the party photos, etc. Would there be instances in which it would be appropriate to blur or black out the eyes (the black stripe in particular would inadvertently reference the over-cautious censorship characteristic of public archives). Or do we live in a sufficiently image-saturated internet culture that the last thing people have to fear is their image lying dormant inside a dusty library book? But the photos that concern me the most are the two that depict the horrible events of 9/11. Putting aside the idea that a conceptual archive project might be too whimsical a venue for such images, I could imagine being genuinely threatened or intimidated to find such photos inserted loosely in a library book. Is there a way around this?

I am going to compile my subject headings spreadsheet today (with prospective book matches) and post it up here. Comments and constructive criticisms are welcome. I would love to hear what other people are doing also.

Edit: Rather than place one photo per book, I could assemble the major categories of photos and then place them together in the same book in an envelope of “supplemental photo plates.” So each figure skater could go into a book on figure skating, etc. Maybe this represents a compromise; I will think about it further.

Revised project idea: The dispersal of the fonds

OK, scratch my convoluted homage to Chris Marker. I have a rather different idea now — it is not yet formed, but I feel I should write it down before it evaporates. It originally began as a mail art concept, but evolved after I did some mental postage calculations and realized it wouldn’t be feasible to spend $300 on a project, especially since I am saving all my money for rolls of Ektachrome 64 (see below). Anyway, I was thinking about Vid’s discussion of library interventions, and it occurred to me that it would be interesting to take this consolidated, but only questionably coherent “Ingelevics fonds” of 100 images and disperse it among books in the university library system. I would assign each photograph a keyword and number, then print them in colour, with keyword and number on the reverse. A brief note on the back of each photograph would note that the photograph in question belongs to the Ingelevics fonds located at such-and-such an address (I have a few ideas for which address, but be reassured, I want to take pains to avoid making any trouble for anybody). I would search the library catalogue for books with identical keywords, and place the photos in like-tagged books. I would probably copy the book cover also as record, thereby compiling a parallel archive that records systematically the physical dispersion of the fonds (thereby, in a sense, preserving the fonds while dispersing it). It would interesting to see if the fonds gradually crept back home through inter-departmental postage as librarians identified the photos and sent them back to their “rightful” owner. Of course, this could take years, and would never be fully realized, but it could be expedited in various ways (for instance, by enclosing them in envelopes identifying their archival provenance). This is the germ or the kernel of an idea, but I think it might have legs. Essentially, this would play with a notion that fonds are organic units and might possess a magnetic, unconscious force within them that seeks to return home — to stay identified with the personality that collected them and gave them collective meaning. I could get extra mischievous and disperse these through several public and university libraries, but I will first weigh the consequences carefully. The magnetic fonds…

Thesis-related digression

This is a digression from the topic of archives, but I have a restless need to broadcast a change of heart I have experienced in the last few days concerning my thesis. For a long time, I have felt that my documentary thesis project represented a concession, in that I couldn’t think of an unusual, obscure corner of life to document, so I adopted a thoroughly familiar subject. Now, I am passionate about my subject, but again, acknowledge little likelihood of shedding any “new light” on it, at least in terms of facts and arguments. Because of this, I told myself that I should produce a unique formal response to the subject, one that was personal and idiosyncratic and that visually addressed ideas about nostalgia, landscape, emotional geography and local identity.

My project was to consist of two parallel elements: audio interviews and a sequence of video images (note, I am implying a certain detachment or disconnect between these two elements, which is why I don’t simply call it a film). Having begun production, I have found that while my audio interviews have been generally successful (and thus encouraging), my videography has been uniformly substandard and plagued by technical difficulties. Discouraging, especially when visual (not sonic) issues are what I want to emphasize in the dreaded written component: I would really prefer to write about some roles of landscape in Canadian film and photography. Although I have seen wondrous video work from some colleagues, in my own amateurish work I find that HD video is characterized by a kind of banal indexicality, with little or none of the magic I associate with cinema. Now, if I had a living human or animal subject whose vitality could be depicted on screen (as in my short film Horse Patrol), any problems with the particular aesthetics of video would seem trivial. But in my work I am emphasizing absence, solitude, empty spaces, and applying a somewhat photographic approach to the depiction of loss; the problem is that while, in my mind, I have vivid, contemplative 4×5 film images, on my video viewfinder I have nothing but trite “b-roll.”  

For my project, the desired cine-photographic “magic” I am seeking is a sense of history/pastness. While it may be possible to produce this using expensive lenses, filters and post-production gimmickry, this misses the point, and I can neither afford the time or money to investigate such things. In this context, my recent epiphany has been to shoot the lion’s share of the project on Super-8. I do not feel this will go over well with my advisors, for a variety of reasons (technical, economic, etc.). But it perhaps would confer on the work the feelings of pastness and longing which elevate a lot of Canadian landscape film, but which are lacking from a lot of contemporary video art. Some of the sites I plan to shoot are non-descript modern apartments and anonymous middle-class houses, but maybe in Super-8 I can transport them somewhere, make them a bit mysterious, sad, innocent.

Or perhaps I am being too messianic about a mere medium (and a humble, low-res, audience-limiting one at that). I am not implying that expertise would come without hard work, or that “lyricism” or “poetry” would gush forth from an otherwise dry well. And I am certainly not looking for an easy way out (quite the contrary; I would like the extra discipline of having to shoot economically with little more than a 2:1 ratio). Furthermore, I do find something intimidating and possibly foolhardy about taking pains to procure access to sites only to shoot 3 minutes of footage with a 1970s home-movie camera. But when one of my profs admonished me in the winter to learn how to “play,” I realized that play is sadly lacking in me, with the result that I tend to produce work laden with conservative cliches and a stifling seriousness. Is this enough justification to think about a shift in medium? Could it assist an emancipation of repressed creativity? Of course, I wouldn’t consider such a route without a good deal of research, familiarization, and experimentation. But I think it might be right for me.

100 Images: Elaborations

Having categorized the images using several obvious (and less obvious) keywords, I found myself returning to some fundamental questions: why does this archive exist? What impulse or motivation accounts for the inclusion of these specific hundred images? 

After last class, I found myself thinking also about the concept of the fonds, the supposedly organic unit of archival organization that preserves groupings of material according to the individuals/organizations from which the materials originate. As Vid noted in class, the municipal archives created a fonds in his name when he donated a series of photographs of Toronto’s City Hall, apparently because, in the archives’ view, the photos are best understood in the context of his artistic practice, and would be deprived of this context if they were broken up thematically and added to pre-existing files. The fonds is an interesting concept, because it has a way of foregrounding the individual responsible for a section of the archive, with the implication that it is a window into a life. I first felt this sense of biographical intimacy last winter, while looking for archival footage of mounted police in the Archives of Ontario; rather than simply finding anonymous film of horses and riders, I came across a series of 8-mm films, depicting the personal travels of a local communist politician (one of which happened to feature a police horse). But the five-second transit of the police horse across the frame seemed inconsequential compared to the rest of the material in this fonds: watching VHS tape after VHS tape, I became fascinated with the man whose (evidently somewhat subversive) life was richly documented in kodachrome. The researcher, originally intrigued by a an academic theme or subject, finds that he cannot help but ask of the fonds: whose life does this represent? Therein lies some of the mystery of an archive.    

So, I have been thinking it would be interesting to address both the “why” of the archive as well as the “who” question (imposed by the fonds structure), rather than simply to organize the photos in a coherent way. But let’s set aside, for a moment, the possibility (likelihood?) that the “100 Images” archive was compiled strictly for the purposes of this assignment, and temporarily ignore our (admittedly partial) understanding of the compiler’s intellectual interests and concerns.

I have contemplated inventing a fictional situation that led to the existence of this body of images, and then presenting the archive according to a speculative system of categorization, one that actively seeks to know and understand the benefactor of this fonds. And perhaps the mode of presentation could be a slide-show (or to lend the project an air of inflexible institutional authority, a film) that presents the “known facts” about the archive in voiceover or intertitles, and then proceeds to speculate on the meaning and proper categorization of the archive. The film would conclude by inviting outside researchers to visit the archive and examine its materials, with the caveats that they must submit to all the kafkaesque access obstacles set forth by the institutional bureaucracy. This last point is key: it emphasizes the prisonlike air of impenetrability and authority, as described by Eric Ketelaar, that so often characterizes archives. (Take, for example, the way archives periodically showcase their prized materials by assembling them in glass display cases. The glass cases, which allow the archivist to interpret the materials in a particular order — effectively producing a narrative — ironically must be seen to limit, rather than expand, researcher access to the material. After all, you can’t touch things behind glass, and pulling up a desk to a display case for the purpose of extended study would likely be discouraged).    

I am still thinking of a premise that would explain the existence of this archive, these 100 images.  I suggested to some classmates that maybe the images were discovered in a box after a devastating archive fire or other catastrophe, and the filmmaker-archivist has only this odd, partial archive to comprehend its maker — like some alien life-form trying to learn something about humanity from the songs and inscriptions floating through space on the Voyager spacecraft. Graham noted that a fictional film composed of still photos with an underlying post-apocalyptic premise is somewhat reminiscent of Chris Marker’s La Jetée; it will be interesting to explore the implications of this further.  

My only reservation about this project is that it strives for a lot, perhaps too much: to invent a fictional raison-d’etre for the archive, to develop an alternative (non-obvious) system of categorization, and to make a statement on the institutional authority separating archives from the public. Each of these components could produce a project unto itself. Feedback is welcome and appreciated.

100 Images: Some first thoughts

A cursory examination of the 100 Images archive provided by Vid reveals that the photographs fall into several obvious categories. The fullest category would be museum and gallery photographs, which could be subdivided into 1) photographs that emphasize the patterns of spectatorship in these spaces (and accordingly, feature crowds) and 2) photographs of largely empty rooms (populated only by the solitary, yet omnipresent security guard) that seem to take as their subject the neglected corners and portals that help to define and organize these interior spaces. I believe that this division reflects two separate bodies of work (those of Thomas Struth and of Vid himself) , but I am not aware of each image’s authorship. Other clear categories are: aerial/satellite photographs of highway intersections, passport photos, images of Asian photographers in various comically distended poses, photographs of Stephen Harper, and action shots of figure skaters. 

Perceiving certain deeper relationships between the photographs, and wanting to identify categories for some of the more non-sequitur images, I opened the pictures in Adobe CS3 Bridge, and used it to tag them with keywords (organizing the archive into a rudimentary database, if I’m not mistaken). Some of my keywords included: “Aerial,” “Columns,” “Crowd,” “Dance,” “Historical photograph,” “Landscape,” “Museum,” “Painting,” “Photo of photos,” “Portrait,” “Rural,” “Statuary,” “Skating” and “Through glass.” To be sure, this was a helpful exercise in identifying and visualizing unseen connections, but it created as many problems as it solved, because it foregrounded the difficulty of organizing such disparate images into coherent, sincere, and definitive categories. For one thing, lacking context, many of the photos are hard to interpret: does one particular image depict a gallery or a museum? Are the people sharing a meal in the image “party002.jpg” actually having a party in some way like the raucous one shown in “pizza09.jpg,” or are they merely eating together? Are these even relevant questions?

I also discovered the risk of falling into a certain inconsistency of intent, by grouping some images into categories on the basis of an ironic, fanciful, and/or non-literal interpretation of those categories. For instance, a crowd is generally taken to mean a dense grouping of people, but could it not also apply to a dense assemblage of dead, taxidermied animals (in the postcard from the Provincial Museum in Victoria, B.C.)? I am not sure that archives organized on the basis of clever puns and punch-lines serve much purpose.

Lastly, I found that the task of interpreting the subject of a photograph can be near-impossible, and debated whether objects of secondary or minor importance within a photograph can contribute to its categorization, and whether this runs the risk of trivializing the resulting categories. For example, while Vid’s pictures often, very subtly, point to the presence of a security guard in the room, the guards in Struth’s photos blend seamlessly into the crowd, and their inclusion in the composition appears unintentional — less mise-en-scene and more punctum, to be discovered or ignored based on the viewer’s own innate tendencies and curiosities. So, can we say that the presence of museum security unites the two photographers’ images in a non-trivial way?

Perhaps getting into knots over categorization is the way to realize this project. Or perhaps there is some other way.