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.
