SNAPSHOT – 21.3.2018

Barriers

Volume Excess Surfeit Abundance

Fragility

Alleviations

Curation

Durability Antrifragility Permanence Fixity

“I see a lot of beauty in the broken.”

“A photograph is flat, it has edges, and it is static; it doesn’t move. While it is flat, it is not a true plane. The print has a physical dimension.”

“For over one hundred years artists have made books of a handmade bespoke nature. An awareness of the depth of creativity, innovation and expression that these artists’ bookmakers have accomplished offers the photographer an opportunity to break free of the pervading paradigm and transform their self-published products. Through an understanding of these freedoms and their application the photographer can exceed the basic creative form that pervades the discipline today.”

SNAPSHOT – 20.3.2018

Background: As a photography student in the first decade of the 21st century, I was taught to revere both the qualities of the printed photograph and the ephemeral nature of digital files.

Context: Until recently, the goal of photography has been to fix shadows upon a surface for future viewing. Today, photographs often remain in a state of flux, and we are overwhelmed by their abundance, without really understanding their nature. Whilst institutions employ experts to take responsibility for collecting and preserving collective photographic history, individuals are frequently adopting new photographic practices, even before considering the implications for future generations. If photographs are to be available in the future, then individuals must take responsibility for maintaining their own photographic archives.

Question: How could we alleviate barriers to keeping photographs for posterity?

Objectives: To identify barriers we currently face in keeping photographs for posterity, to propose approaches for alleviating these barriers, and to produce a collection of photo-media based artworks, suitable for exhibition, that creatively respond to the research question.

Methodology: There is no longer a clear...

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MELBOURNE ART BOOK FAIR

Under a stained glass roof, creative booklovers unite for the annual Melbourne Art Book Fair, hosted by the National Gallery of Victoria.

At an art book fair, anything goes. There are no rules about what is or isn't an art book — it's an inclusive community, with a niche for everyone (even me). I shared a table with my friend and fellow photographer, Sarah Abad (we share an affinity for tangible photographic vessels).

5 Press (always one of my favourite tables) is a collective of Melbourne-based print makers, including August Carpenter whose monochrome monoprints and hand-bound books posess the gravitas of unique and fragile objects echoing the landscapes they represent (watch this space for a possible collaboration).

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“Photography does not create eternity... it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.”

THE PRINT

When thinking of a tangible photographic vessel, first and foremost the print comes to mind. On most occasions, a print is made up of paper, plus ink or chemicals, which divulge the tones of the image.

The photographic print exists in many forms. The print can be classified as a fine art object, read and commoditised along paintings, sculptures, and more, in an art gallery. The print is innately an historical and cultural artefact, preserving a moment in time on its surface, sometimes created by someone with forethought and sense of archival preservation. The print is taken as authority in the identification of someone on documents such as passports and drivers licences. The physical print is always a tactile, sensory object, it can be owned, given, bought or sold, it can be lost, damaged, or deteriorate over time, and it can also be wholly destroyed. The print is a photograph, a finished image, beyond a negative or digital file, affixed to a surface for future viewing, to reach this process it has often survived rounds of curation and elimination, before being deemed worthy of printing. Printed photographs have traditional...

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“there is simply no equivalent of the permanently archived, physically unique photographic negative. Image files are ephemeral, can be copied and transmitted virtually instantly and cannot be examined (as photographic negatives can) for physical evidence of tampering. The only difference between an original file and a copy is the tag recording time and date of creation – and that can easily be changed. Image files therefore leave no trail, and it is often impossible to establish with certainty the provenance of a digital image.”

TANGIBLE/INTANGIBLE

Some photographs are tangible – you can touch them, perhaps even hear or smell them, taste them if you really want to, visible with nothing more than a naked eye.

Others are intangible – you can't hold them, and they are only visible whilst being viewed on a screen, decoded by software, reliant on hardware, powered by electricity.

“The material things that accompany us on our journeys through the decades will often outlive us, and they are where we keep the stories we will pass down... a lot of the paper photographs will endure both in museums and in private hands. Indeed they may become more valued as they are recognised to be old, fragile, and rare, but we may forget how to look at them as they were once looked at.”

THIS IS PHOTOGRAPHY

The distinction between analogue and digital photography has faded. While the processes remain distinctly different, we live in a hybrid world. Film is scanned and Instagrammed. Pixels are printed – I can even use my phone to expose instant (Polaroid) photographs.

As I look holistically at photographic practices, the words analogue and digital have become somewhat redundant distinctions. It doesn't matter how a photograph was made, just that it was made.

"Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

PHOTOBOOK NZ

I recently flew across the sea, with a suitcase full of books, to Photobook NZ, a festival that connects New Zealand's photobook community with the world. Held in Wellington at the Museum of New Zealand: Te Papa Tongarewa and the College of Creative Arts at Massey University, the second biennial festival welcomed high calibre international guests from around the world.

Throughout the lectures I was fortunate enough to attend, the act of returning again and again to a place, and the weaving of poetic words with photographs reverberated. I sadly missed Carolle Bénitah’s talk, who’s work literally strings together photographs, using “beads, coloured threads and scissors to alter her family photographs and albums to explore the memories of her childhood, and as a way to help her underst...

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“How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible.”

SNAPSHOT – 8.3.2018

What barriers exist to keeping photographs for posterity?

How can these barriers be alleviated?

THE FAMILY TREE

Do you have photographs of your parents? Of your grandparents? What about your great-grandparents, or great-great-grandparents? How many of your ancestors left photographs of themselves behind for you to see?

Mother? Yes.

Father? Yes.

Maternal Grandmother? Yes.

Maternal Grandfather? Yes.

Paternal Grandmother? Yes.

Paternal Grandfather? Yes.

Maternal Grandmother's Parents? Yes, both.

Maternal Grandfather's Parents? Mother only, aka Grandma Bessie.

Paternal Grandmother's Parents? Yes, I think.

Paternal Grandfather's Parents? Probably.

Great-great-grandparents? Let me have a Google and get back to you!

SNAPSHOT – 6.3.2018

How could we
mitigate alleviate
barriers obstacles
to keeping conserving
our photographs for posterity?

DO YOUR PHOTOGRAPHS HAVE NAMES?

I should be more specific. Do your digital photographs have filenames? Of course, by nature, they must. But, what are those files called? Do they have unique names, or simply the names generated by your camera? If you consciously name a set of files, do they all get the same descriptor, or are they each customised? Do you name your folders too? If you go to the trouble of naming your photographs I'd assume you also name your folders, but what do you name them?

I don't name my RAW files, I let the camera do that for me. Although if it allows I will choose to insert my initials into the filename. When, if, I save JPEG, TIFF or other files, I'll batch name the files "YYYYMMDD_Description_##" which translates to something like "20171202_Home_01" or "20180304_Posteritas_©ChloeFerres_01" although this is mainly for the benefit of family, friends or clients who I share photographs with.

But, no matter what, I always systematically name the virtual folders that contain my digital photographs. In my early days, that meant sorting photographs into folders like "Family" with subfolders such as "Chloe" or "Evie" (the family dog). As my photographs multiplied (and I learnt from professional photographers) this method proved to be chaotic and unsustainable. Over a decade ag...

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“Internet-centric explanations, at least in their current form, greatly impoverish and infantilize our public debate. We ought to steer away from them as much as possible. If doing so requires imposing a moratorium on using the very term ‘Internet’ and instead going for more precise terminology, like ‘peer-to-peer networks’ or ‘social networks’ or ‘search engines,’ so be it. It’s the very possibility that the whole — that is, ‘the Internet’ — is somehow spiritually and politically greater than the sum of these specific terms that exerts such a corrosive influence on how we think about the world.”

THE ORIGINAL TABLET

Title: Library of Ashurbanipal

Year: 7th Century BC

Description: "Late Babylonian clay tablet: table of lunar longitudes. Contains a table for the daily change in the duration of the visibility of the moon on the thirty days of the month of the winter solstice according to the tradition of the city of Babylon." From a series of cuneiform clay tablets excavated in Kouyunjik, northern Iraq, believed to be the remains of King Ashurbanipal (668-c.630 BC) of Assyria's great library.

Significance: These clay tablets have weathered thousands of years, and still retain enough information for us to read. How long will our modern tablets last? I suspect that the iPad I am typing on will not be able to show you these words in a few decades, let alone hundreds of thousands of years...

UNEARTHED

The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto exhibited Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross, buried in 1944, dug up in 1945.

“I buried my negatives in the ground in order that there should be some record of our tragedy.”

FILE ROOM

Artist: Dayanita Singh

Year: 2013

Description: "File Room is an elegy to paper in the age of the digitization of information and knowledge. The analogue photographer and bookmaker has a unique relationship with paper that is integral not only to the work of making of images, texts and memory, but also to a larger confrontation with chaos, mortality and disorder in the labyrinths of working bureaucratic archives in a country of more than a billion people."

Significance: Dayanita Singh's photographs of papers printed on beautiful matte paper and bound in a book is a cyclical celebration, as is much of her work including Museum Bhavan which repackages museums into concertina books or miniature museums which were subsequently exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. Her work is proof that the SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS + SEE MORE