ARCHIVES, NETWORKS AND NARRATIVES Awareness of the historical accumulation of photographic archives has expanded exponentially since the invention of the internet. Wheth private or public, anonymous or authored, photographic images now form a massive new presence as a type of archive material. It is not only that the internet has given greater access to existing archives, but that it has also begun to radically change what we think an archive is. No longer are photographic archives merely filled with dusty piles of boxes, although these certainly still exist, but the digitisation of photographic images online has also generated new networks related to each other through software systems. These systems are beginning to change the way we experience the relations between images in a number of different ways: the changing values of public and private, image and text, past and present, and the links between one image and another in narrative formations. The internet itself functions as a new type of meta-archive, linking vast quantities of individual archives. However, we might start with the institution that houses the dusty boxes, and which relates most obviously to art archives: the art museum. Museum Archive Museums and art museums are far from universal and are a relatively recent invention. Yet every museum has a history. The Louvre in Paris is one of the oldest art museums and remains a classic example of a European history: at first it was a private collection of art in a royal palace, then, following the 1789 French Revolution, a national public museum, Under Napoleon it also briefly became a repository for artefacts from im- perial conquests, at once creating an image of self and others, including those conquered. The Hermitage in St Petersburg has a similar history, first as a private royal palace, before its conversion into a public museum. In England, the royal family still has its own private art collection, but the ‘National Gallery in London, established by the state in 1824, is based on a separate collection of private paintings. Since 1838 it has been housed in Trafalgar Square, so named after the 1805 sea battle with Napoleon's fleet, placing national identity and a cultural museum in direct proximity. Collections of artefacts for private or public display are thus never a neutral activity. Museums aim to serve particular interests, whether personal, cultural, regional, national, international or global. Museums act as repositories of cultural memories of the past, the present or implied futures, and organise historical narratives of culture, While the function”) of museums is to organise and display artefacts and materials, they also inevitably create inventories and interpretations of them along the way. | The items selected and arranged - both within the architecture of the ‘museum and its online platforms ~ are often chosen from a vast repository, aiming to construct a particular story or a pattern of engagement with 105 Figure 69 Raymond Depardon, Harar Ethiopia 2013 my NrERPRET1 Fenton lling spectator, This, ind texts for the strolling or scrolling sp objects, im basic scenario of complex factors can be taken as the typical situation for all kinds of museums and archives. Photography performs a peculiar double role within these institutions. Photographs can function as both a collected artefact that might be put sa way to collect the museum and its artefacts, since the on display photograph is a form of archive in its own right. A number of museum artefacts can be collected in a single photograph. Consider the first photographs taken in the British Museum in London. The museum was established as a state collection in 1753, when SirJohn Sloane bequeathed it to the nation. The museum's first official photographer, Roger Fenton, was employed in 1854 to document its anded Gustave Le Grays photography studio artefacts. Fenton had school in Paris in 1851 and, like Le Gray, had also studied as a painter with Paul Delaroche in Paris almost a decade earlier, albeit briefly. Again like Le Gray, Fenton tried to sustain himself as a professional photog- rapher in these early years of the medium. In addition to his infamous Crimean war pictures, his photographs ofthe royal family at leisure won him the commission to set up a new photography studio in the British Museum. Fenton considered this commission of museum photography to bbe a most ‘useful an application of the photographic art’? To photograph the artefacts of the museum, he noted, would benefit everyone, and dem- onstrate how ‘photography could help the museum catalogue, classify, and disseminate information about its burgeoning collection and prove Photography's usefulness to the other arts’? Fenton photographed the moveable objects in a rooftop studio for maximum light, but for other, larger objects he had to settle for 106 3 Ibid pe in Baldw 2004, p16,Moles Pictures (looking back Tendon 2006 photograp! ig them in the museum's interior. His photo, an impression of how it was to see these objects in ot iphs create the Victorian era. The iphs evoke a ‘pastness, which shows the effect a photograph n have on how we see the things in it. The pictures themselves create an atmospheric itself c pace, with a kind of silence around the artefacts, a stillness of the historical museum. This is what Walter Benjamin called the ‘aura’ of an object, created by the historical distance that is experi~ enced in relation to it. With historical time, Fenton's photographs have become famous and feature in museum shows and exhibitions as arte~ facts in their own right. The effect of such photographs is not necessar- ily nostalgic, provoking a desire in the viewer to return to some imagined past invoked by the image; rather, the meaning of the image is also intertwined with the present. Archive photographs not only record objects and events, they also produce a meta-archive, with meanings that can be mobilised in other times and new contexts, Public museums, increasingly conscious of different audience de- mogtaphics, link the display of archives to various categories of cultural memory, butalso to types of forgetting. In this sense, museums make implicit and explicit choices about how to arrange artefacts and what to say about and through them. Archives, reconfigured into museum displays, construct narratives of what can be held to be art or culture (or whatever the rubric of the collection is), as we have already seen on pp.59-60, where Berenice Abbott's collection of Eugene Atget photographs came to provide a foundation for the values of modem art photography in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.* Cultural Memory Museums accumulate archives and mobilise them to meet cultural- institutional goals. In recent years, artists have become more conscious of these institutional roles, sometimes taking them as the focus oftheir work Louise Laver’s photographs feature artworks in private homes, public museums or auction houses and other key institutions that organise taste and evaluate art aesthetically, critically and economically. Her pictures show how art is contextualised or de-contextualised by these environments, and contrasts them in relation to one another.* Her photographs of exhibition installations of art highlight the institutional production of value through a sort of museology of ar as art photography. Lawler's pictures cast a keen anthropological eye, with a visual framing ‘that is attentive to the institutional aspect of display, from behind the scenes ofa museum or auction house presentation, to domestic settings. ‘They offer mostly fragmentary glimpses of artworks in these spaces and make a gently critical judgment. Quietly pensive, the photographs draw the spectator into a mesh of questions about spatial relations, taste and ‘value of these objects. Lawler's photographic work does not so much judge the museums or galleries as ask questions about the relations between. artefacts and the underlying logic that drives the degree to which a work: belongs to its setting. In observing this, her works begin to highlight the subtle ways that cultural values such as gender, ethnicity, social currency, poftical affiliation and sexuality are brought out in or projected onto a ‘ork, Look at Lawlet's photograph taken in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1983. 107108ess icty of The foreground space of Statue before Painting 1982 (Gg,71) is dom- Fira 72 ae inated by the legs and genitals of Canova's Mycenaean warrior Perseus | “ouseLarl sto PSN 4304-6 and its plinth, which Lawler has copped to echo a rectangular Painting. sbntauaut'scoay lit space i the background, though which Giovanni Batista Tiepolo's 1 saeactzaers painting The Triumph of Marius 1729 canbe seen, Between Perseus tins 160 genitals and his hand ~ which holds the sword with which he severed the head of Medusa, held in his other, out-of-frame hand - the museum's architrave leads the eye straight to Tieps eral’s victory over the Aftican king J 's depiction of the Roman gen~ wurtha, Among this neo-classical symphony of violence and victory, tiny figures stand before the vast painting. We can see ho ‘museum architecture frame the spectator, while Lawler's own framing and cropping strategically emphasise the archival potential of photography, as the sculpture and painting recede from the surface of the photograph itself. The photograph, alongside others, makes an imaginary museum, ‘a montage of objects collected in one space, as once posited by André Malraux. A ‘museum without walls’ has come to fruition, materialised in photographs, websites, art books and photobooks (as they have ‘become known) “Thomas Struth’s museum-based photographs turn this idea of the photograph as a museum into a question about the art museum itself (Gig. 72). Lawler’s work looks at the organisation of artworks in relation to each other in the museum space. Struth’s photographs, on the other hand, look at the social interactions between a modern audience and i historical artworks in different world-famous museums. His pictures examine these patterns of viewing art in museums, and show a clear {interest in the sociological dimension of the audiences of art. Mixed groups and individuals crowd together in front of and around paintings to form tableaux-like arrangements. Some photographs hint ata curious disjuncture between the time ofthe historical paintings and their modem mass audiences. Struth seems to see that his own photographs are creating pictures of these museums, with the audience integrated as part of theirimage. While tourists and school groups do not quite seem obelong to the same time as these historical pictures, this also reminds lis that the paintings’ original, intended audiences are long gone.* ‘The life-size scale of the paintings and the restless flow of passing visitors exacerbate the contrast between the culture ofthe past and the Tnodern museum visitor. The visitors seem, and indeed are, transient Compared to their static, painted counterparts, which are powerfully fixed in their pose and instance of light forever, However, no museum is timeless. Infact, itis precisely the encounter with these historical aitefaets that gives the experience of, and generates thought about, time and temporality. ‘We may contrast these works. which are so explicitly concermed with the polities and aesthetics ofthe cultural at museum, with workby erst and photographers who address the museum by contributing in other sways to its archive. These ave, for instance, made by creating different image taxonomies, using existing archives or constructing new ones from arvaretyofother cultural artefacts not usually considered of museo}ogical Sahu, giving them new value and cultural significance by bringing them within the museum as an artwork: museum visitors ~ the sightlines within the 109) eeei10igures, with others in the bac ; round. They ‘ound, who seems indifferent to them. F nark he 1 urbane eleganc and dr - apart, and she appears to be thoughtful, perhaps yondering her future. This is not a Cinderella rags-to-riches fantasy re 1989 aa represented in cultural archives. The National Gallery of Australia in jy eee Canberra, the county's capital cy, now owns tis work, so by finding burner aes its way into a national archive, this Aboriginal story of desire and social siolence helps re-figure an understanding ofthe past within the present, which also fosters and hopes to anticipate a different future. Susan Hiller's Dedicated to the Unknown Artists 1972-6 (fg.74) is a collection of Some three hundred postcards, all ofthe coast around Britain, Each postcard presents an image, variously black-and-white or hand-tinted photography, several of them paintings; all are of waves crashing over different parts of the coastine. Arranged on fourteen panels pecome part of an archival display of how a culture in grids, the pictures sess itso, repeated over an iconographic trope - the postcard seascape, A tap on one panel plots the locaton of ech image, Together, the scenes Greate a kind of musical chythm, with the seas rolling lyrically against the shores of the British Isles. Postcards are usually seen as ephemeral as folk art or popular culture that usually circulates outside high-art m1.Figure 74 The postcards depict waves crashing onto shores around Britain, Alatge map annotated with each ofthe locations featured in the postcards ts inchded inthe frst Panel, The tte refers to the overlooked and forgotten artists who painted, photographed or hhand-tinted the seaside mages, elevating them to art through memory and ‘asa memorial nstitutions (even if they bought inside them). By bringing to- er begins to show something more: the ima gether these postcards, Hiller begi § inary belonging that is at work across them. The pictures create an image .ged by the sea, its coastal edge repeatedly of Britain as relentlessly be battered by the elements. The sea’s accumulating natural force begins to suggest a very powerful energy (as also featured in Turner's famous paintings), which stands in metaphorically for an imagined or actual in~ vasive force or power. This effect might also be linked to some emotional threat by a hostile person or idea, against which one must create de fences. In what seems to be an adoption of the attitude and methods of an anthropologist or cultural archivist, Hiller suggests that these images are worthy ofa level of attention beyond that which they would usually receive as mere postcards. Yet by tuming them into an archi she does something else to them too. Hiller celebrates the authors ofthe postcards as ‘unknown artists’ ~ a term that resonates with the ‘unknown soldier’ of war memori~ als. The anonymous artists who made these images are recognised as belonging to a whole group of ‘unknown artists; which by simply install ing the postcards in the gallery raises the question of their status within culture and social memory. Why is the coast such a considered and repeated scene in postcard imagery? Is the violence ofthe sea a symptom ‘of what people identify as important? In effect, this is what Hiller’ s work asks: do these humble, anonymous postcard images not tell us some- thing about a particular popular concept ofthe British Isles? Are these anonymous artists speaking to some collective idea or ideal through the artwork, 12repeated iconography of th and coastline, imag: ning some abstract fear signified with the edge of the island? Do these pictures not drammatise and allegorise in a popular form the imagine ss nagined community of an island under siege by external forces? Postcards often inhabit people’ ‘homes in places that art does not: on the front of a fridge, propped ona shelfor mantelpiece, stuck on the wall or a door, and so on. Made in the 1970s, Hiller’s work offers a counter memory, an alternative to the sometimes-bombastic history of art told through galleries or a nation’s trophy war-ches tures, which frequently belong to the ‘official histories’ of a nation or Population. Contemporary artists and photographers bring new types of imagery to the archives of museums and wi st of paintings and sculp- alls of galleries, contributing different types of images, narrative: 's and aspects of culture to them, as seen in Hiller’s work. In the aftermath of historical events, archives can become a resource through which to rethink ‘what happened?’ Archive materials can be used to generate unofficial accounts, which may well conflict with official stories, The retelling of stories helps to situate conflicting accounts of of ficial and unofficial histories, but differently. Photography can play a huge role in this cultural issue, Photographic collections promise (or threaten) to overwhelm museums with masses of archives, as people have taken photographs all their lives, from commercial photographers to amateurs, with alist of themes that is potentially endless. Some such archives and practices have found their way into art, or are mobilised explicitly to make it, The particularly strong emotional effect of photographs and their sense of specific historical presence are often key elements in this type of archive practice. By implicating the viewer in fragments of different stories in a very direct way, photographic images help to make possible new or other stories, other versions of what happened. So while we tend to think of museums as orientated towards collecting the past, they are in fact as orientated towards the present and future too. Remembering and Forgetting ‘Today the internet and the wide availability of mobile phone cameras have begun to transform the speed and quantity of visual recording and archiving of experience. Within reasonable economic means, itis easy to ‘select and distribute pictures and have access to modes of representation, ‘Anyone can send pictures and texts to others online to relate their social orpersonal experience. As the internet has begun to show, ‘archive fever is a prevalent aspect of human behaviour, with everyone collecting some- thing or other, either as objects or via photographs. Photography enables anyone to collect anything - food, clothes, found objects, pets, people, places, scenes, events, activities and processes ~ as part of a personal online collection, We can increasingly see that, while any archive makes present the past, itis always produced according to the particular interests ‘of those involved, and in this way develops a conditional presence for its future use, Thus, cultural memory becomes a problem of whose memories and perspectives are stored and retrieved and whose are forgotten. na polemical essay, the US critical Foster contrasts the archival impulse to an allegorical impulse and the ruin of meaning, which had been so central to postmodernism.’ Although they both appear to have similar 113 Peeconm laree Cone) onl—————— 75 Figure : ad reframing of popular images and The tactic enables archive and partial strategies of sampling, quotation a stories, the archival impulse is dif fragmentary stories that are associativ artists to construct new, fragmentary Seog Stl hs, Teagan estes wasted Tiere of ested yes sion misting em Tan iste meaning Thilo the sim of achive sed a : different realities in new ways, presenting effective ee arratives, which can be completed by : - t intentionally construct archives, so an archival di é Sacre anised for these archive ive tates ht om ono ante, depending onthe isitional [nation andthe diptin or dacourse fone institution, whose context ibing reconsidered rom within aod vik Mandel and Lan ult s exhibition and photobook Eien 77] rough together photographs fom government agencies, corporations, research and educational institutions. Being granted access and reproduction rights by such organisations’ archives is no mean feat $ The monochrome photographs document a variety of scientific and other experiments, but since the artists’ selections remain uncaptioned, there are few or no clues as to the context of their original purpose beyond the fact they are documenting something. Each image could as readily be a science-fiction scene as a document of scientific research. These types of presentation replicate a bystander’s outsider view ~ outside the institu- tions’ specialist knowledge. The photographs’ often bizarre scenatios fore- ground our lack of actual knowledge as to their purpose, and force us to consider the evidence of meanings and events to which there is otherwise little or no access. The limits ofthe popular belief that photographs speak for themselves become only too apparent when the discourse to which they belong is withheld, Anonymous pictures culled from archives or found in attics are a recurring theme, attractive to artists for their enigma, the riddles they pose and the uncertainty of meaning in their aesthetic values. Never originally 114 i del andok by Hunt 201 0 The standa is Allan Sek he Body andthe 1992, See also Tagg 2012. intended a these pictures from other visual values, with what might other correct pictorial values, Inad often bring strange ise be regarded as mistakes or ntl, these different aesthetics renew interest in what can be done with a camera. Eventualy, though, the unt miliar has become familia, as many albums and archives of photographs ate uncovered or rediscovered. The forgotten is made visible. In this sense, photography has been responsible fora much wider set of transformations ‘towards a visual knowledge, with the massive use of photographic images as documents and records across a wide range of many, fnotall, i stitutions and practices. Today almost every organisation uses photographs to archive events, document its staff and display its values to others, There isa strong uttealist legacy to these practices of disrupting con- ventional social signification systems. Although the use of archives is. often identified with conceptual art, the revaluation of the outmoded or discarded was a key component in the surrealist toolkit. Surrealist pub- Tications often included found images, postcards and other anonymous pictures. Browsing in street markets and elsewhere, junk was retrieved, photographed and given new significance through a kind of re-archival method. The discarded became the regarded. Compiled into a new | archival space, the photographs served to critique existing culture and its histories. Images and their objects were used to signify ‘thing presentations; to reveal unconscious or repressed thoughts. The surrealists created deviant archives, opposed in structure and form tthe criminal ormedicl photographic archives found in organisations maintained by the state.!° The criminal archive developed by the police was designed to form a ra~ tional picture of criminal identity The ‘criminal body’ was photographed in ways that was often informed by medical or quasi-scientific theories of physiognomy and anthropometric measuring systems. The vales of medical and police photography were intertwined to serve as disciplinary images, aimed to exert power of the state over the individual subject. Salvador Dali's The Phenomenon of Eestasy 1933 (fig.76) intentionally undoes this power structure by mixing up medical and criminal photography alongside other types of image. As a minf-archive, this pictute is thor- oughly eclectic and anti-scientific. Dali's montage jumbles mate and female, medical and criminal genres, sculptures and real humans ears and hair all together in elements of irregular size and shape. Dali appears to adopt the logic ofthe archive, to produce nota stable scientific record but ajoulssance, akind of ecstasy and deathly pleasure, Hysteria land ecstasy are not easily distinguished ftom one another, as was argued at the time by medical theory. Subvertng the dominant medical theory that hysteria was only feminine and never masculine, Dali reuses photographs from stich classification systems to insinuate that, just as bait and ears are found across both sexes, s0 isthe stat of ecstasy. No state-sanctioned scientific values can constrain these bodily experiences Trench artist Sophie Calle has egularly used the construction of a photographic evdenced-based archive a the model for her artworks. She Freates chronicles of daily events, for example, using a diary mode with photographs, mimicking official records of a scientific process. In Hotel Room 28 1981 (fig.77), evidential-type monochrome photographs of a hotel room in one panel are juxtaposed with a singular colour photograph asa hotel bed and fine-printed text in another, The text describes in the neutral manner of a detective report hat was found or seen in th ‘oom on specific days. The accompanying introduction to the work in- forms us that Calle had been temporarily employed as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel for three weeks, during which time she had taken these photographs and mad he notes that accompany them. The apparatus ofthe archive provides a ready-made structur and the viewer's understanding of how to read it. Calle gives an authorial voice to the images via the texts, which hint that some sort of surveillance operation has been engaged in. The artwork implicates the ‘viewer in this process, making one feel complicit in investigating these people's lives. Like a detective report by Sherlock Holmes, or the many fictional detectives in stories that have updated the genre ever since, the viewer is given a set of ‘facts’ from which a mystery is to be solved. Only here, there is no crime apparent in these images; there is only the evidence provided by the unwitting hotel customers, whose belongings ate disclosed as ifthey are part of a crime scene. We are tricked into suspicion. ‘The enigma of the story is in fact Calle's curiosity, not the actions of the room's occupants. Her report, made through subterfuge and spying, ‘mobilises the apparatus of the archive to introduce us to Calle’s (and pre~ sumably our awn) fascination with what goes on in hotel rooms, their residents and what can be read into their possessions. We too are impli- ‘cated in the creation of a mystery. But what is this mystery? What is the story to be disclosed by these photographs and texts? What we find out about these people is perhaps less interesting than the artist's methods and our own prurient activity as voyeurs. Of course, the hotel is'@ note rious location for illicit affairs and dubious deals, as well as for innocent visits. Calle’s voyeurism, and our awn, no doubt trades on these ambi- sities: the work induces a guilt in looking into people's private lives, yet this also seems justifiable, in that perhaps, as in the movies, we are observing people who are guilty of something. But this in turn begs the (question of whether, ifthey are not innocent, this justifies the scrutiny of their affairs, The viewer is certainly left to consider the ethical im~ plications ofthe position in which they have been put. We may admire Calle's audacity, or feel quite uncomfortable about her furtive intrusion {nto privacy, but the interest in her work thrives on the uncertainty of these attitudes and values, Yet Calle’s work does come close to the sense that something disturbing, thas happened here, some sort of mystery, a primal scene or hidden plot cr story that it would seem to be too embarrassing to mention directly ‘The atchive is thus often associated with trouble, asa scene of trauma: distant memories, either repressed or partially forgotten, returning to haunt the archive investigator or the viewer. Detective stories set out to dispel mystery, to reveal the ‘ruth’ ofthe story, but we only scratch the ‘surface of the drama here. Calle manages to balance the work elegantly ‘on a fine line between the question of public knowledge and private intimacy. The surface knowledge given by the pictures and the texts con- structs an archival presence but gives no depth to any interpretation, ynor to any teal intimate knowledge of the goings-on in the hotel. In this vas, the work frasrates the true voyeur, dissatisfied with what they see, 7 Figure 76 fesiasy 1933 published in M December 1933) our11812 Wiliam Henry Talbot, cited because they ways want to see more. Th 3 archi impulse in Calle a narrative drive in the viewer, which ultimately is never resolved and remains elusive. This desire to know belongs to what can be called ‘archive fever’ Archive Fever As long ago as 1995 French philosopher Jacques Dertida described ‘archive fever’ as a contradiction atthe he Conservation is driven, paradoxically, by of the dea of conservation." the possiblity of forgetting, Since human memory is limited and not infinite, the retention and registration of impressions within photographs has come to be associated with the idea of remembering and the desire toretum to something beyond the capacity of spontaneous conscious memory. The anxiety of remem: bering is thus that which we will forget. Its also tue, on the other hand, that we may wish to forget something that has already happened. We can see all this as the paradoxical drive of archive fever, which is at work right from the beginning of photography and other forms of memory inscription ‘William Henry Fox Talbot anticipated the idea of photography as an archival practice, useful as ‘museum’ initseé The prospective applications ‘and purposes of this would tum out to be, to understate the case, both ‘multiple and considerable. Photography is now clearly a pervasive means to register information and to record impressions, from the banality of ‘ordinary insurance recotds and parking offences to family events, friends ‘and many other social experiences. Photographic data files remain a vital tool across diverse fields of state and scientific knowledge, used to document geographical, military, police and political activities and processes, alongside their massive use in culture industries, personal, social and popular~ ‘Tatbot’s Articles of China (ig.78) is one of several photographs he pro duced of collections of objects: glassware, Dooks, hats, set dining tables, ‘vases, jars and plant leaves.” Writing on the Articles of China picture in ‘The Pencil of Nature, Talbot notes that ‘the whole cabinet’ of a collector might be depicted on paper in little more time than it would take him ‘to make a written inventory’? Today it would be a litle quicker. Talbot speculates that the photograph might be ‘a novel kind of evidence used in testimony against a thief caught with pusloined objects, o show the true ownership ofthe treasure. Talbots archive desire already amticipates i future violence ~ in the theft ofhis possessions. Although thisis merely one [future meaning that might be anticipated by the collector, it demonstrates | | how the archival drive is also wedded toa future significance, as much | | as to the present or the past: 4 Th practice, human memory is acomplexand unstable matter not eaity edible to simple binary oppositions like past and present, true andfalse, fealty and ftion. Memory can conflate Or compress separate moments together, and confuse diferent times entiey. By consigning memory to documents, texts, imas ges and objects, this relieves the human brain of the burden of recording or remembering things accurately, yet seems to pass om the capac ay for uncertainty to these prosthetic substitutes to, rWe know, for instance, that this depiction of china by Talbot is an invented archive, Te realism ofthe photographic image denies its con~ structed nature. We cannot tell from the 19 photograph that these shelves Figure 77 “Two works on Pa AAC Dw and 14142_eessSsSsS=.==—_ae__qj cm 15 Proust 2003, would have had insufficient light for th Ne al pest eae verity of its status without reference to other sources of infor f Nature (1844-5) | ory ~adate ora name, for example just as digital files have metadata that canbe mined for information too. Only inthis sense aze photographs part-archives, components ofa lager body of knowledge, which belong to and are situated within a narrative context o discourse. In the case of Talbot, this is his archive of negatives, diaries, letters, notes, and s0 on Despite the scepticism that may be felt towards the truth-value of any photographic resource, the photographic image itself nevertheless creates a real positivity which is affective as much as itis logical. In this way, the significance ofthe photographic archive lies not merely in designating whats tre or false, but also in constituting a dimens knowledge. Whether divisive o distinc, the photographic image represents ‘a statement for interaction with human memory and culture, The question ] to ask - in art, at least - is not so much ‘is it true?’ as ‘what does it do?" AS “What isthe effec ofthe stor or fragments ofinsight that a wok relates? Return of Repression Some students of photography may expect a dutiful reference here to F ‘Camera Lucida,3* Roland Barthes's last book on photography, for its work on memory and the ‘return of meaning’ in a photograph that the book eventually addresses via a family archive. Camera Lucida meditates on the role of memory in photography and establishes a duality of meaning in photographs, as social and personal. Barthes makes this distinction in Latin terms: the social meaning of a photograph being its studium, where a social message is read via cultural codes derived from a particular society; and the punctum betrays a highly personal meaning, something Blinn ¢ private and purely individual, which affects only a particular viewer, Wor tm Barthes's thesis on memory is preigured by one ofhis references, Marcel Proust's literary epic In Search of Lost Time.*® Proust deals with the accumulation of memories during a lifetime and makes a distinction ‘between voluntary and involuntary memory~ distinctions that resemble Barthes's photographic categories of studium and punctur. Like Barthes's ‘punctum, Proust's involuntary memory is also activated by some detail, Tice the treasured madeleine cake in his novel, which in tur sparks an associative chain of mental images and forgotten memories. The pasts conjured up, recovered and associated withthe thing that triggered it Photographs also have this capacity to trigger and generate memories, just as an objector smell can, and can even be used to reinvent thelr ‘meaning. The mechanism of involuntary memory may explain the fase vation for anonymous photographs encountered in an archive, where an iinage suddenly sparks an associative chain of ther images in the mind of the viewer. The photograph has involuntarily triggered obtuse emotional feelings, beyond any obvious logic, not easily rationalised by the studium or social meaning ofthe picture. “hs Proust had noted, voluntary or conscious perceptions are surface perceptions without depth, and he likens them tothe instantaneous 121, eeeSSS ee ee snexhibition, Involuntary memory, by contrast, 16 Freud 1984 ‘as significant and embedded in 17 Bernard 2002 glance at photographs in a refers us to something already identifies e not actually conscious of it at 1g persida 2010 nt, when the odour of the cake en: our memory, even or especially if we the time, Proust's ‘madeleine mom : ‘elops the whole of the protagonist in a memory, is the classic example which introduces memory of this type of involuntary memory as effec tsa problem tthe photographic archive, The meaning of Talbot pho tograph of china, then, despite his own assertions about its future social function, may well end up being subject to involuntary associations generated by other viewers. In this duality of voluntary and involuntary meanings, fantasies about history and the subject's own relation to these antiquities can intertwine, activating new meanings, steering the photographic image into domains of thought that are far from Talbot's original description. Such is the slippage of meaning to which all historical images may be subject. Proust's distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory shows that the effect of engaging with archive images is far from guar~ anteed, the outcome is far from certain and indeed, for that matter, not necessarily as pleasant as the ‘madeleine moment’.The memory trace can evoke not only an uncanny disorientation, but also an involuntary pain. Barthes developed in Camera Lucida an understanding of this negative dimension of effect. In such cases, the terror of the sign is not in the material image archive, but in its interaction by those who encounter it, located within hidden memories. Here is the idea of the traumatic “return of the repressed; as Freud understood it, for example in soldiers returning from the First World War. In the retum of the repressed, Freud angued, an experience that is not quite registered atthe time returns later to haunt the subject in other life experiences.%* Involuntary memory, whether positive or negative, pleasurable or painful, leads to associative tracks in human memory that extend beyond the literal image. _Archives, then, in the formulation and methods explored here, are never passive entities simply waiting to be found or discovered, but the result ‘of someone in the construction of some discourse or other. No matter how ramshackle, eclectic, disorganised or rational an archive appears, itwill have been mobilised, narrated and organised for a number of pur- poses or means. Curiously, Proust was himself an iconophile, obsessed with photography. He would purportedly demand a portrait photograph from any new person he met who especially interested him. Those who promised to send one but failed to do so were besieged with letters com- ing they had not met their promise and requiring them to do so - a refrain he would continue until they complied.” We find here the same archive fever at stake as in Talbot's image, whose wish to collect objects together is for a future anticipated meaning, although we do not really know what this was in Proust's case. What we can say, though, is that ar- ‘chive and memory are obverse terms to one another, mirrot images held apart by the photographic impression and its potential for life stories. These archives are the narratives we tell ourselves about who we are, will be, or were. Collecting things is an activity of memory, perhaps in anticipation of its dissolution. This might even be, as Derrida has hinted, lke Freud, an anxiety about death, even, paradoxically, in archive images of war and conflict.* Such are the negative and positive dynamics 122 ee ee:ated by artists who use archives in the formulation of an artwork, whether it is pronounced as a cultur: jal, political or individually orientated work. The internet provides a new way to consider links between archives, and to create it is the sp lifferent networks: narratives. However, ce of culttire and memory that gives narrative space to these forms. The photograph, with its pensive form, lends a certain visibility to these anonymous narratives. A photographic archive enables the con- struction ofa bridge between art and non-art, to reformulate who we are and the temporal space in which to conceive the images of where we live. 123