September 14, 2008
When I opened the images for the first time I was a little disappointed. Most of the images didn’t spark any interest in me. Many of the images were already categorized in terms of subject and name. There are a group of figure skating images, a group of passport photos, a group of aerial images of Toronto, etc… To keep them in these categories of subject and name would be very boring and uncreative.
I need to make the images more exciting for myself. I began to think of different stories that I could tell using the photos. Stories with accompanied text, or stories with just the images.
The types of images are very random and diverse; it will be difficult to create one cohesive narrative. Maybe I could play with multiple narratives?
On closer inspection the images I like the most are the older black and white and sepia toned ones. Paring them with more contemporary ones could be interesting.
I will have to think on this.
September 25, 2008
I have been thinking a lot about how to present the images and what medium to use. I like the idea of a book. I opened Blurb, Booksmart (book making software) and began to drop some of the photos into the program. Using the images within a book will support the idea of a narrative.
I am drawn to the images that I like. I am repelled by the other images. It is difficult to figure out how to use the ones I dislike, because I want all the images to be aesthetically pleasing.
September 28, 2008
I have placed all the images in the Blurb book layout within their subject categories. I now have a better idea of what the images are and how certain images look together.
Maybe I could centre my narrative on my favorite image and go from there. My favorite image is the black and white photo of the young boy at the wedding.
October 5, 2008
I am interested in memory, and would like to use that as a basis for my narrative. Maybe these images could represent someones memories and wouldn’t really be images at all.
I have uploaded all the 100 images onto Flickr.
This is a unique project because I have no personal connections to the images. Part of the process of trying to organize these images is about creating personal connections.
October 14, 2008
The more I look at these images the less cohesive they become.
However, I have come up with a tentative story. It is through the eyes of an elderly woman, 80 years old. She lives in the English countryside, just outside of London. The story is told by the woman as she recounts a day when she goes to London to visit a museum/art gallery. The 100 images in the archive represent her memories, so they are not actual images, but images within her own psyche. Some of the images are memories from her past; others are what she remembers from the day. Because of her age her memory fades in and out and some parts of her life are more vivid than others. I would like the images to reflect the notion of memory.
I continue to move all the images around in order to tell her story and see how they work together.
October 24, 2008
Pierre Nora’s article “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire” is helping me to explore memory for this project. Nora discusses memory, “It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived” (8). I want to play with these evolutions, deformations and manipulations. Nora also says that memory “…nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic—responsive to each avenue of conveyance or phenomenal screen, to every censorship or projection” (8). In my book I want to deconstruct the 100 images, maybe repeat them, make them blurry, close-up, or tiny, maybe change the colour etc, all to reflect the fleeting nature of memory.
October 26, 2008
I have started with digital images and I am changing them into printed material images within a book, however they are representing memories, which are ever changing. There are many different layers of representation.
At this point I have some concerns:
I hope the book does not become too literal. Within the narrative I will be describing the images, the same images that are right there. I am not sure how this will work?
Am I allowed to manipulate the images, is this within the rules of the assignment?
October 27, 2008
I am interested in family and personal archives. My project for the 100 images assignment is related to the personal archive. Personal histories evolve into larger questions about cultural histories. Archives can remind us of what is unattainable and of what can’t be grasped. They create a discourse between fiction and reality, the public and private, and memory and history. They also create threads that bind us together across time. They explore history, memory and identity.
Through personal archives personal histories are revealed. Private archives bring the unheard and the invisible into the light, creating new stories that question official histories. They reveal the familiar in an unfamiliar way. It’s about a ‘discourse’ rather than a ‘document,’ the discussion that surrounds a work, rather than just an arbitrary record. In Dot Tuer’s book Mining the Media Archive, she discusses the notion of making new histories, “…the reconceptualization of history as circular and fluid, rather than chronological and fixed” (Tuer xi). We are continually reshaping the past to understand the present. The breaking down of history into new images creates new narratives and memories and a more diverse collective archive. Tuer writes, “In its imagined form, this archive houses local and translocal conversations about the importance of art as a reflection of social reality and struggle. Far from being dusty and archaic, the archive becomes a dynamic montage of the past and present: a repository for the steady trickle of utopian interchanges between life and art that lies beneath the surface of the simulacrum, and a talisman against the historical amnesia of global corporate culture” (Tuer xi). Our connection to the past gives value to the present. The artist and critic, Allan Sekula, in his article The Body and the Archive, writes, “Our problem, as artists and intellectuals living near but not at the center of a global system of power, will be to help prevent the cancellation of that testimony by more authoritative and official texts” (Sekula 64). Sekula feels that personal archives will shift the power imbalances of official archives and therefore create a more inclusive and truthful history.
Archives are often incomplete—just like our memories. Using the archive is like being an archeologist and trying to gather traces of the past and putting them together in a way that creates new meaning. Art critic, Hal Foster writes about the will to connect within an archive. In his article, An Archival Impulse, he says, “A final comment on the will ‘to connect what cannot be connected’ in archival art. Again, this is not a will to totalize so much as a will to relate—to probe a misplaced past, to collate its different signs (sometimes pragmatically, sometimes parodistically), to ascertain what might remain for the present” (Foster 21). Making sense of archives can bridge the gap between the fragments of our memories and the significance they hold today.
Roland Barthes, in his book Camera Lucida, discusses his mother’s old photographs and what they meant to him after she died. He writes about the experience of going through his own family album looking for clues and ways to uncover or tell his personal family story, “There I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it. The photograph was very old. The corners were blunted from having been pasted into an album, the sepia print had faded, and the picture just managed to show two children standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory, what was called a Winter Garden in those days. My mother was five at the time (1898), her brother seven” (Barthes 67). By studying this little girl, Barthes rediscovers his mother. He says that before he found this photograph, he could not ‘find’ his mother or the essence of her identity. The photograph was the mediator of truth, a living reality, and a complete memory.
In modern times, the archive has become a significant means by which historical knowledge and memory are collected, stored, and recovered. Critic, Lucy Reynolds, in her article Outside the Archive: The World in Fragments, writes, “The works strategically oppose the constant re-organization of the past, a process which, propelled by the acceleration of history, removes its experiential lining. Instead, they promote a kind of memory which is felt, and which has the power to affect us in the present” (Reynolds 47). The traces of archives are powerful in deconstructing history, memory and identity.
November 1, 2008
I have been trying to write a story to go along with my images, writing it from the point of view of an elderly woman. It’s not working and doesn’t seem to fit.
Could I tell this story without words? Is a story an archive? Is a book an archive?
I went to Vid’s website to see which images were from his projects, most are very related to his interests. Some, such as the Hunter/Gathers (wood piles) are from his recent art exhibition. It’s difficult to take these images which are already the archive of Vid and then try to force the images to have different meanings to myself and others.
I’m having second thoughts about my story. So I have decided that my story will not go throughout the book, but that I will tell the story at the front of the book, or the back and then the images will just speak for themselves. I think this will make for a more interesting project and give the viewers more power in creating their own narratives. The images may take on different meanings with different viewers.
At some points during the process of this project I felt that my archive project should not be so structured and that I should not be imposing so much meaning. But any arrangement of images imposes meaning.
November 4, 2008
In between watching the election I have spent quite a lot of time arranging my images, manipulating them and distorting them. I have also spent a lot of time creating a narrative.
I have decided not to have the story written in the book.
The book/archive will be called:
A Day in the Archive of Memories
At the beginning of the book it will read:
This is an archive of memories. The memories are from one woman about one day. They are images that represent what she remembered during that day. They are distorted and manipulated. Some are clear and others are fuzzy. Some images represent events of the day and what she actually saw or experienced, others represent things from other times in her life or things that were triggered by what she saw that day. She often gets confused, but regains her focus and her narrative. It is a rare look into the information that is stored, retained and lost in memory.
I am happy with this. I won’t be actually printing this book, I am going to project it through the computer. I think this makes more sense for presenting purposes.
This book is a different kind of archive. It’s not one that has categories, or one where the user can choose the images they want to look at. It’s what Jacques Derrida describes in Archive Fever as a personal archive that shows the intimate traces of a private life.
A personal archive that shows the intimate traces of a private life.
November 10, 2008
From the very beginning of this project it was difficult for me to get excited about the images and really engage with them. It was difficult to create a meaning that wasn’t there. But through the ideas of memory which relate directly to the ideas of archives and photographs, I was able to think about the images through different parameters and create a narrative structure. Narrative was very important for me. I was then further engaged through the narrative by manipulating the images and spent a lot of time playing with each and every one in Photoshop: zooming in and out, darkening and lightening, blurring and making images more vivid, cutting and duplicating, etc… I wanted to tell a story and create an aesthetically pleasing archive.
November 20, 2008
I presented today:
A Day in the Archive of Memories
This is an archive of memories. The memories are from a day in the life of 85-year-old Mary Gorski. Mary lives in a small town outside of London, England. On September 24, 2008, Mary went into the city to visit a museum. The images in this book represent what Mary remembered of that day. Many of the images are deformations, manipulations and appropriations, reflecting the fleeting nature of memory. Some images represent events that took place during that day—what Mary actually saw or experienced. While other images represent memories from the past and were only triggered by what happened that day. Mary often gets confused and forgetful, but she is still very sharp and is usually able to regain her focus and narrative. This archive is a rare look into the information that is stored, retained and lost with memory.
I will give you a little information on Mary Gorski’s background. She was born in 1923 in Krakow, Poland. Her maiden name is Danka. She and her family immigrated to Boston in 1925, where she grew up. She had two sisters and one brother. Her father ran an insurance company in Dorchester (South Boston). Mary was the bookkeeper there. In 1943, she married Chester Gorski who was an electrician, also from Poland. They had two children, one daughter, Elsa and a son, Peter. Her son now lives in Toronto and her daughter lives in London, England. When her husband died, 5 years ago, Mary moved to England to be closer to her daughter and grandchildren. She often goes to London to visit the museums and galleries. She likes to sit in front of one image for a long time, almost in a meditative state. Mary also enjoys walking through the many different rooms and drifting between the different images, losing herself in time and place.
The detailed interview with Mary Gorski took place on the evening of September 24, 2008 over the phone by Lindsay Maynard. The images representing Mary’s memory narrative were compiled by Lindsay Maynard during the fall of 2008.
This book is what Jacques Derrida describes in Archive Fever as, a personal archive that shows the intimate traces of a private life.
My process was to create a narrative, to give meaning to these images as a whole. I centered the narrative around one photograph, the black and white family snapshot of what appears to be a wedding. This was the photograph that most interested me. I used the notion of memory as a way to create my narrative. I also wanted the archive to be aesthetically pleasing. My intent is to have viewers use their own imagination to link the images and create their own meanings for what the story is or could be.
In Pierre Nora’s article “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire” he discusses memory, “It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived” (Nora, 8). Nora also says that memory “…nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic—responsive to each avenue of conveyance or phenomenal screen, to every censorship or projection” (Nora, 8). The photographs within my archive have been manipulated to reflect the fleeting nature of memory.
During this process I was continually asking the question: what is an archive? I don’t have an exact answer, but I know that archives are about remembering, and that they are often about exploring personal histories. These personal histories evolve into larger questions about cultural histories. Archives remind us of what is unattainable and of what can’t be grasped, they are often incomplete. However they do create a discourse between fiction and reality, public and private, memory and history. A Day in the Archive of Memories attempts to explore these issues.
Comments on my project:
1. The power of design as a way to create meaning, the relationships between different images.
2. Literature—a story, as a way to frame the archive.
3. The intimacy of my archive.
4. Will I be printing the book? An actual book to hold would reflect the precious nature of the images and the story.
5. Through the context of Pierre Nora my project has more meaning.
6. How true was my story? Were there personal truths?
