Photographs: Material Form and the Dynamic Archive PDF

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47 Elizabeth Edwards Photographs: Material Form and the Dynamic Archive* The photographic archive—the site of a thousand stereotypes, gathering the dust of a century, a source of fever, a site of taxonomic and self-evident meaning, an ideological performance, an embarrassing legacy of past interpret...

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Elizabeth Edwards

Photographs: Material Form and the Dynamic Archive* The photographic archive—the site of a thousand stereotypes, gathering the dust of a century, a source of fever, a site of taxonomic and self-evident meaning, an ideological performance, an embarrassing legacy of past interpretative and methodological follies.1 An archive—of photographs—something separate from the dynamic of a discipline, something to be mined when useful, ignored at whim; a mere passive resource, tangential to the main business, a mere supporting role whose significance is defined not through its own identity but through asymmetrical relations with other objects which it serves to confirm in some way or other.2 Even language—archive instead of collection—speaks to this. Photographs simply are a passive ‘resource’ activated not through their own force, but through that of the historian and their consequent juxtaposition with other classes of objects. In this paper, which is very much in the unashamed character of a polemic on the material archive and its potentials, I want to take a broad theoretical and methodological sweep which asks what happens if, as an heuristic position, we stop thinking of photographs and their archives simply as passive ‘resources’ with no identity of their own, but as actively ‘resourceful’—a space of creative intensity, of ingenuity, of latent energy, of rich historical force. How do photograph collections and their archival preservation elicit readings, impose themselves on the embodied experience of the user, shaping their content for the user? What, within this, is the role of the very materiality of the archive, and what are the consequences of its digital translation? Having outlined this position, I shall briefly consider three bodies of work which demonstrate the importance of ‘thinking materially’ within the photographic archive. The first, from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shows how material concerns *

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I should like to thank Costanza Caraffa for inviting me to take part in the original symposium, and thank her and Gillian Grant, Liz Hallam, Clare Harris and Joan Schwartz for their comments and conversations on this topic. They have been immensely helpful. See for example, Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, transl. by Eric Prenowitz, Chicago/Il 1996; Allan Sekula, “The

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Body and the Archive”, in: Richard Bolton (ed.), The Contest of Meaning, Cambridge 1992, pp. 343–389. See Gaby Porter, “Economy of Truth: photography in museums”, in: Ten.8, 34 (1989), pp. 20–33; Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Anthropology, Photographs and Museums, Oxford 2001, pp. 183–207.

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were central to the building of an archive. The second is a consideration of Gillian Rose’s argument on the affective space of the archive and the production of ‘the researcher’. Finally, I shall discuss briefly a digital project which attempted to translate the material saliency of the archive into the digital environment. My argument draws in particular on theories of material culture from within anthropology, which over recent years have explored the ways in which the material environment, notably things—here photographs, archives—mediate social relations. For, I shall argue, it is in the social relations between people and things, that photographs and archives, as resonant objects, become ‘resourceful’. Similar concerns have also emerged in a broader cultural analysis. Notably, in refiguring a vitalist model, W.J.T. Mitchell has famously asked “what do pictures want?” as a means of accounting for “the agency, motivation, autonomy, aura, fecundity or other symptoms that make pictures into ‘vital signs’”.3 How do such characteristics shape our engagement? What do they desire of us? How do they imprint themselves on our disciplinary actions? This is not a collapse into crude animism on one hand or fetishism on the other, a subjectivising of the photograph or the archive, but to recognise the dynamic relations between persons and things and the social saliency of objects, as Mitchell puts it: “to refine and complicate our estimate of their power and the way it works”.4 Mieke Bal, too, has called, in a similar way, for the reinvigoration of the object within cultural analysis, in which “objects from the cultural world are opened up to close scrutiny” and in which “an important consequence of the empowerment of objects is that it pleads for a qualified return to the practice of ‘close reading’ that has gone out of style”.5 That is, how might one account for the material saliency of an object—such as an archive or a photograph—is returned to analytical prominence. These questions and positions, and the challenge they pose, are especially pertinent in the consideration of the dynamic material qualities of photographic archives. For it is perhaps significant that our awareness of the material power of the archive emerges at precisely the moment it is under threat, perhaps that flash of memory and history, of awakening consciousness in the moment of danger that Benjamin described.6 For the move to a too-often ill-considered or unconsidered digitisation threatens to obliterate historical materialities and formative affect, and install others, because it is important to note here that digital environments are, of course, themselves socio-technical assemblages, with agency, affective and material qualities.7 But too often these processes amount to an unconsidered re-scripting of the nature of the archive and the histories which might emerge from it, yet it is these latter, not the analogue archive, which are increasingly presented to scholars as ‘the archive’.8 What is at stake here is vitally important to the way the tools of a discipline and its practitioners are perceived—whether in art history, history or anthropology—for the historical archive is structured through a series of highly significant material practices. These material practices have been imagined to create a resource, a body of information, without loss of that information, presented in a way to create maximum visibility, and the transmission of information. This is what a resource actually does. But at the same time, the archive, and the individual photographs in it, stand for both the social practices and the processes of a discipline, their shifting assumptions and desire are embedded in it. They con-

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W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Loves and Lives of Images, Chicago 2005, p. 6. Ibid., p. 33. Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, Toronto 2002, pp. 8–10. Walter Benjamin, “A Thesis on the Philosophy of History”, in: Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, London 1992, p. 247.

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For a discussion of these broader issues see, for instance, José van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, Stanford 2007. See Joanna Sassoon, “Photographic Materiality in the Age of Digital Reproduction”, in: Elizabeth Edwards / Janice Hart (eds.), Photographs Objects Histories: on the Materiality of the Image, London 2004, pp. 186–202.

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stitute the archaeology of the discipline and thus constitute its ‘ecosystem’,9 and, as we are all aware, ecosystems are delicate structures, the destruction or unbalancing of which can have catastrophic consequences. I would argue that the danger to the analogue archive and all that it can tell us, is its very construction as a mere ‘resource’. If the photograph and the archive are reconceptualised instead as not merely passive ‘resources’, but ‘resourceful’ as I suggest, it is necessary to ask the crucial question: what is the significance of those material forms, how is the technological assemblage rendered ‘social’ and therefore active? Photographs and archives might be described, following Alfred Gell, as ‘distributed objects’ in that they are, at one level, bound together as objects, yet comprising “many spatially separated parts with different micro-histories”, that is, material parts and their unfolding social relations which are entangled in different and significant ways.10 Such sets of social relations are manifested archaeologically through the marks, traces, material accretions, and disturbed surfaces of the archival objects, and through multiple material configurations and multiple formats of the distributed object. They reveal traces of, for instance, systems of truth production at any given historical moment in the ways in which photographs were acquired, owned, stored, displayed, exchanged, and collected. In this the archive becomes a material manifestation of social relations in which images are active. This raises further questions such as how did people assess, acquire and use photographs? What were the truth values associated with different kinds of photography and which thus shaped collecting practices? How is this traced in the material archive? In what ways were they disseminated? What were networks of exchange? What were the resonances for viewers of different material forms? How was information about photographic sources disseminated through social relationships of the discipline for instance? How do photographs shape the practices of institutions? What are the patterns of absence in collections? The material and dynamic archive is saturated with these questions, and more importantly, in part with their answers. These questions, which obviously I cannot pursue in detail, are fundamental to the work that photographs are asked to do, not only in terms of images but in terms of ‘things’ that people expected to behave or perform in certain ways. For material choices are affective decisions which construct and respond to the significances and consequences of ‘things’ and the human relations to which they are integral. These ideas about the sociability of objects, which can only be outlined here, suggest that objects (here archives and photographs) are not merely stage settings for human actions and meanings, but integral to them. They have, as I have suggested, been developed largely in anthropology in the work of Bruno Latour and Daniel Miller, for instance, and in theoretical and phenomenological archaeology in the work of Chris Tilley and Chris Gosden. Of particular influence again has been the work of Gell, as I have already suggested, who has argued for the diverse ways in which “social agency can be invested in things or emanate from things”.11 Through this idea of the social agency of objects, Gell argues for a more “action centred” approach to things and the way in which they play a “practical mediating role […] in the social processes”.12 Latour develops similar ideas in a version of “actor-network theory,” the guiding principle of which is that things, here again archives and photographs, must themselves be regarded as actors in any socio-technological assemblage. Akrich adds to this theorisation, in a way which in some ways anticipates Gell’s agency argument, arguing that the idea, that objects im-

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I am grateful to Costanza Caraffa who used the word ‘ecosystem’ in an e-mail exchange and set me thinking in this direction. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency, Oxford 1998, p. 221. For an example of this concept applied to collections see Frances Larson, “Anthropology as Comparative Anatomy: re-

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flecting on the Study of Material Culture during the late 1800s and late 1900s”, in: Journal of Material Culture, 12/1 (2007), pp. 89–112. Gell 1998 (note 11), p. 18. Ibid., p. 6.

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pose back onto humans through a process of ‘prescription’ by which objects carry a ‘role expectation,’ predicts certain experiential and embodied responses through the qualities of its material being.13 Material forms are, of course, not primary agents, they have no consciousness and no direct intention, but as Dant has pointed out, systems of intentionality are themselves articulated through the material forms of objects and through the systems of values that enmesh objects.14 However, significantly, it is notable how often archives and documents are endowed with a metaphorical quality of personhood and action. For instance, the philosopher of history Paul Ricoeur describes documents as “sleeping” while photographs themselves are often assigned “voices” which “speak” in tones from “shouting” to “whispering”.15 Material objects are rather, however, what Gell has described as secondary agents, in that they are objective embodiments and materialisations of the power and capacity to demand or will a use in certain ways, for certain ends, permitting particular cognitive operations.16 Following broadly from this position, Miller has attended to the precise material qualities of objects. He has argued for a kind of banal materiality such as one might encounter in photographic archives— lantern slides, 35 mm slides, labels, boxes or filing cabinets: “[B]y dwelling upon the more mundane sensual and material qualities of the object we are able to unpick the more subtle connections with cultural lives and values that are objectified through these forms, in part, because of the particular qualities they possess”.17 Importantly here, Miller, rather than thinking only about how things signify, which he maintains privileges an intellectualised response to objects, suggests that it is necessary to think about “how things matter”, as a way of allowing a space for the subjective.18 Thus, especially relevant for any consideration of photographs’ materiality, much is to be gained analytically in understanding the specific ways in which different material forms become meaningful—a point to which I shall return in my three examples. Significantly, there are resonances of this approach in recent writing in historiographical theory, sometimes drawing on the same body of literature, notably Latour.19 Echoing Miller’s argument on ‘mattering’ as opposed to ‘signifying’, Ewa Domanska has recently pointed to the idea of historiographical ‘significance’ not in terms of representation or a signifying discourse, but through “the materiality and thingness” of the material trace rather than on its “textuality and content”.20 From this, Domanska argues a position of ‘material hermeneutics’ which, like Bal’s reinvigourated object marked earlier, brings the consideration of the material back into the centre of historical understanding and interpretation. Key to my argument here is her contention that “instruments”, here the photographic archive, printing papers, mounts, boxes and so forth, mediate experiences and articulate desires to the extent that they “co-constitute the reality studied by scholars.”21 Even the most mundane of material existences and practices point to both the complex producing and indeed productive practices which enable a statement to exist in certain ways.22

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Madeleine Akrich, ‘The De-Scription of Technical Objects’, in: Wiebe E. Bijker / John Law (eds.), Shaping Technology, Building Society, Cambridge 1992, pp. 205– 224. Tim Dant, Material Culture in the Social World, Buckingham 1999, p. 121. For a related argument of social saliency and instrumentality see Joan M. Schwartz, “‘We make our tools and our tools make us’: Lessons from Photographs from the Practice, Politics and Poetics of Diplomatics”, in: Archivaria, 40 (1995), pp. 40–74. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, Chicago 2004, p. 169. Ibid., pp. 20–21; Elizabeth Edwards, “Thinking Photo-

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graphy beyond the Visual?”, in: Jonathan J. Long / Andrea Noble / Edward Welch (eds.), Photography: Theoretical Snapshots, London 2009, pp. 40–43. Daniel Miller (ed.), Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, London 1998, p. 9. Ibid., pp. 3, 11. For an extended consideration of this point, see Elizabeth Edwards, “Photography and the Material Performance of the Past”, in: History and Theory, 48/4 (2009), pp. 130–150. Ewa Domanska, “Material Presence of the Past”, in: History and Theory, 45/3 (2006), pp. 337–348, here p. 337. Ibid., p. 341.

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In such a reading, and this can be only a very basic summary of the debate, photographs and the archive are dynamic forces within networks of non-humans and humans which themselves constitute social processes. They exercise a form of agency as powerful and active players in that it is not the meanings of things per se (here what a photograph is ‘of’) which are important, but their social effects as they construct and influence the field of social action. Thus, the choices that constitute objects cannot be reduced to a single purposeful expression, they are latent with incidental meanings. This ‘active materiality’ is no better demonstrated than in the discourse of the archive as a site of resourcefulness, where the accuracy, truthfulness, and authority of the socially active historical statement is technically and materially performed through the attention given to the exact nature of image-objects that comprise the archive and their ‘affect’ on users.23

Some ‘Resourceful’ Archives In order to put some flesh on these theoretical bones, I want to look at three bodies of archival objects, and engagements with them, to consider their ‘resourcefulness’—their creative direction of meaning, because all three were made to perform specific roles and intended to elicit certain forms of response. The first example is the extensive and dispersed archive of the photographic survey movement in England, comprising amateur photographs of objects of historical interest (parish church architecture, old cottages and customs) made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.24 Not only does this archive constitute a dispersed object—created through different micro-historical trajectories, yet discursively united as a single object. The material qualities of the archive were central to the active performance of that discourse. In the collections of photographs gathered for these archives, enormous intellectual, and indeed physical energy, was expended by their makers over the precise material forms the archive and the presentation of the photographs within it should take.25 In this material form the dynamic materiality was seen from the inception of the archive as central to the expectations, understanding, and archival performance through which these photographs could come to have meaning. These material debates revolved around key archival values of accuracy and longevity, materially expressed. What size of negative? Could it be retouched? Did enlargements obscure or illuminate? Should platinum, a very stable process, be the only desirable printing process? Or should silver prints be allowed if this were the only way of preserving the desired historical object? The relations of mounts and labels are especially revealing. What kind of visibility should be afforded to the photograph? Should there be cut mounts which protect the physical chemical deposits from abrasion and thus disappearance of both the photograph and the referent for whose preservation the photograph stood? Should labels be placed on the back, or apprehended in one visual act? What did this mean for the viewer? These choices were material performances of moral, scientific and subjective desires, without which this archiving project cannot be understood. For instance, as John Tagg, commenting on these archives and the way labels were deployed on mounts, has noted, there was an “extraordinary expenditure of commentary and moral fervour […] [devolved] onto this little slip: how much it should say; to whom it 22

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Bruno Latour, Science in Action, Milton Keynes 1987, p. 69. See Elizabeth Edwards / Janice Hart, “Mixed Box”, in: Elizabeth Edwards / Janice Hart (eds.), Photographs Objects Histories: on the Materiality of the Image, London 2004, pp. 47–61.

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Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera As Histo...