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Image Archives in Practice by Ines Schaber

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Image Archives in Practice by Ines Schaber Obtuse, Flitting by, and Nevertheless There – Image Archives in Practice by Ines Schaber PhD Thesis in Research Architecture, Centre for Research Architecture, Department of Visual Culture, Goldsmith College, University of London Supervisors: Avery Gordon, Eyal Weizman 1 I hereby declare that the following work is my own. Ines Schaber. Berlin, August 2011 2 Abstract Over the past thirty years, the status of the archive as well as the state of what we call “documentary” have dominated discussions in and around photography. Although it is now commonplace to presume the objectifying gesture of documentary photography, the complex question of how, as a working artist/photographer, to approach the archive has not yet been adequately addressed. The purpose of this research is to raise questions about how, after the critique of the documentary image, the artist/photographer addresses, indeed, finds the archive. I am starting with the assumption that the archive is not only a place of storage but also a place of production, where our relation to the past is materialised and where our present writes itself into the future; thus, accordingly, I understand the archive as a place of negotiation and writing. After the problems of the archive have been identified theoretically, the practice in the archive still encounters challenges and contradictions. This project explores those difficulties that remain within the practice in and around the archive, even after the critique has been stated. It is not about simply extending the critique, but finding an archive and the practice with it. I am approaching these questions as a practitioner. As an artist and photographer, I am concerned with two practices in relation to archives: working with existing archives, and making work that will itself be archived. The point raised by those two activities is not to find or create another institutional archive per se, but to develop an archival practice in which the set of problems that the archives produce is in fact part of the process one engages in. Hence the work is a theoretical and practical set of experiments that may never be complete and conclusive. 3 Table of Contents This thesis includes a variety of documents, such as critical texts, images, works of art, and interviews. I have organised the material in four Cabinets, each of which is headed by four specific questions most relevant to the approaches I take to the practices in and around the archive. Preface Discourses around the photographic image and the archive—What I mean by practice—Artist and photographer: how they are distinguished and/or separated: photographs as part of bourgeois culture and as a technical medium (Sekula)—Historical development and theoretical discourses around the archive in general (Foucault, Derrida) and the image archive in particular (Sekula)—An attempt to picture the institutional procedures (Resnais)—Other archives and other forms of practice (The collective of Tucumán Arde)— Questions in and for practice—Limits of disciplines (Laclau, Gordon), interdisciplinarity (Barthes), and the questions of knowledge(s) (Taussig)— Benjamin: materialist history, dialectical image, and forms of montage— Thesis—User’s Manual—Cabinets. Cabinet 1: What is the relation between language and images? C1_Quote by Walid Raad on the relation between language and images C1_Introduction While moving from one place to another, photographs provoke various readings that are influenced by the language that surrounds them—The text around the image can be personal, explanatory, illustrative, interpretative, independent, tagged—The writer and the photographer: a collaboration; positions of the spy and the counter-spy—Image and text: prohibition, regulation, sorting, classification, photo essay, and narration— Archive and language: abstraction, loss of context and use, clearing house of meaning (Sekula)—Archival systems of rationalisation and language—The discursive spaces of photography; cultural worlds, forms of knowledge(s) (Krauss)—Practices around the archive: thick descriptions (Geertz), general captions (Lange), changing fields (Goldblatt)—The image’s front and back: 4 horizontally split—Digitalization—Struggles, translations, readability (Villesen)—Dedisciplinary exercises (Mitchell). C1_Image: Hine Six out of one hundred images by Lewis Hine photographed in 1910 in Pennsylvania as part of a commission for the National Child Labor Committee. C1_Essay: Unfinished Business Visibility and Enlightenment—Social documentary photography and its promises—Lewis Hine—The critique (Rosler) and the question of what remains despite all—A series of images in different archives—Rules, laws and regulations of archives—Public archives and commercial archives—Changes in reading—Control versus interpretation?—Accessibility versus historicity?—The right of the author versus the right of the owner?—Practices—Uncanny encounters—Travelling images—Faces and landscapes. C1_Work: Schaber_Picture Mining Trip to one of the commercial holders of the Hine images (Corbis)—Relations between places and images across time—Reinterpreting images, adding new ones—Montage of the old with the contemporary—Uncanniness—Lecture. Cabinet 2: What is an author? C2_Introduction Lange’s Migrant Mother: An iconic image, its readings and interpretations—Ownership versus Authorship—Obligations to act, limits to do so—The civil contract of photography (Azoulay)—Marxist readings of the photographic process (Edelman, Tagg)—Agents of the photographic process— The death of the author and the limits of the cancellation (Foucault)—Practices around the notion of the author, intentionally confused (The Atlas Group, Walid Raad, Arab Image Foundation). C2_Image: Migrant Mother C2_Essay: Holt Reading of the archive of the artist Nancy Holt—The archive as a place of collaboration and individual activity—Individual artistic work and collaborative projects and productions—Then: how to render the archive of a female artist visible?—How to acknowledge the individual’s work while not erasing the parts of the archive that point towards the significance of friendship and love?—Attempts and Proposals—What could have been? What could be? 5 C2_Work: Schaber_Diabolic Tenant A reworking of a piece by Reich and Mies van der Rohe—Readings of history—Accepting existing structures to include other ones versus creating new structures—What did Reich do?—A dialogue between two curtains on the role of the display and its political function—An attempt to ask questions, despite all. Cabinet 3: What is missing in the archive? C3_Quote by Michel Foucault on “subjugated knowledges.” C3_Introduction Artistic ways to deal with what is missing—One: Recreate parts that are erased (Oppenheim)—Two: Historical critique of the archive (Sekula)—Three: Creating and reflecting upon an archive at the same time (Nicholson)—The case: Didi-Huberman and the photographs of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz—Making images despite all—Didi-Huberman versus Lanzmann—The archive as a place of “permanent lack” versus the archive as a “place of storage”—The personal and the general—Images that do exist (Barthes)—Punctum, studium and the blind field—Things that are there, but not in the picture—The ghostly and its implications (Gordon)—Its implications for dealings with the archive (Alloula)—Images that should not have been made—Towards a practice of watching? C3_Image Series of images called “killed,” produced as part of the photography section of the WPA project in the 1930s and 1940s in the US—Erasure and control—The archive has it all. C3_Essay: Who is Speaking There? Examples of inclusion—Gifts and comments—Where is the place for the voice of the documented? What happens if the one who is documented starts to speak for him/herself? C3_Work: Pente and Schaber_Unnamed Series Three out of nine takes on an encounter of Aby Warburg with the Hopi Priest Cleo Jurino in Santa Fe in 1898—An image as personal memory becomes a document—Reactions and dealings—Unnamed Series: Part 1: What is the importance of a representation of a site in which something important has happened?—Part 2: How to deal with images that should not have been made, or should not have been published?—Part 7: How can we redefine or rearticulate the space of the secret that is contained in every image? 6 Cabinet 4: What is an active archive? C4_Introduction What could an active archive, or another form of archival practice be?—Active archives, other archives—The “other” needs to be monitored and protected versus archives need an activity and possible appropriation—Neglecting abstract and objective notions of the material, resisting globalising and universalizing treatments of images, accounting for the labour of interlacing iconic, graphic and narrative constructions (Sekula)— Archives, Mnemosyne (Warburg)—Organisations from within—Atlas, survival, pathos formula (Warburg)—Forms of collecting and showing— Becoming insane—Repertoire of gestures—What name can I give to the thing that I miss? (Farocki)—Chaos. C4_Image: Arab Ladies Union Meeting in 1944 in Jerusalem, photographed by the American Colony (Library of Congress in Washington DC). C4_Essay: Umm el-Fahem To create an archive from scratch—Decisions about a structure—Identity versus place—Conditions and consequences—The archive as a place of creation and production—Creating voids for what is missing— Acting in the voids—Challenges—An image and its story. C4_Interview: Khaba Interview with the art historian and co-founder of the image archive of Umm el-Fahem: Dr. Mustafa Khaba.
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