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November 29, 2018Conceptual and Practical Issues with the Archive
Photography disrupted the archive. There’s no doubt. Photographs, those flat boxes of captured light, provided a new kind of evidence and a new way to represent.
Photography was the first representational image that could be used as an evidence of ownership. Painting and drawing could not do this; there has never been enough certainty that an image produced by the hand of a person is close enough to the thing being represented. “Only the photograph could begin to claim the legal status of a visual document of ownership.” (4) The photograph is the object. Or at least that is how early adopters of the technology considered it. Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag have since persuasively argued that the image and the object are two separate things. But, the general consensus in early photographic history, and arguably still to this day, is that a photograph is what it captures. And thus, the photographic image can give claim to ownership. I photograph a cup. Now I can prove that I own that cup, because of the photographic evidence I have of that cup. This concept is exemplified in the process of purchasing insurance and later making claims, whereby photographs are “evidence of ownership.”
This idea of ownership claimed through positivist forms of representation has implications that ripple out beyond me and my cup. In his seminal essay The Body and the Archive Allen Sekula argues that this form of empirical classification and ownership is fundamental to the history and evolution of photographic practices. And the development and implementation of photography, like all technology, has been adopted by the bourgeois as a means to maintain power and control. Sekula shows that photography helped create and establish two bodies: the criminal body and the social body. This gave the state a clear visual representation of those to be respected and those to be controlled. As artist and curator Lauri Firstenberg says, ”[w]ith the apparatus of the camera, categories from criminology to ethnography to bourgeois subjectivity were established that facilitated the cataloguing and surveying of bodies, in visual and discursive terms, in ways that fueled ideological investments in colonialism and nation building.” (59)
One can simply look at the first commercially successful photographic process, the daguerreotype, and already see the oppressive representation and categorization of bodies. Brain Wallis notes that the daguerreotype “had two purposes, one nominally scientific, the other frankly political.” (Wallis, 40) Wallis references Louis Agassiz’s slave daguerreotypes and their implementation of the positivist ideal of photography. Agassiz claimed his images of black bodies were clear representations of a lower class of people. His images, however, were unabashedly impregnated with his politics. And looking at the photographs now, one can easily see this. Not so much in the mid-20th century, though. And this classification of black bodies as lesser bodies still continues to this day.
Following the history, Sekula states that as photography became more prevalent into the early twentieth century, images were increasingly separated into two distinct categories: “honorific” and “repressive.” (4) Honorific images were those portraits of leaders, heroes, politicians, and elites. Repressive images were the portraits of slaves and criminal mug shots. The largest collector of the latter were the police. They collected the repressive images of the criminal body. The criminal archive began to take shape. And this archive provided a promise for more effective and more powerful means of controlling and collecting the criminal body. But the promise of this archive proved to have two issues: its massiveness and its messiness. There were simply too many photographs and no effective way to sort and use them.
The solution to these problems was a system of standardization, classification, and categorization. A structure of organization was put in place to sort through the amassing photographs. And this system permeated the practices of institutional archives. To collect now means to sort, organize, and classify.
With benign or impartial intentions this has conceptually positive outcomes. But, of course, nothing and no one is truly neutral. Especially those in power. As Verne Harris says, “archives are never a reflection of reality because when a document finally arrives in an archive, it has already passed through the hands that create it, the hands that managed it, the archivists who gathered it, and the researchers who read it.” (4) And to push it further, as Crystal Fraser and Zoe Todd say “it is essential that we continue to recognize archival spaces, especially state archives, for their original intent: to create national narratives that seek to legitimize the nation state by excluding indigenous voices, bodies, economies, histories, and socio-political structures.” (2). Hegemony is only maintained by first controlling the national narrative.
We must then ask the question, as Liz Park does: “What is the ultimate system that benefits from the existing model of photographic classification?” (42) The system that benefits tends to be the system that is in power. And power is always in tension, as power is dependent on an opposing oppressed force. Thus, systems of representation and classification, too, are always in tension. We should then follow the former question with deeper archival considerations: Whose voices are absent? What images are used repressively? How is material organized and separated? And, who has access? These questions will give us some of the tools to begin to look behind the curtain that covers nation’s hegemonic structures.
0004 The Indian Act and the Filing Cabinet