Archive

Reading Sekula over spring break was a really interesting experience because it made my try to consider everything as an archive, or at least try to. Some things were easy menus, newspapers, the internet and the like all presented pretty straightforward cases for being archives. Then I started thinking that almost anything can be an archive depending on how one thinks of the criteria or defines the parameters of an archive. I was thinking of a folder I’ve kept on my computer called “pics” that I’ve had pretty much since the I first got the internet in 5th grade. In it I’ve kept almost every snapshot, news photo, celebrity photo, or any image that I’ve ever thought I might want to look at again. Its sort of funny because I pretty much never look through these pictures and I suppose the parameters of this archive would be anything I saw online that I thought for a second I might want to one day look at again. It is organized chronologically because that’s the way I set up the folder but it works in almost exactly the way Sekula describes as far as abstracting context, changing meaning and re-making the meaning of everything to be somewhat antagonistic to whatever its next to. I also think of it as something of a bizarre self portrait because the images do very literally reflect my visual interests. There is lots of friends, lots of family, lots of pictures of my beloved Steelers, and more than a few images of pretty girls who I have no idea who they are.

As far as archives in art I kept thinking about Christian Boltanski and the archives he manipulated and made. I think the most interesting and haunting to me is Sans Souci, a book of images he made from photographs of young Nazis on vacation and relaxing and smiling. The idea that something evil is absolutely haunting and I have to say after having seen it I can’t really look at any family album the same way again. You sort of always know when you look at a photo that you really cant tell anything about the person from it but that a normal looking person could be so menacing is rather terrifying