Photography Reframing The Archive Essay

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Reframing The Archive“We don’t need the new sentence; the old sentence re-framed is good enough,” – said Kenneth Goldsmith.IntroductionThe last two years have radically altered the way most of us live, work, and create, forcing us to reconsider our connection with our previous photography work. How do we frame our previous work when the world doesn’t appear the same? Images of rush-hour pedestrians or pals lazily flinging their arms around each other have taken on new meaning[footnoteRef:1]. The COVID-19 period and the measures put in place to curb the spread of the disease have had a major impact on art, particularly in the conceptualization of space. This change in how we do things has caused many to reimagine how we can get the common and ordinary things done differently. The archive, which has a pronounced role in our daily life, has been compressed, not just because of COVID-19, but generally as a new concept in modern-day, to a portable space within one mobile phone. The phone as an archive has become the storage for contact information of others, the storage for captured still pictures, storage for phone captured short videos. With the concept of cloud storage, the archive accessible through the mobile device has been extensively extended. However, despite these technological advancements, the concept remains the same, thus the creativity that this is simply a reframing of the archive as we know it. This essay, therefore, is a discussion of the reframing of the archive to suit modern-day users, needs, and contexts. [1: Jaimie Baron. "The archive effect: archival footage as an experience of reception." (2012): 102-120.]The archiveThe archive, both an idea and a physical item, has evolved throughout the last few decades. Although official photographic, film and television archives continue to advertise their collections as the most valuable and legitimate source for historical documentary films, alternative types of audiovisual archives have begun to compete. Online databases and private collections, in particular, are threatening to dethrone official archives as the principal providers of audiovisual evidence[footnoteRef:2]. While amateur photography, film, and video have long had a tense relationship with official archives, the increased availability of still and video cameras, both analog and digital, has resulted in an influx of indexical records outside of official archives. [2: ]The archive in the context of the modern-day technologyThe impact of an ever-expanding notion of the archival, which tends to favor and emphasize modes of operation such as collecting, curating, compiling, editing, ethnographizing, and so on, has had a considerable impact on contemporary art practices. Most of these activities work on revisionist, frequently creative, and occasionally romantic objectives. Exhibits and performances frequently employ techniques such as interrogating current archives, probing their infrastructural chores and (in)accessibility, proposing alternate uses, or establishing new (counter-) archives[footnoteRef:3]. As a result, the archival has proven to be re-contextualizing, re-arranging, re-organizing, re-enacting, re-evaluating, or re-introducing documents, the archive’s content, and critical reflection on the archive’s ontology be cornerstones of contemporary artistic practices in various locations.

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[3: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. "The archival multitude." Journal of Visual Culture 12, no. 3 (2013): 345-363]This general trend is likely to become even more evident in the face of a digital culture of search engines and social media whose architecture is imminently regulated by archive logic (and the increasingly customized ‘algorithms’ of data storage and retrieval). The technical formation of the archiving archive additionally determines the archival content structure from its initial existence and in its future relationship,’ as Jacques Derrida[footnoteRef:4] put it in his 1995 essay ‘Archive fever,’ thus ‘archivization produces as much as it records the event.’ [4: Jacques…

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…has been a movement to document ordinary activities, especially through the selfie, as indicated in figure 2 below. The introduction of the camera phone has altered picture capture from a carefully planned activity to one that can occur spontaneously.Figure 2: Obama selfie. (adopted from Miltner and Baym [footnoteRef:12]) [12: Kate M. Miltner and Nancy K. Baym. "Selfies| the Selfie of the Year of the Selfie: Reflections on a Media Scandal." International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 15.]This has significant implications for creative activity and memory building; our images and films serve as lieux de mémoire (memory sites) that help us shape our recollections of events, people, and places. Mobile phone cameras are great for creative practitioners studying memory constructs because of their ubiquity and near-constant presence[footnoteRef:13]. The subject was able to record and study these photographs at any moment due to the portability of the mobile phone. Mobile technologies’ mobility and technological capabilities drastically alter relationships with media and creative practice, opening up new options and tactics for artists to probe and analyze the detritus of ordinary encounters, as in figure 3 below. [13: Keep and Berry. "Memories, mobiles and creative arts practice." 2009]Figure 3. Screenshot from Elbe Tunnel. (Adopted from Keep and Berry[footnoteRef:14]) [14: Ibid]ConclusionMobile technologies’ mobility and technological capabilities drastically alter relationships with media and creative practice, opening up new options and tactics for artists to probe and analyze the detritus of ordinary encounters. Our contacts with mobile media give us new chances to reflect on our prior experiences and initiate new forms of self-expression. However, despite the significant advances made concerning the archive, it remains that the concept is the same, and what is happening is simply a reframing of the archive as we have always known it......

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