This week’s readings brought us deeper into the archive by looking at it from another perspective of photo archives. I realized a few things about the organization of the archive that were evident before, but were really apparent in this week’s readings. John Tagg talks about how the photo archive is a “political apparatus” that is “inseparable from the rationalization of information the control of bodies, and the relegation of the photographic operator to ‘the status of a detail worker.’ There is a lot to unpack there, but overall it helps us realize the power of the archive and how its function and organization extend beyond just the organization of data and material objects and into the realm of societal norms and functions. Archives are systems of knowledge and we see both the importance and limits of the archive. As Nina Vestberg stated, the politics of truth fold into a politics of identity through the regulation of relationships both to time, truth, and memory and to the practices and technologies of record and recollection. Our archives reflect our own identity and how we think about the world.
Previously I hadn’t thought about how many different subjects the photographic archive touches and how important it is to access those photos for various disciplines (medical, artistic, etc.)
In my previous job as a copywriter in advertising I would write metadata for images to help people find our website. This was my own form of organizing a kind of photographic archive within the tripartite system that Vestberg talked about. We have the thing, then data about the thing, and finally the bits of information to help you search for the thing and determines your finding, therefore determining your exposure and knowledge.
In current terms, hashtaging on Instagram serves this same function. We are both functioning as the Warburg and Conway libraries do, we account for what a picture shows, but sometimes it is never the same as describing what it depicts.
I love all the layers of “discipline” in your post, Kristin :). We have the photo archive as a tool for disciplining subjects and populations. Then we have the photo archive as an integral apparatus for a wide variety of professional disciplines, whose distinctive interests probably order/discipline the archive itself. And then there’s the everyday practice of pinning down – “taming” – our innumerable Instagram photos with hashtags.