Photography : Elusive Materiality

Photography is one of the mediums that I rarely connect to problematic situations. Whether it be interpretation, classification and in this case even less archival work. This is possibly explained by the assumption that photographs are so straight forward that what needs to be understood beyond their own existence? Unlike books, manuscripts, even paintings and other mediums photographs are considered a stolen moment encapsulated in a photograph to document.

I became aware of this dismissiveness while reading Elizabeth Edwards’ Photographs: Material Form and the Dynamic Archive. She states “An archive—of photographs—something separate from the dynamic of a discipline, something to be mined when useful, ignored at whim; a mere passive resource, tangential to the main business, a mere supporting role whose significance is defined not through its own identity but through asymmetrical relations with other objects which it serves to confirm in some way or other.”

A perfect example of this is the outstanding work Julia van Haaften did for the NYPL’s photograph collection, which had been neglected and forgotten until her personal interest sparked this great endeavor of classifying, organizing and eventually creating a collection out of the photographic material.

The retrieval and storage aspects of the archive are structural components that undoubtedly are of great importance for the conservation and organization of them. Nevertheless, as Jhon Tagg shares in “The Archiving Machine, or, The Camera and the Filing Cabinet”, it is the relationship of classification and knowledge that make the archive a well of wisdom. The importance of classification is essentially making sure we have as less lost narratives as humanly possible and that through classification systems we can diligently and responsibly reflect truth, whichever that may be.