Frederick Douglas and friend (circa 1850)
photographer: William A. Pratt
Title: Freemen of Color
Quarter plate daguerreotype | Hand colored
4 1/4 x 3 1/8 in. (10.8 x 7.9 cm)
Photographs are easy to
think about and very difficult to write about.
How do you translate what is an initial sensory perception into the theoretical
language of archival practice? I chose
to reflect on Joan Schwartz’s article “Coming to Terms with Photographs:
Descriptive Standards, Linguistic ‘Othering,’and the Margins of Archivy,” to
frame my final post. It mirrors, I feel,
a greater dilemma for archival education that exists in the shadows of the
overarching paradigm of library science.
What is visual literacy?
FLICKR
COMMONS
As Conway points out –
everyone sees an image differently. In
this multi-dimensional context – what have archivists done or not done in the
handling of photographic materials? Or
what could be better done towards their categorization and access?
Schwartz suggests that
the identification of photographs as non-text records – “images,” “graphic
images,” or “special media,” directs our thinking to a linear trajectory that
establishes the textual model as the accepted
norm.
Add to this the language and systems of cataloguing and indexicality we
are taught, and you are literally trying to put a round peg in a square hole:
We do need to become familiar with these tools, but familiarity
with such tools must be mitigated by a certain professional wariness on two
levels: just as library tools must be adapted, not adopted, to perform archival
functions, so must these same tools be tailored to the nature and needs of the
respective media to which they are applied. (Schwartz, 169)
I don’t pretend to fully
understand how to competently apply adequate descriptors to photographic
images, but I am compelled by our exposure in this course to not “give up,” and
further marginalize the materials I handle or the expectations of prospective
users of those materials.
Sculptor Malvina Hoffman and Model (circa 1930)
Preparation for Exhibition, Chicago Field Museum –The Hall of
Man
Ironically just as
photography revolutionized and surpassed our expectations of the
representations of painting, we live with the unknown and ever-evolving
implications of cyber technologies. Just
as the unseen world was made accessible to the populace after photography’s
advent in 1839, we voraciously travel the virtual globe daily in search of
answers to every facet of our lives.
I find the term visual
literacy a bit hierarchical unless expanded to include those areas of knowledge
creation that are not traditionally defined as academic because -- like
photographs -- they are not easily categorized:
Almira Buffalo
Bone Jackson (in 1994)
Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI)
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/A-Spectacular-Collection-of-Native-American-Quilts.html
(The undocumented textile knowledge production of Native and African Americans)
(The undocumented textile knowledge production of Native and African Americans)
This lack of questioning is dangerous because it
implicitly supports the archival myth of neutrality and objectivity, and thus
sanctions the already strong predilection of archives and archivists to
document primarily mainstream culture and powerful records creators...Its rules
of evidence and authenticity favour textural documents, from which such rules
were derived, at the expense of other ways of experiencing the present, and
thus of viewing the past. Its strong
whiffs of positivist and “scientific” values inhibit archivists adopting
multiple and ambient ways of seeing and knowing. (Schwartz and Cook: 18)
The arguments that place
photographs as suspect in their handling as secondary sources of historical
evidence mirror those of the use of oral histories. An example of this is the Library of
Congress’ WPA Collection of Former Slave Narratives (1936-38); its
mis-management and faulty indexing over time.
Yet however, skewed, cropped, or touched up -- photographs like the re-counting
of a former slave’s life experience – document an event we would not otherwise
know.
Central Lunatic Asylum for Negros (circa 1900)
(occupational therapy)
Now Central
State Hospital, Petersburg, VA
In thinking about the
politics of representation – the governance of decision making paradigms within
what Boker and Leigh would term the “community of thinkers” offers insidious
consequences in taking for granted the power inherent in categorization. I suggest we -- as future archivists – and
information architects -- refuse to walk the linear tightrope.
References:
Bowker,
Geoffrey C. and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its
Consequences, MIT Press; (1999)
Conway, Paul, “Modes of
Seeing: Digitized Photographic Archives and the Experienced User,” American
Archivist 73, no. 2 (2010): 425-462.
Schwartz, J M, “Coming to Terms with Photographs:
Descriptive Standards, Linguistic ‘Othering,’and the Margins of Archivy,”
Archivaria (2002): 142-171.
Schwartz, Joan M. and Terry Cook, "Archives,
Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory," Archival Science 2, no. 1-2 (2002): 1-19.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography, Farrar,
Straus and Giroux (1977)
Yetman, Norman, “The Background of the Slave Narrative
Collection,” American Quarterly, Vol.
19, No. 32 (Autumn, 1967): 534-553
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