convicts and negatives

 One of my jobs recently has been to clean and scan negatives of BC Penitentiary inmates from the 1940's (I was given access to them by Peter Murphy, a professor at Thompson Rivers University). When I'm cleaning each negative, I can't help but think about what the lives of these men were like as they stare back at me...Trying to incorporate these negatives into my own work, I'm planning on taking a little field trip to the site of the BC Pen (which for the most part, no longer stands - though there are graves marked with just inmate #'s).

I see both landscape and the archive as being a shared experience that acts as a 'bridge between the personal and the shared'. I think the term 'intersubjectivity' works really well when considering the experience of dealing with people's archives and landscape in general - as I imagine landscape to be a large scale, shared, living archive - with generations of lives marking, mapping and experiencing it continually. Here is a definition of Intersubjectivity (wikipedia): In phenomenology, intersubjectivity performs many functions. It allows empathy, which in phenomenology involves experiencing another person as a subject rather than just as an object among objects. In so doing, one experiences oneself as seen by the Other, and the world in general as a shared world instead of one only available to oneself. Intersubjectivity also helps in the constitution of objectivity: in the experience of the world as available not only to oneself, but also to the Other, there is a bridge between the personal and the shared, the self and the Others.

On another note - I have to add that in almost all of the negatives that I have cleaned so far - every single inmate is dressed well!

 

what you know about someone...

I've been thinking about what is lost when you archive. What narratives are formed, and what you learn from even the photographs you've taken yourself. I sometimes think I've photographed something that was right in front of me a million times, never noticing what later becomes totally apparent. I've been photographing my husband since we met. When I look back on some of these photographs I can see the evolution of my own feeling...it says less about his identity than it does about my own. Perhaps that's why I photograph my family so consistently...it becomes an archive of my own experience, that I'm unable to articulate in a document or a photograph of myself.