The Brief

Question for the Seller re-situates images in a different context and in doing so allows for a new dialogue to take place.

Reflect on the following in your learning log:

1. Does their presence on a gallery wall give these images an elevated status?
2. Where does their meaning derive from?
3. When they are sold (again on eBay, via auction direct from the gallery) is their value increased by the fact that they are now ‘art’?

Look online at the Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye series The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1996). You might be forgiven for assuming the images to be remnants from an old family album documenting the life of the beautiful actress Fae Richards. The images appear to chart Richards’ life from her birth in the 1920s through her glamorous career in the 40s up to her involvement in the civil rights movement of the 50s. Fae Richards is an entirely fictional character, however. Leonard and Dunye drew upon historical records and, noting the distinct lack of information about African-American women, they invented one. The purpose of this fictional archive is to question the truthfulness of the archive and how history is recorded. Who gets included in our written histories and why? More importantly, who is left out? And who is in control of this information?

Do you have any archives that you could have access to? Might you be able to use it for the beginnings of a project?

Blog about some ideas that you could come back to some day

Questions for the Seller

Does their presence on a gallery wall give these images an elevated status?

The idea that something can be elevated in status by calling it art is something that has been hotly debated for many years. As I was growing up, I had an inherent cynicism about ‘art for art’s sake’, with the most notable examples being what is considered to be ‘modern art’. Whenever I visited a gallery or museum, I was often left with a greater appreciation of the building architecture than the pieces contained within it; Tate Modern in London and Hamburger Bahnhoff in Berlin being good examples. However in researching what makes something art, it’s clear that the main attribute is what it is being said by the the artist. One philosopher who sought to define art in objective terms was Martin Heidegger. His hugely complex essay The Origin of the Work of Art published in 1950 discusses the relationship between what we understand of an object being represented as art and how that understanding is built. In a review of the concept of art[1] Jon-Paul Stonard states:

At the outset Heidegger says that it is the work of art that ‘gives credit to the master’, enabling them to emerge as an artist. The work of art and the artist exist in a circular relationship, depending on a third, mysterious thing – art itself. You get the sense that he is talking not about the moment of creation, but rather about what happens when works of art emerge into the world – when they are seen and thought about.

Jon-Paul Stonard (2018)[1]

What Stonard suggests is that art is about the artist and what they are trying to achieve with it. It doesn’t become art though, until it is seen and interpreted by others in a way that connects with the artist’s intent. We have learned in this unit that context and contextual elements are key to the viewer being able to form their own narrative. Perhaps what Heidegger and Stonard are saying is that the artist themselves, being the enabler and curator of their work, is also a contextual element. In the case of Bird’s work, the photographs themselves are not her original work. Arguably the only tangible thing that she has done is to add the text and arrange them pictures in a particular way. Of course, this is what emerges as the art. The people going to see the work at Belfast Exposed responded to her treatment of the images; creating a sympathetic archive where none existed previously. The act of displaying them in a gallery with the artist’s intent being on display, does elevate them for me. We should also not underestimate the role of the gallery in the creation of art. Most displays contain some background information on the artist, which can often be the first introduction to the person and their work. The setting and arrangement of the pieces reminds us that we are there to try to derive some kind of meaning from the work, even if the act itself is subconscious.

Where does the meaning derive from?

I would say that the meaning comes from two places. The first is from the context that the artist places with the groups of images. They were bought in lots, so there is a natural grouping by seller. However, the backstory that Bird includes with the series sheds some light in some cases on the lives of the subjects. Bird contrasts the very human stories with the fact that these images were essentially being discarded by their owner. In the interview she did with Boothroyd [2], Bird traced this contrast back to an experience she had in the US prior to this series:

I was in a picture archive in the US. On another table was a contact sheet of Elvis Presley in the 1950s, at a formal dinner table surrounded by immaculately dressed women. There was a picture editor’s pencil mark around his head – indicating the part of the photo they wanted to use. This cropping revealed in an instant the value of the picture and how they weren’t interested in the unidentified group of women.

Nicky Bird talking to Sharon Boothroyd[2]

This idea that archives somehow exist at the behest of their owner and as such only tell the viewer what the archivist wants them to, is a similar experience to Broomberg and Chanarin. In Bird’s case, the pictures were not wanted at all which the artist uses to highlight the fragility of our place in the world and in history.

The second place that their meaning comes from is how we see them out of the context of their time. We tend to linger on an image when presented with it in a gallery setting, which offers us time to write our own narrative that may support or contradict that of Bird. That narrative may simply our reading of what’s in the picture or a very personal connection with what is familiar to us about the image. What elevates the image is perhaps the challenge of ‘this is what I think, what do you think?’ For me, art must be a challenge to the viewer set by the artist that fuels the circular relationship that Heidegger referred to in his paper[1].

When they are sold (again on eBay, via auction direct from the gallery) is their value increased by the fact that they are now ‘art’?

This is an interesting question. In the first instance there is evidence that the individual photographs had an increased monetary value as a result of being in Bird’s series. The video clip on the artist’s website [3] shows a picture with its accompanying ‘title’ selling for £12, which we assume is considerably more than the bare minimum that it was originally purchased for. Being introduced to the public as an artwork and gaining more exposure than it had ever had in the lifetime of the owner [3], the interest in the photograph had grown many times over. That value is more interesting than the financial for me. In seeing the photographs together at a gallery, the viewer is being presented with them as art that has been created by an artist as I mentioned previously. The value may have something to do with that simple fact and Bird’s reputation as an artist and photographer, but for me there is more to it than that. When we see these images, we see the lost history that interested Bird in the first place and because everyone has imagery of some sort that documents their own lives, we emotionally relate to that. The fact that Bird came to the rescue of these uniquely personal documents, saving them from destruction appeals to our own sense of place in the world. The sentimental connection with the past and the narratives that we write for the pictures as we see them, creates value to the piece. The mastery of the work is in the way that it started and ended with an auction, the re-situated archive that Bird created becoming transient [4]. For me, it serves as both an artwork and social reminder that our lives are so brief in the context of history, that some things are worth preserving in some way for the next person to appreciate. The irony of the sale is that not only is the archive transient, but it also becomes disbanded with the images going to a whole variety of new owners.

Leonard and Dunye: The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1996)

The first thing I noted when looking at The Fae Richards Photo Archive was the huge amount of effort that went into creating this fabricated reality. Leonard collaborated with Dunye for a film that the latter was making in which a young black film director was looking for as much as she could find about a Black film star of the early days of modern cinema. The central character in the film essentially investigates the mysterious Fae Richards and narrates her story towards the end of Dunye’s film. In a review discussion of the work [5], it is revealed that the photo archive was created to such a convincing standard that they even employed a number of techniques in the darkroom to age the prints to the appropriate time period. Each photograph was meticulously planned to tell the story of Richard’s struggle as a Black lesbian actress trying to be taken seriously in Hollywood. The story itself is almost a biography in its own right, discussing moves that Richards made in her career and her personal life as well as leaving some elements unsaid. The ‘narrator’ in the film tries to piece together the ‘what happened next’ elements from what she ‘knew’ of Richard’s life.

This is all very clever, but the most interesting point here is the impact the archive has. We are introduced to the central character of Richards and the people who feature in her life and the thread of the story follows a pattern that is familiar to us. A young Black woman who is also lesbian, trying to be taken seriously against a backdrop of the institutional racism of 20th century America. Her beginnings, which tell of being given parts as ‘the Black maid’ or ‘the Black cook’ all fall into what we know as a wretched time in the history of prejudice. Her failed romances with women also point to the difficulties of same sex relationships with the prejudices of the time. However, Richards is a fighter who leaves Hollywood for an independent film studio where she rises to greater roles until eventually retiring from acting. She becomes part of the movement for equal rights and campaigns as an activist in her later life. The problem I have with this is that as a single story, it is a total Hollywood cliché. What we don’t see are the more mundane parts of Richard’s life; the things she admires or the things that she avoids, the accidental snapshots of her just living her life. We don’t see any real evidence of domesticity or how her life changes with her success. The archive very deliberately leaves out any of the things that we would want to know about someone or a situation. When we consider the size and complexity of the curated archive for The Troubles that we encountered previously[4], we see precious little real detail in the fabricated archive about Fae Richards. The feat of creativity and technical attention to detail in Leonard’s work is remarkable, but for me it drives home that photography can be exploited as a pseudo-factual document that convinces the viewer of a version of reality. The director and artist both want to steer the viewer to seeing this incredible life of their character as one might expect in a Hollywood movie. The archive is carefully controlled to steer the viewer through the plot, but leave enough room to create their own impression of the central character. When we think about it, the director is now the archivist which begs the question as to whether any archive is really a historical record of events or merely a version of events. Taking the example of Richards, there we clearly many people in history who fought prejudice against their colour, sexuality or simply their way of life. However, not all of them led lives of signposted narratives and not all were able to change the perceptions of themselves. The Richards archive is a pastiche of all the things we hope that people did when facing the extremes of that period in history. As the notes suggest, this was the intention of the archive that was used in the film. When the work was displayed in its own right, i.e. without the accompanying film, Leonard deliberately included the cast list of each image, to make sure that everyone viewing it knew that it was a fiction[5]. I admire the way that the artist tells a story that is veiled in truth, exercising the control of the context while allowing some freedom for the viewer to fill in the gaps as they see it. The archive, it would appear is a good way of lending credibility to the creation which we want to engage with as if real. I’m reminded of the first time I saw Insomnia by Jeff Wall, when I spent a few moments wondering if this was real or fictional. The longer I looked at the picture, the more I began to notice the way that it was constructed. It didn’t actually matter that I then knew it was a fiction as I could relate the sense of dread, the depressing harshness of not being able to sleep etc with my own experience. The way the picture’s constructed reality merely lent my own narrative some credibility; the same is true for when I look at the Richards archive.

Do you have any archives that you could have access to? Might you be able to use it for the beginnings of a project?

As I started to work on this exercise, I immediately thought about the thousands of slide photographs that I was given by my father a few years ago. My dad was an amateur photographer throughout my childhood and became a professional towards the end of my teenage years. He shot many formats, but slides were the traditional way of showing photographs in those days using projection. I had asked him about photographs of the family which he duly said he had sorted out for me. When it came to being given them, the collection was actually all of his slides with subjects ranging from family holidays to his professional portfolio work. They weren’t really all that organised and not all of them had annotations but some did – they don’t really exist as an archive although I’ve always intended to create one when I have the time. An idea for a project came to mind as I worked this exercise. My childhood was a very happy time in the sense that we were loved and always provided for. My dad had a great job and my mother was a wonderful homemaker, which left me feeling like we were somehow blessed with amazing good fortune. However, at an early age I started to be dogged with the anxiety which would eventually lead to my struggle with depression in my thirties. When my mother became ill and died shortly afterwards, any notion I had of our family being fortunate died with her. The photographs in the collection show the happy side of growing up, but perhaps that could be coupled in some way with the darker side of life in a way that seems real but isn’t. I could either insert altered reality in the form of slides (I shoot positive film fairly regularly) taking inspiration from the artists studied here or simply add some textual context and unrelated imagery from the boarder set of slides. This is an idea that I may explore with time as the raw material is certainly available. The problem that I see currently is that I don’t have the time to devote to it, which rules it out as an idea for Assignment 5.

Conclusions

In conclusion, I’ve found this exercise very interesting. The idea of an archive being used to elevate seemingly disconnected items to a work that has new meaning, is something I hadn’t appreciated before. The artists are challenging the idea of an archive as an accurate depiction or record of real events, but still using our interpretation of them being factual to increase the impact. In the case of Bird, she acts as a temporary landlord for other people’s photographic records of someone else’s history. In her elevation of the photographs, Bird re-energises the interest in these long lost people and incites the viewer to take their ownership of the story. She has this concept of filling in the narrative in common with Leonard and Dunye, but in their case what is provided to the viewer is done so by their design. Like the tableaux photographers, the careful construction of the key messages are left for us to fill in the blanks. The archive in both cases serves as a referee for what is real or believable.

References

[1] Sonard J-P, 2018, “Opinion: When does art become art?”, Tate Etc, https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-44-autumn-2018/opinion-john-paul-stonard-art-makes-artists

[2] Boothroyd S, 2013, “Nicky Bird by Sharon Boothroyd”, Photoparley website, https://photoparley.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/nicky-bird/#comments

[3] Bird N, 2007, “Questions for the Seller: Closing Live Auction Event, Belfast Exposed”, Vimeo accessed via the artist’s website, https://www.nickybird.com/projects/question-for-seller/

[4] Fletcher R, 2020, “5) Project 2: The Archive”, OCA blog post, https://richardfletcherphotography.photo.blog/2020/12/20/project-2-the-archive/

[5] MOCA, 2019,”The Fae Richards Archive, A Panel with Garrett Bradley, Huey Copeland, Lanka Tattersall, and Rebecca Matalon”, Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-5gf2qqPB4