Mapping Meaning, the Journal (Issue No. 3)

Mapping Meaning, 

the Journal 

Issue N o 3 • Fall 2019

The contents of this publication are under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) unless 

otherwise specified. Contents may be shared and distributed for noncommercial purposes as 

long as proper credit is given to Mapping Meaning, the Journal as well as the individual author(s). 

To view a copy of this license, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. 

2 Mapping Meaning, the Journal

Issue N o 3 

3

About 

Mapping Meaning, the Journal 

Minidoka Project Idaho 1918, 

Photo of the U.S. Department of the Interior, courtesy of the U.S. Bureau of 

Reclamation. 


"824 Min Surveying party of 

girls on the 

Minidoka project." 

Original caption, National Archives 

How might interdisciplinary practices promote a 

reconsideration of the role that humanity plays in a 

more-than-human world? 

In a strongly fragmented and disciplined-based 

world, Mapping Meaning offers a collective space 

to imagine, create, and propose new models in the 

face of radical global change and ecological and 

social crises. Each issue takes up a particular theme 

and is edited by different curatorial teams from a 

variety of disciplines. All issues include the broadest 

possible calls for submission and gather together 

divergent and experimental knowledge practices. 

Mapping Meaning, the Journal, is published two times 

per year. 

www.mappingmeaning.org 


5


Founding 

Editorial Board 

Melanie Armstrong 

Krista Caballero 

Nat Castañeda 

Sarah Kanouse 

Vasia Markides 

Jennifer Richter 

Carmina Sánchez-del-Valle 

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky 

Sree Sinha 

Trudi Lynn Smith 

Sylvia Torti 

Linda Wiener 

Toni Wynn 

The Honors College at the University 

of Utah serves as Mapping Meaning 

Journal’s partner and initial fiscal 

sponsor. Consistent with Mapping 

Meaning’s mentorship mission, the 

Journal is committed to publishing 

a breadth of work from those at all 

stages of their careers. 

Managing Editor: Sylvia Torti 

Artistic Director: Krista Caballero 

Visual Designer: Aliza Jensen 

Copy Edit: Corinna Cape 

Issue Editors: 

Nat Castañeda, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, Trudi Lynn 

Smith 


7


Archives and Photography 


9

Content 

12 

Introduction: Archival Encounters 

Nat Castañeda, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, Trudi 

Lynn Smith 

Issue #3 editors 

20 

Father’s Dream 

Louis Hothothot 

38 

The Living Archive of Aboriginal Art: Maree 

Clarke and the Circulation of Photographs as 

Culture-Making 

Sabra Thorner, Fran Edmonds, Maree Clarke, 

Kirsten Thorpe, Rimi Khan, Sharon Huebner 

64 

Photographs with an Audience, San Antonio 

Clifford Owens 

77 

An Embodied Archive: gestures and 

documents from "My Electric Genealogy" 

Sarah Kanouse 

86 

Critical Plagiarism and the Politics of 

Creative Labor Photographs, History, and 

Re-enactment 

Leah Modigliani 


100 

Recurring Objects: Heirlooms, trinkets, or 

otherwise... 

Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda 

107 

Sacred Geometry / Geometría Sagrada 


113 

The Photograph Is Not Immortal… Or Is 

It? The Role of Technology in the Life and 

Death of the Tangible Photograph 

Meghan Lynn Jordan 

122 

Future Systems 

Janine Biunno 

130 

Untitled (Mule on Walnut and Hackberry) 

Kate Harding 

136 

25 Minutes 

Lynda Gammon 

152 

Author Bios 

Front and Back Cover Images, 

Associated Press Archive. 


11


Introduction to 


Nat Castañeda, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, Trudi Lynn Smith 

Left | Trudi Lynn Smith 

Associated Press archive. 

File: Dupont. Combo. Original print 

under photography equipment 

Cameras Bird Owls. 1955 

Anthotype. 2019. 

In Spring 2017, Nat, Karina and Trudi decided 

to meet in NYC and visit The Associated Press 

archives located in Lower Manhattan. As three 

participants in Mapping Meaning, we share an 

interest in interdisciplinary approaches that center 

on thinking about our place in the world and social 

and ecological crises. There has always been a 

connection between archives, photography, and the 

Mapping Meaning initiative. The origin of the biennial 

workshop was a photograph, taken in the early 

20th century, of an all-female survey crew, replete 

with their own custom leveling rods and other gear, 

which Krista Caballero found while researching 

histories of land surveying in the U.S. American 

West. Krista remade the objects in the photograph 

as a way to think about feminist histories of place. 

Her interest in the photograph also led her to 

bring women together for on-site interdisciplinary 

workshops at field and research stations. Since 

2010, this multi-generational collective has been 

gathering together around experimental knowledge 

practices. 

We were interested in the AP archive since each 

of us work with photography archives – those 

infamous sites of collection, storage, and recovery 

of documents and objects. Despite our shared 


13

connective tissue of archives and photography, 

the three of us consider and challenge archives 

in diverse ways in artworks and research: We are 

concerned with time, hybridity, ecology, family, 

biology, territory, power, history, erasure, hope. 

We use archival photographs as a source for reenactment, 

remix, collage, gifs, anthotypes, film, 

videos, wearable and soft camera forms. 

Over a few days Nat, Karina and Trudi worked 

together and alone at the AP archives to look 

through a selection of photographic materials, 

housed in a temperature-controlled room, filled 

with aging yellowed envelopes. These were the 

very negatives, slides, and photographic prints 

that set standards for national and international 

news over 100 years. In its telling of history, 

we found the AP archive provocative. As we 

would expect, it’s a record of what became news 

over a hundred years; but, more than that, it is 

an archive of the history of photography as it 

reached the newsroom. Files of press releases 

and typed and cursive captions describe new 

photographic tools, fascinating new inventions 

such as the erasable “Photo-Plastic Recording” 

that GE laboratories announced in 1963. The 

order of the archive does not denote what 

happens next: Obscure and little-known 

inventions are given the same potential as 

industry behemoths. A Portuguese scholar in 

1946 claims to have discovered the process 

of producing photography in relief, and these 

negatives are found next to the infamous Edwin 

H. Land photograph that “Demonstrates One 

Minute Camera Process” in the Feb 21, 1944 

envelope caption, heralding Polaroid instant film 

into everyday North American life. 

More generally, the AP archive is the history of 

photography as journalists and copy editors use 

it to make news. The materiality of photography 

is key when making news. Over the course of 

100 years, we see photography transition from 

black and white glass plate negatives to large 

and medium format analogue, then these are 

supplanted by 35mm SLR negatives, Kodachrome 

slides, and then other kinds of color 35mm files. 

More recently, digital, extant to the archive, has 

been relegated to off-site storage, and thinning 

files since the 2000s mark a move away from 

paper and chemistry. 

Like most work in archives, for us the AP archive 

brought up questions of what photographic 

archives remember, and forget, and how they 

remember and forget. The material practices (the 

how) and the subjects depicted (the what) are 

fluid and entangled. Archives pulse with politics 

and power over people and places, authorship 

over stories and erasures, despite the ideological 

ambition of archives to save and form a "truthful" 

collective memory. Even within family archives, 

the official story may elide and overrun the 

vulnerability found in facing complexity and 

contested stories and events. 

In this volume, we have included submissions by 

artists and scholars who all work with archives 

and photography and we outline some of the 

themes we see that bring them into conversation 

or contradiction: 

Archives shape, reshape, and transform 

documents from presence to absence. 

Photography is lively, or as Paolo Usai Cherchi 

(2001) writes about film, it is destructive, with 


chemical mingling inside a negative or positive, 

creating mayhem and erasures. Photographs 

of people degrade into blobby shapes through 

the action of light and heat, or being in the 

world, rather than being an idea (Hennessy 

and Smith 2018). Films and film houses catch 

on fire. The image, the archive, is always on its 

way to disappearance. Meghan Lynn Jordan 

takes up the liveliness of archives in her article, 

The Photograph is Not Immortal….Or Is It? The 

Role of Technology in the Life and Death of the 

Tangible Photograph. Reflecting on her experience 

of encountering a copy of a photograph in a 

museum versus an original, Jordan finds serious 

implications and challenges in trying to preserve 

photographic objects and also still show them 

to the public. These tensions between visibility 

and impermanence are amplified in asking, 

what vibrance does an original photograph, a 

photograph that the maker touched 100 years or 

more ago, hold that a copy of the image doesn’t? 

the tree and mule marks. These works abstract 

information in a way the photograph pretends 

to reveal all and, through the use of her hands, 

Harding adds the intimacy of her corporal being. 

Artist Lynda Gammon’s 25 minutes is a two-part 

project that is a reflection on the archive through 

the passage of time. In 2009, she discovers that 

her friend is working in the same studio she 

worked in during the 1980s, and she finds a wall 

drawing she had made under layers of paint and 

plywood boards. In the project, she uncovers the 

drawing, records that process, and eventually 

removes it. This work is paired with a meditative 

project in which she photographs herself sitting 

beside a large camera and looking at the same 

peeled section of wall for 25 minutes; the time 

it takes for the camera to make an exposure. 

The photographs thus record time through the 

physicality of an artist workspace and the artist’s 

own body. 

In rural Missouri, where she grew up, Kate 

Harding encounters bite marks on trees and 

documents them in photographs. Harding’s 

faithfully recorded mule teeth marks create 

a more-than-human photographic archive, 

Untitled Mule on Walnut and Hackberry. Instead of 

stumbling into a room filled with human records, 

Harding’s archive comes from the natural world. 

Her work spins a generative dialogue between 

herself, the trees, and the mules that roam 

their family land. Questions of agency arise in 

Harding’s work through a playful interchange of 

beings. In her archive, each actor’s motivation and 

lived experience is given the same weight and is 

handled though quiet observation. In addition to 

her accumulation of lens-based documentation, 

Harding makes charcoal-on-paper rubbings of 

Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda uses lapses in 

memory and the complicated relationship we 

can find ourselves in with the domestic objects, 

both used and decorative, in our lives. A metal 

serving container elegantly cradles translucent 

glass containers for a dinner table. Sepúlveda 

photographs each of her subjects twice in slightly 

different angles and color temperatures to signify 

the passing of time and the change in feeling 

in the meaning of each object. To unify the two 

photographs, she joins them with a thin banner 

of visual noise to signify “lapses of memory.” 

Sepúlveda's archive of photos can appear 

devotional, and yet they express a mental and 

emotional weight that objects can impose on us 

with their sentimental demand that may provoke 

us to display and consider them. 


15

Archives are relational. 

In The Living Archive of Aboriginal Art: Maree 

Clarke and Circulation of Photographs as Culture- 

Making, the living archive is “an Aboriginal 

community archive containing both tangible and 

intangible records” that reflects Indigenous ways 

of “knowing, being and doing things.” While led by 

Maree Clarke, the work of recounting their work 

on the Living Archive Project is generated through 

non-hierarchical and multiple perspectives, 

written texts, and photographs. The authors 

Sabra Thorner, Fran Edmonds, Maree Clarke, 

Kirsten Thorpe, Rimi Khan and Sharon Huebner 

chart a recursive use of photographs throughout 

the project: archival photographs are always in 

relationship as they move around in meaning 

and venue. From personal archive, to storytelling 

inspiration, to artwork, into exhibition, reworked 

into a new archive, the Living Archive is all the 

while “an ever-growing source of nourishment 

and connection for the people who are connected 

with it.” 

Louis Hothothot’s 12 Moments acts as a 

storyboard for a film he is in the process of 

making that examines Mao’s legacy and his 

father’s life through the use of archival (family 

and state) photographs that have been digitally 

manipulated to direct the reader. In using 

techniques of photographic repetition and 

an accompanying text that is concise, Father’s 

Dream, a chapter from 12 Moments, initiates an 

intersection between politics and family. We 

learn about how communist China has affected 

the author’s own family. In this way, Hothothot 

upends the notion of the Family Album as a 

hermetic record. Instead, his family album is 

transformed into a public archive, an investigation 

into post-revolutionary Chinese history and a 

visual narrative. 

Like Hothothot, artist Sarah Kanouse mines her 

family archive, focusing on the records of her 

grandfather, an influential leader in creating the 

electric grid, whose career spanned the early to 

mid 20th century in Los Angeles. Kanouse uses 

her grandfather’s professional documents and 

family photos to reconstruct and reconnect her 

family tree, using her own performances as a way 

to digest memories both real and imagined. In 

An Embodied Archive: Documents from My Electric 

Genealogy, Kanouse becomes her grandfather, 

her grandmother, and parts of herself through 

a series of reenactments as she mulls over 

responsibility, both personal and social. In 

1968, Kanouse’s grandfather gave a speech that 

imagined where power would and should be in 

the year 2000. In a series of text collages, Kanouse 

wrestles with the speech, redacting and editing 

her grandfather’s ideas. Masking tape pops off 

the photocopied pages, denoting a clear mark of 

change between their lived generations. 

Archives can support a politics of disruption. 

Resonant to the impulse of Fraser and Todd, Leah 

Modigliani asks the question, “Can the creative 

re-use of historical images be transformative for 

viewers?” Her article and images in this issue, 

“Critical Plagiarism and the Politics of Creative 

Labour: Photographs, History and Re-enactment” 

re-reads historical documents, adapting and 

repeating historical images and texts. The artist 

builds sculptures from historical photographs as 

a politics of disruption and with a concern rooted 

in how power is exercised over particular bodies 

and places in different times. Modigliani signals 


complexity in categorization of images of protest 

and highlights differences between the past and 

present in making an image in the context of an 

artwork rather than document of an event. 

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky’s hand-cut collages 

are made from appropriated photographs of 

tourists, Indigenous people, llamas and ceramics 

from Ingapirca, an archeological site that is one 

of Ecuador’s tourist attractions. These collages 

are sourced from vernacular photography, 

found in popular blog postings or public travel 

albums. These collected images become an 

archive collapsed onto single pages. If the 

internet is a chaotic archive with many tangents 

and digressions, analogizing these images gives 

them order and reminds us of the inherent 

objectification in the photograph. 

Site and iconography drive the work of archivist 

and artist Janine Biunno. In her two-dimensional 

works, Future Systems, Biunno considers how we 

understand and remember virtual sites and the 

real-life encounters we have with those same 

sites. Do they blur? Is one memory more present 

than the other? Do we have the same need to visit 

a site in person when we can inhabit it virtually? 

While making in a repetitive form of drawing, 

Biunno asks these questions while visually 

skewing the shapes she creates through a style 

heavily influenced by her internet searches as well 

as her years working in architecture. 

In Photographs with an Audience (PWA), an ongoing 

photographic project Clifford Owens has 

been staging since 2008, the relationship between 

photography and language is on full display. 

Like traditional archives, each iteration of PWA is 

connected to a specific moment in history. Unlike 

most archives, however, every photograph made 

in PWA is prompted by language in the context 

of a live performative event. In PWA San Antonio 

(October 2018), the artist asks audience members 

to identify themselves based on a series of labels/ 

titles. The photograph titled, “Cruz”, depicts an 

empty gallery space. (No one present voted for 

Cruz). In “Loving Black Men Publicly,” we see 

Owens, who is African-American, being hugged by 

another man of color in a small group of people. 

Together, this series of photographs, acts as a 

personal archive (Owens writes the prompts and 

directs the camera) and as a public archive - it is 

staged in public and asks the audience members 

to consciously identify themselves. 

We’ve edited this journal volume with the idea 

that art and writing (among other actions) have 

the strength to confuse and jostle the archive’s 

relationship to empirical order, power, and 

control of the historical record and to build new 

relationships. We follow Crystal Fraser and Zoe 

Todd (2016), who find it is necessary to attend 

to the complex relationships between archives 

and those who have been oppressed by them 

as a way to transform archives and attend 

to matters of justice. In part, this is found “in 

reading historical documents in creative ways 

that allow for deep and fluid understandings of 

the past” (Fraser and Todd 2016). In this issue of 

MMJ, recognizing the power of archives, power 

over the story of individuals, groups, collective 

memory, and scholarship (Schwartz and Cook 

2002) is acknowledged through working with the 

everyday, the unexpected, the more-than-human, 

the personal, the intimate. As much as archives 

claim truth, like photography, they are also ripe 

with failure, countervailing presences, uncertainty, 

and impermanence. Attempting to thwart binaries 


17

of truth/fiction, permanence/impermanence, 

science/art, we included submissions that build 

more fluid relationships in and with archives. We 

think about archives as places of encounter, fluid 

places that allow, confront, rework, and challenge 

our personal and collective relationships to pasts, 

presents, and futures. 

References: 

Paolo Cherchi Usai 

The Death of Cinema History, Cultural Memory and the Digital 

Dark Age. British Film Institute. 2001. 

Crystal Fraser and Zoe Todd (2016) 

Decolonial Sensibilities: Indigenous Research and 

Engaging with Archives in Contemporary Colonial Canada. 

L'Internationale Online (https://www.internationaleonline.org/ 

research/decolonising_practices/54_decolonial_sensibilities_ 

indigenous_research_and_engaging_with_archives_in_ 

contemporary_colonial_canada) 

Joan M Schwartz and Terry Cook 

Archives, Records, and Power. Archival Science: International 

Journal on Recorded Information. 2 (1-2 & 3-4), 2002. 

Kate Hennessy and Trudi Lynn Smith. 

Fugitives: Anarchival Materiality in Archives. PUBLIC 

57:Archive/Anarchive/Counter-Archive. Edited by Susan Lord 

and Janine Marchessault (pp. 128-44). 2018. 



19

Father's Dream: an excerpt 

from "Twelve Moments" 


"Father's Dream" is an excerpt from "Twelve 

Moments,” a documentary project focusing on 

Hothothot’s story of his illegal birth as the second 

child in China in 1986. The main storyline is a 

relationship between father and son, connecting 

his personal and collective pain to ask, “how does 

politics affect our lives?” 


07 

Father’s Dream

My father has big rough hands.

They always hold something.

This is not my father.

This is my father.

095 



My father was born in 1951 in the countryside 

in central China. He was Mao’s loyal red kid. 

Mao’s socialist movement offered free 

education to the lower classes. 

When he went to primary school, he found 

out that his thirty-five-year-old father was 

studying in the same school in a different 

grade. 

My father was confused as to whether he 

should be listening to his father or to the 

teachers in school. 

28 Mapping Meaning, the Journal 

father's dream.indd 8 26/06/2019 10:44

During the Cultural Revolution, he was a passionate Red 

Guard. He had become the head of his class, and soon 

became the head of the school’s Red Guards. 

father's dream.indd 9 Issue 26/06/2019 N o 310:4429

He even had a romantic relationship with my mother, 

whose family had been one of the richest of their city. 

Mao’s socialist movement took away her family’s 

houses, medicine shops, theater and land. 

She had only recently lost her father when she met my 

father. 

30 Mapping Meaning, the Journal 


She believed that my father’s politically 

correct background and self-striving 

could bring her a safe nest in a grim and 

grave time. My father believed that the 

socialist movement was romantic and 

would create a great equal society! 


father's dream.indd 11 26/06/2019 10:44 

31

Let’s pretend that 

we can hear ‘The 

Internationale’ 

while looking at my 

father in his solid 

community.


My father started his career as a headmaster in a middle 

school in 1976. 

Mao died a few months later. My father cried on the 

square in front of the radio station. He believed that 

Maoism would never die, and it could guide them to 

create a bright future with a red road leading to a 

communist society. He needed to work even harder. 


His loyalty to communism and his strong work ethic led 

to a quick promotion. 

The socialist movement raised his family’s 

class, and brought new hope to his life 

about how society could change. For him, 

the communist party meant justice. 

Mao was a symbol of idealism and a hero. 

He wanted to be a politician. 


father's dream.indd 15 26/06/2019 10:44 

35

The music 

is over.

My father’s ambition was to be a politician, 

but my birth had destroyed his wish. He 

paid his fine for the One Child Policy. For 

the rest of his life, he never had the 

opportunity to be a politician, only to be a 

school headmaster. 

But he never questioned Mao’s regime. 

He said Mao is the sun 

of China. 

How can you question 

the sun?


The Living Archive of 

Aboriginal Art: Maree 

Clarke and the Circulation 

of Photographs as Culture- 

Making 

Sabra Thorner, Fran Edmonds, Maree Clarke, Kirsten Thorpe, 

Rimi Khan, Sharon Huebner 

Left | Figure 1 

The possum skin cloak made 

by Maree, together with her 

nieces and nephews, for the 

“Reimagining Culture” exhibition 

at the Mildura Art Gallery 

(March-May 2019). Photograph 

by Rimi Khan (April 2019), and 

reproduced with permission from 

Maree Clarke. 

The term “living archive” refers to an Aboriginal 

community archive containing both tangible and 

intangible records. The living Aboriginal archive 

holds records that may be transmitted orally 

by members of the community or passed on 

through art, dance, or storytelling—that is, they 

are not captured in particular physical or digital 

form but are transmitted through interaction and 

connections between people. In addition, the 

living archive is considered to be not only a place 

for storing or gathering materials, but also a place 

where information can be contested. Multiple 

sources of records can be gathered, analysed, and 

debated, and new layers of information can be 

captured that reveal their context (Thorpe 903). 

I’m a visual artist and a curator with more than 

30 years’ experience of revivifying the knowledge 

and practice associated with my Ancestors. This 


39

process includes reclaiming the collections and 

archives holding my cultural heritage in museums 

and galleries around the world. My work is 

multi-dimensional—from the revival of possumskin 

cloaks and kangaroo-tooth necklaces to 

the innovation in lenticular photographs and 

3D-printed jewellery. My ambitions are to pass 

the cultural knowledge embedded in art-making 

on to future generations, handed down to my 

nieces and nephews so that they can explore 

their connections to their culture and identities in 

ways that are meaningful to them. I’m also keen 

to share this knowledge with anyone really who 

wants to support these practices, especially those 

that occur in my backyard. I want my work and all 

the accompanying stories—especially the humour 

and enjoyment connected to the art-making 

process—recorded in such a way as to ensure 

our archives remain representative of our living 

culture. 

Maree Clarke 

in ongoing conversation with Fran Edmonds 

Setting the Scene 

It’s March 2019, the first weekend of (southern 

hemisphere) autumn. It’s unusually hot—a 

heatwave grips Melbourne and a small house in 

the inner-western suburb of Yarraville is ablaze 

with activity. I (Fran) have arrived to join in the 

final weekend of an art-making frenzy with artist 

Maree Clarke. My contribution to the workshop is 

minor, though I’m always made welcome. Maree 

is Wemba Wemba/Mutti Mutti/Boon Wurrung/ 

Yorta Yorta—these terms denote language and 

cultural groups of the region now known as the 

southeastern state of Victoria, Australia. This is 

a space where people continue to navigate what 

it means to be Aboriginal. Narrm/Melbourne 

is a city with a sense of itself as sophisticated, 

cosmopolitan. Here, Aboriginality is rarely seen, 

heard, or openly acknowledged. Yet, this house, 

and especially the backyard, are a vivid reminder 

of people’s ongoing connections to Country and 

kin. 

This weekend is the culmination of a series of 

workshops that began a month ago. Their focus 

is a family exhibition in Maree’s hometown of 

Mildura, in northwest Victoria, opening next 

week. 1 The show features her deep commitment 

to sharing her knowledge and practices of art/ 

culture-making with her nieces and nephews 

[Figure 1]. The exhibition will include a possumskin 

cloak, a kangaroo-tooth necklace, a 

supersized river reed necklace, and projected 

black and white images of family and friends 

from her photographic collection made in 

the early 1990s [Figures 2-6]. Her passion for 

intergenerational knowledge transmission has 

developed from her own ambitions to revivify 

the material culture and cultural practices of her 

Ancestors. Maree has forged herself as a culturemaker, 

a mentor, and a facilitator who draws on 

a diverse network of immediate and extended 

family, friends, and colleagues, and urges their 

own contributions as experiential learning. 

During the weekend workshop, while Maree and 

I are in her too-warm backyard working on the 

possum-skin cloak design, she reflects on her 

passion for photography and her early training. 

She has an extensive personal archive stretching 

back to when she was a photographic “cadet,” 

1“Maree Clarke: Reimagining Culture: Contemporary Connections to Country” was held at the 

Mildura Arts Centre March 9 – May 12, 2019. 


Figure 2 

Sonja Hodge, Maree Clarke, and Aaron Clarke, nephew. NAIDOC march, mid-1990s. 

Photograph from the collection of Maree Clarke and reproduced with permission. 


41

or trainee. Maree and Kim Kruger (Muroona 

and South Sea Islander) were the first Aboriginal 

women to receive funding from the Victorian 

Women’s Trust in 1990. 2 They worked with 

photographer (Jillian) Viva Gibb (1945-2017), who 

was instrumental in having the cadetships funded 

through that Trust. Maree relates the story: 

Viva had spent some time in South Africa, 

photographing people and communities. 

While there, she noticed there were lots of 

Black photographers, and when she came 

back to Australia—it was the late 1980s—I 

think there was only Mervyn Bishop. Merv 

was a press photographer based in Sydney 

and took some quite iconic photos. Aboriginal 

women photographers like Tracey Moffatt, 

Destiny Deacon, and Lisa Bellear each had 

their own individual photographic “art” 

practices but were only beginning to make 

headway with their work…There were few 

career pathways that provided Aboriginal 

women with opportunities to learn the 

“trade.” 

Viva approached the Victorian Women’s Trust 

to get funding to train two Aboriginal women 

in photography…Kim and I worked with Viva 

for two years, traveling to Aboriginal families 

and events throughout the state. 

Maree’s sister-in-law, Sonja Hodge (Lardil), was 

often included on these journeys. The women 

photographed many Koori events. 3 Maree’s 

images range from NAIDOC (National Aboriginal 

2 The Victorian Women’s Trust is a non-profit advocacy group for gender equity. Founded in 

1985, it’s one of the oldest women’s funding bodies in the world. 

3 “Koori” refers to Aboriginal people from southeastern Australia (in the present day state of 

Victoria, and often extending northwards into southern New South Wales). The word derives 

originally from the Awabakal language from what is now northeastern New South Wales and 

means “person.” “Koorie” is an alternative spelling preferred by Elder Uncle Jim Berg, one of the 

co-founders of the Koorie Heritage Trust, an Aboriginal cultural center in Melbourne. 

and Islander Day of Commemoration) marches 

held along the main streets of Melbourne [see 

figures 3-4], visits to country towns, and places 

of significance for family and friends [see figure 

5]. There are images of missions where today 

people continue to reside; pictures of individuals, 

including beautifully composed head shots 

[see figure 6]; group photographs of people 

partying; snapshots of Elders congregating at the 

Aborigines Advancement League, 4 and glimpses 

of people going about their everyday activities. 

The photographs are significant reminders 

of the continuing depth of Aboriginal family, 

community, and culture in Victoria. They also 

make tangible Maree’s ongoing connections to 

place and to political activism; they position her 

as a matriarch, a keeper of knowledge. Together, 

they demonstrate the resilience of a southeastern 

Aboriginality, and the alternative perspectives 

of culture as witnessed, experienced, and 

tenaciously maintained by a young Aboriginal 

woman. 

An Introduction: the Living Archive of 

Aboriginal Art 

It is the seamless movement between artmaking, 

storytelling, recording, and mobilizing 

the photographic archive in Maree’s backyard 

that led us to develop a project we’re calling the 

Living Archive of Aboriginal Art. We’re writing, 

assembling, revising, making, and learning 

together. We—Sabra Thorner, Fran Edmonds, 

Maree Clarke, Kirsten Thorpe, Rimi Khan, and 

Sharon Huebner, together with others—are 

a team with diverse backgrounds, expertise, 

and interests, who began working together 

4 The Aborigines Advancement League is the oldest Aboriginal organization in Australia (founded 

in 1957), and long a place of significance for Victorian Kooris, supporting both social welfare 

and cultural heritage. 


Figures 3-4 

NAIDOC March, mid-1990s. Photographs by Maree Clarke. 


43

in August 2018. Our goal (over the next few 

years) is to develop a digital tool that reflects the 

deep interconnectedness—for contemporary 

Indigenous artists in the land now known as 

Australia—of knowledge, culture, land, kinship, 

language, and performance. 

I (Sabra) have taken the lead on this shared 

publication—I’m an anthropologist based in the 

United States who’s been working with Indigenous 

people in Australia for about 20 years. I’m 

broadly interested in photography, digital media, 

and archiving as forms of cultural production and 

social activism. My participation in this shared 

project extends back to my dissertation fieldwork 

(2008-10), when I worked as a volunteer at the 

Koorie Heritage Trust in Melbourne (during which 

time I met Maree, then the Exhibitions Curator 

there, and got to know Fran, who’d already 

long been working with Aboriginal artists and 

community members in Australia’s southeast). 

More recently, over the last few years, Fran, 

Maree, and I have been working, writing, thinking, 

and making together, focusing especially on how 

Indigenous art-making is also culture-making, 

that these processes are in fact collaborative and 

intercultural, and that they seek to profoundly 

reimagine what archives are and what archives 

do. 

I (Fran) am coordinating the Living Archive 

project. Almost 30 years ago, I began working as 

a remote area teacher, lecturer, and researcher 

in Australia’s Central Desert, living and working 

with Warlpiri people in Willowra, then with 

Alywarre and Anmatyere people from the vast 

homelands of Utopia. Soon after, I worked as 

a historian/anthropologist involved in archival 

and genealogical research for Native Title 

claims across Australia. 5 Over the past 20 years, 

my work has focused mainly in southeastern 

Australia. The long-term relationships with 

artists and community-members forged through 

this work (and further progressed when Maree 

became my Ph.D. field supervisor in 2002) have 

deeply influenced the ethnography I conduct. 

This includes documenting, recording, and 

understanding the interconnection of art practices 

and visual cultures in relation to Aboriginal 

knowledge systems, alongside the intersection of 

digital technologies to support these processes. 

My research seeks to be collaborative, where 

Aboriginal voices and knowledge are a priority in 

achieving intercultural knowledge exchange, to 

progress Aboriginal control of their histories and 

stories located in the “archive.” 

We are led by Maree—her generosity, her 

passionate commitment to transmitting culture, 

and her insistence that this be collaborative and 

intercultural work—and are driven by Indigenous 

knowledge paradigms and a powerful sense 

of social justice: Indigenous people must be in 

control over their own cultural heritage. 

The goal of the Living Archive project is to 

respond to, reflect, and further reinforce the 

holism of Indigenous ways of knowing, being, 

and doing things (Martin and Miraboopa 2003), 

foregrounding the culturally-appropriate 

transmission of knowledge. The building of an 

enduring tool is one planned outcome, yet equally 

important is developing sustainable pathways 

for the education, training, and employment of 

young people—empowering Koori youth as the 

knowledge holders and cultural custodians of 

5 “Native Title” refers to the processes that allow Indigenous peoples in Australia to reclaim rights 

to their lands and waters, through the Commonwealth’s Native Title Act 1993. The Act followed 

the decision of Australia’s High Court in 1992 in the historic Mabo and others vs. Queensland 

(No 2) case, which overturned terra nullius (meaning “land belonging to no one”), the philosophy 

(and legal fiction) that allowed for European invasion/colonization of the continent. 


the future. This work is both crucial and urgent 

in Narrm/Melbourne (and in southeastern 

Australia more broadly), where Indigenous 

people are deeply marginalized, ignored, and/ 

or assumed to be located elsewhere (such 

as remote communities in Australia’s desert 

center or tropical far north). The activation, 

preservation, and innovation of contemporary art 

practices contribute significantly to personal and 

community wellbeing (Edmonds and Clarke i-xvi, 

1-56); these are also powerful political assertions 

of unceded sovereignty over lands, bodies, and 

cultural expressions (Balla 11-16, Bunda 75-85), 

increasingly led by a cohort of senior women 

(Thorner et al., 269-291). 

Archives have become important sites of scholarly 

inquiry over the last two decades (Anderson 

“Authors, Owners and Archives” , “Access and 

Control”; Derrida 7-102; Gilliland et al 16-29; 

Jorgensen and McLean 1-428; Stoler 1-278); they 

are no longer taken for granted, but are now 

actively investigated as cultures, institutions, and/ 

or technologies with their own logics (and logics 

that can then be resisted, responded to, and 

reimagined). There have been several successful 

projects to “Indigenize the archive,” both in and 

beyond Australia (Anderson and Christen 105- 

126, Boast and Enote 103-113, Christie 61-66): 

these turn the focus away from text-based 

repositories of information (often enmeshed 

in agendas of state-making and/or surveillance 

of citizen-subjects) towards active, multimedia 

sites of creative knowledge production. They 

also turn the focus away from traditional 

collecting institutions back to community-focused 

archives (see Faulkhead 60-88; Timbery 145-178; 

Thorpe 900-934). The proposed living archive is 

among the first in Australia in which Indigenous 

people will be included as co-producers, urban 

Indigenous knowledge will be foregrounded (and 

so too, the wisdom of women and matriarchal 

structures of cultural transmission), and the 

foundational idea will be to preserve and activate 

objects and the stories they elicit according to 

local and holistic ways of knowing. 

This piece is a hybrid, a first attempt to write 

together and very much part of our ongoing 

collaborative archival intentions. It includes 

ethnographic storytelling, academic analysis, 

archival photos and captions, and some 

additional reflection from an Indigenous 

archivist collaborator on the project. We are 

working at being reflexive and recursive at 

every step. In what follows, we think and write 

about photographic archives in two main ways. 

First, photographs are historical documents: 

these, from the personal archive of artist Maree 

Clarke, are an inspiration for storytelling, which 

is also culture-making. They are evidence of 

Koori connections to kin and Country, evidence 

of political activism, evidence of community 

and presence in the urban space that is 20thcentury 

Melbourne. Secondly, photographs 

(and video) are mobilized as integral to the 

art-making process, always an archive-inbecoming. 

Art-making, here, is intergenerational 

and intercultural, collaborative and experiential, 

and simultaneously experimental and reliant on 

traditional designs, motifs, and materials (Figure 

7). Maree visually documents every stage of 

her production; this is integral to her making 

and to her clear political intervention: to allow 

the knowledge that is made tangible through 

art-making, artworks, and the storytelling that 

inherently go with them to live beyond the here 

and now. 


45

Figure 5 

Alice Clarke (Maree’s mother) with Alicia Clarke (Maree’s niece) at Warrakoo, c1995-96. 

Photograph by Maree Clarke. 


A First Photographic Encounter 

When I (Fran) first arrive at Maree’s house with 

a dynamic group of graduate students in August 

2018, the space was relatively calm, yet the 

students are able to see and feel the place as 

one where art-making is a priority and is deeply 

embedded in contemporary Aboriginality. Maree 

introduces the students to her vast and eclectic 

collection of objects and materials, which she 

uses to create her vibrant works of art. From 

among the piles of river reeds (collected from 

the Maribyrnong River) [figure 8], the possumskin 

pelts (ordered from New Zealand where 

the small marsupials are not protected) [figure 

9], the kangaroo jaw bones (gathered up from 

roadkill animals along the highway north from 

Melbourne) from which teeth are extracted for 

making necklaces [figure 10], Maree produces 

six archival folders. Each folder holds pages of 

negatives inserted in plastic sleeves; some are 

labelled and some not. Altogether, there are 

almost 1,000 tiny black and white squares. We 

gather around Maree as she nostalgically opens 

folders and flips through the photographs-inminiature. 

Soon, she retrieves a light box to see 

more clearly, and easily begins telling stories of 

people and places. Her narrative is interwoven 

with aspirations to return the images back to the 

people and communities pictured. 

At the end of our visit, Maree entrusts us with 

the care of the folders. Later, I would take them 

to a digital archiving center at the University of 

Melbourne, where the students and the research 

team (myself included) would work with archivists 

to register the photographs and prepare a series 

ready for selection by Maree for the upcoming 

exhibition—“Reimagining Culture: Contemporary 

Connections to Country”—at the Mildura Arts 

Centre, in Maree’s hometown. 

Over the subsequent months, together with 

the university archivists’ help, we developed a 

workflow and some protocols to ensure that 

photographs are retrievable. We built a shared 

Excel spreadsheet to hold all the scanned images 

and record as many details as possible; this will 

expand over time as we gather more information 

from Maree. Throughout this registration period, 

Maree was a visible presence, meeting with 

students, talking about events depicted in the 

images, and sharing stories about the Mildura 

exhibition and her intentions for recording the 

making of things in her backyard. The practice 

of ongoing recording is one that is yet to be 

captured in the registration process; films and 

photographs of Maree’s work will all go into the 

growing archive. Maree avidly documents all her 

art-making projects—art- and archive-making are 

parts of the same process, all culture-making. The 

archive, in this context, is dynamic and flexible, 

something that we hope to be able to capture as 

we develop a digital platform that is interactive 

and non-linear. 

The registration of photographs from Maree’s 

beginnings as an artist and an activist in the 1990s 

has been imagined as a purposeful beginning, 

a framework for intervening in conventional 

archival practices in which “things” are 

categorized and catalogued, in the first instance, 

by type. This Western/European model of “order” 

in fact inhibits more circular and relational 

understandings of photographic and art practices, 

which reveal Maree’s work as living and ongoing, 

always being layered upon, always being shared. 

These photographs are not confined to an earlier 


47

Figure 6 

Ruby Hunter (Ngarrindjeri), early 1990s. 

Photograph by Maree Clarke. 


Figure 7 

“Reimagining Culture” exhibition at the Mildura Art Gallery; this wall featured three screens, 

including film footage by Simon Rose at left, black and white photographs from Maree’s archive at 

center, and Simon Rose’s short film “Cultural Activist” playing at right. Pictured at left is pokerwork 

being inscribed on a possum-skin cloak in the making during a backyard workshop. Exhibition 

photograph by Rimi Khan (April 2019), and reproduced with permission from Maree Clarke. 


49

Figure 8 

River reeds in Maree’s backyard, February 2019. Photograph by Rimi Khan, and 

reproduced with permission from Maree Clarke. 


Figure 9 

Possum skins laid out for sewing, Maree’s backyard, February 2019. 

Photograph by Rimi Khan, and reproduced with permission from Maree Clarke. 


51

time or another place (the colonial logics that 

construct and police “authentic” Aboriginality 

as rooted in skin color and/or remoteness) but 

resonate with and are creatively taken up by Koori 

people today. 

Maree’s Role as a Cross-Cultural Facilitator 

Maree’s work is both intergenerational and 

intercultural. I (Rimi) grew up in Australia as the 

daughter of Bangladeshi migrants against the 

backdrop of official policies of “multiculturalism,” 

and in cultural spaces where I was regularly 

asked to perform my heritage for different 

kinds of publics. Later, as an academic and 

cultural researcher, I developed an interest in 

how communities are formed through art, and 

what kinds of art-making are ascribed value in 

a culturally diverse, contemporary Australia. 

“Multicultural art” has been an institutional and 

aesthetic category used to describe the work 

of migrant-background artists (Khan 184-199), 

yet the connections between migrant and First 

Nations artists and communities are rarely 

examined. I became interested in how Maree’s 

efforts to revive and reawaken Aboriginal cultural 

forms and stories are inevitably positioned within 

settler-migrant and cross-cultural contexts. At 

Bunjilaka Gallery at Melbourne Museum, for 

example, Maree’s works form part of a narrative 

of southeastern Australian First Nations peoples 

that is presented for large numbers of visitors 

and tourists. Reflecting on Aboriginal traditions 

of grief and mourning, these works are not just 

a representation of cultural history, but are also 

living, intercultural practices of knowledge-sharing 

and dialogue in a global context. 

Maree’s ways of transmitting knowledge 

emerge from an approach to art-making that is 

emphatically community-driven. Most of Maree’s 

works are the result of many hours sitting and 

working alongside family and friends as cocreators 

and collaborators. Maree’s works are 

tactile, large-scale, and multidisciplinary, qualities 

that lend themselves to collective and crosscultural 

processes. The backyard workshops 

mentioned above, over a number of weeks, 

became open spaces of dialogue, learning, and 

conviviality. These sessions involved long hours 

of working with different materials—kangaroo 

teeth and sinew, possum skins, river reeds, 

cockatoo feathers and echidna quills—which 

we cut, sewed, threaded, burned, and glued, 

with the guidance of Maree and her community 

of collaborators. The work was detailed, 

painstaking, and physically demanding in the full 

heat of summer. 

It is work that is ultimately seen in the formalized 

settings of galleries and museums, but made 

possible by deep practices of kinship and 

community-building. I felt that the students, 

recruited from a class I teach, had much to learn 

from these processes as a form of intercultural 

and intergenerational cultural pedagogy. These 

students, who aspire to be festival curators, 

performers, and media producers, volunteered to 

painstakingly register and scan the photos from 

Maree’s black and white archive, and participated 

in the art-making workshops in Maree’s backyard. 

The students approached these forms of cultural 

and physical labor with curiosity, industriousness, 

and humor. They were not paid for their time, 

but took part because they wanted to learn about 

the relationships between archives, art-making, 

and Aboriginality. The students themselves were 


culturally diverse, as temporary visitors and 

settlers to Australia. They made sense of Maree’s 

backyard as part of a wider global space. One 

student from mainland China described how 

difficult it was for her, as an international student, 

to find opportunities to connect with “local” and 

“authentic” Australian culture. Her life on and 

off campus was largely confined to studying and 

socializing with other international students. 

Yet she had a keen interest in art, and was 

enthusiastic about the opportunity to work with 

Maree. Accompanied by a friend, she participated 

in numerous workshops, sharing food, drinks, 

and conversation with Maree and her family as 

they worked together and spoke of arts practices 

of ethnic minority groups in China. The students’ 

presence in Maree’s backyard opened up the 

space to these other cultural trajectories, and 

their questions about the making of possum-skin 

cloaks and river reed necklaces drew connections 

to cultural knowledges from other parts of the 

world. 

Significantly, these forms of exchange are only 

possible because of the ethos of generosity that 

characterizes Maree’s approach as an artist. 

Her work is enabled by her willingness to share 

stories, skills, and ideas. The cultural knowledge 

that informs her art-making is not something that 

is owned or possessed solely by her, but by others 

in the workshops: nephews, nieces, friends, and 

aunties who themselves are developing and 

exchanging knowledge about these cultural 

practices. This emphasis on cultural and aesthetic 

exchange is unlike Western frameworks of 

art production in which expertise or genius is 

embodied in the individual artist. While aesthetic 

knowledge and skill can be cultivated or learned 

from others through training in narrowly defined 

institutional contexts (such as art school), artistic 

talent tends to be assessed as something that is 

the sole property of the individual. Maree’s work, 

in contrast (and much Indigenous art-making 

more generally), is dependent on the community 

relationships forged via the processes of makingtogether. 

Instead of restricting or guarding the 

spread of this knowledge, Maree’s approach is 

one of openness; sharing such knowledge in 

intercultural community contexts is crucial for 

ensuring the legacy and survival of these artmaking 

practices, the objects they produce, and 

the stories they inspire. 

This generosity is also reflected in Maree’s role 

as an artistic leader in other art spaces. For a 

number of years, she has been a curator at the 

Wyndham Art Gallery, an arts center in the outerwestern 

suburbs, funded by the local municipal 

government. Despite being an hour’s drive 

from central Melbourne, Maree has mobilized 

her connections with arts stakeholders and 

communities across the region to turn the gallery 

into a space that attracts a wide range of artists 

and visitors. The institutional mandate eschews 

the usual divisions between the city and the 

suburbs, and the center and peripheries of the 

art world. Instead, the gallery promotes the work 

of emerging artists and foregrounds weighty 

questions about cultural difference. 

A recent exhibition, Bla(c)k Femmes Bla(c)k Visions 

(February 27 – March 24, 2019), is a prime 

example. Mounting this show included working 

closely with young Black curators, building and 

affirming connections between African and 

Aboriginal women. Together, they explore 

meanings of Blackness, in the context of arts 

and cultural policy discourses that prefer not to 


53

address difficult questions of race, exclusion, and 

colonial violence (Khan et al 25-34). The opening 

event showcased the words and performances 

of young brown and Black women and was 

explicitly intersectional. Speakers and performers 

highlighted their personal experiences of racism, 

and situated these in the diversity of Blackness, 

genders and sexualities, and the analogies 

between African and Aboriginal struggles for 

empowerment and self-determination. The 

catalogue explains the exhibition’s title: 

Bla(c)k is helpful to us to emphasise the 

difference between sovereign Blak people 

here, 6 and displaced or settler Black folks 

with roots from elsewhere as well as pointing 

towards many of our shared experiences 

(Mag, Wol & Trambas). 

The exhibition featured the contradictions 

of simultaneous hypervisibility and erasure 

shared by these Bla(c)k women from different 

communities and countries. 

Bla(c)k Femmes Bla(c)k Visions offers an example in 

which Maree leveraged her position as a curator 

to enable the critical cross-cultural work of a new 

generation of bla(c)k femme artists and cultural 

leaders. The exhibition’s guest curators – Adut 

Wol, Abbey Mag, and Aisha Trambas – are South 

Sudanese and Afro-Greek women, who describe 

themselves as “three young Black settlers on 

Wautharong and Wurundjeri land” (Mag, Wol 

& Trambas). Their connections and debts to 

local Aboriginal communities are the first thing 

they highlight in the exhibition notes, and by 

bringing together First Nations and African- 

6 The term “Blak” originates with Indigenous artist Destiny Deacon (Ku’a Ku’a and Erub/Mer), 

who coined the term in 1991 to enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples “to refer to 

themselves specifically and separately from wider settler and international Black cultures” (Mag, 

Wol & Trambas 2019, n.p.). 

background artists, the exhibition’s frame is 

explicitly transnational and translocal. Bla(c)k 

Femmes Bla(c)k Visions presents a hybrid vision of 

intercultural solidarity, community-building, and 

exchange. Moving across the different artworks 

presented in the space is to observe disparate 

experiences and identities come into a sharp 

dialogue on visibility and erasure. The exhibition 

also provided a visual language for female 

bodies to reclaim their identities in a society 

that explicitly racializes them; photography is a 

powerful, effective medium through which to do 

so. It is by enabling these curatorial relationships 

that Maree’s cultural work resists existing 

artworld disciplines, categories, and hierarchies, 

and instead emphasizes the community-based 

collaborative production of cultural meaning. 

Precedents in Archiving and the Storytelling 

over Photographs 

Photographs have been instrumental to the 

storytelling processes that are increasingly being 

recognized as integral to Indigenous pursuits of 

healing, heritage reclamation, and social justice 

(see Huebner 171–184; Thorner and Dallwitz 

53-60, Thorner 1-18). Stories—the talking about 

the past in the present—are vital for regenerating 

and sustaining relationships between people, 

kin, and Country. I (Sharon) first met Maree 

at the Koorie Heritage Trust (KHT) in the early 

2000s; Maree was the Exhibitions Curator and 

I was a researcher within the Koorie Family 

History Service. 7 The Trust is a keeping place for 

Koori(e) heritage; the collections include wooden 

artifacts and stone tools, artworks, photographs, 

7 The Family History Service was established in 2001 following the 1997 Bringing them Home 

Report, commissioned by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Commonwealth 

Government, in 1995. The report brought to light the extent of Commonwealth and state 

government policies in effect in Australia 1910-1971 that led to the forcible removal of Aboriginal 

and Torres Strait Islander children from their families and homes. Children were sent to orphanages, 

schools, and/or missions, often far away from their homelands, with the explicit goal of 

assimilating them into white society. These children are known as the “Stolen Generations.” 


Figure 10 

Maree’s nephew Mitch in Maree’s backyard, working on the kangaroo-tooth necklace for the 

“Reimagining Culture” exhibition at the Mildura Art Gallery (March-May 2019). Photograph by Fran 

Edmonds (March 2019), and reproduced with permission from Maree Clarke. 


55

oral histories, as well as contemporary cultural 

materials. Central to my work there was to build 

trusting relationships with community members 

and to conduct oral histories, often in the context 

of reinterpreting objects, photographs, and 

digital media “returned” from libraries, archives, 

museums, and record offices. 

KHT is also a cross-cultural meeting place: its 

motto is “Gnokan Danna Murra Kor-Ki,” meaning 

“give me your hand, my friend,” intended to 

exemplify a spirit of intercultural partnership 

and collaboration. At the Trust, Maree and I 

shared a common interest in historical collections 

of photographs as a source for art-making 

inspiration, community-building, and cultural 

(re)vitalization. We are also both photographers 

ourselves, and taking photographs gave us a living 

platform from which to explore Koori identity, 

individual memories, extended understandings of 

kin and Ancestors, and how all of these emerge 

from, and are dependent upon, Country. 

“Country,” for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander 

peoples, refers to places that are considered 

homelands for generations of extended family. 

Country is geography, ecology, memory, and 

history; it exists out in the world and is also 

intrinsic to one’s identity. Country is a way of 

referring, too, to the inextricability of personhood, 

Ancestors and their knowledge, cultural beliefs 

and practices, and the places which people 

identify as home, sites of nourishment, and 

responsibilities of care. Country is how you 

know who you are and where you come from, 

and where these sensibilities are generated and 

anchored. The dislocation from Country and kin 

experienced by Australia’s Stolen Generations is 

a heartbreaking and enduring legacy felt by many 

contemporary Indigenous people across Australia. 

The Koorie Heritage Archive (KHA), launched at 

the Koorie Heritage Trust in 2003, is an important 

precursor to our current work to reimagine 

archives as dynamic places that incorporate 

art-making, storytelling, and the audio/visual 

documentation of this cultural work. The KHA 

is a digital repository for historical materials, 

previously held only in public archives and 

private collections, which grants Kooris access to 

photographs of people and places important to 

them, images of cultural artifacts, digital replicas 

of artworks and manuscripts, film footage of 

community events, and audio recordings of Koori 

Elders and other community members telling 

their stories in their own words (Huebner and 

Cooper 18–32). The archive includes cultural 

heritage materials and a metadata collector for 

gathering information about those materials. 

Kooris are able to add stories and other 

information that often only they can provide, such 

as the date something was made or happened, 

the names of people and places, or the name 

of the person who created the stories that 

accompany a particular item. In this way, people 

regain control over their representations and 

have the opportunity to respond to, and often 

correct, (mis)representations of themselves or 

family members recorded in colonial government 

correspondence and reports. Users can also add, 

if necessary, cultural restrictions to materials they 

deem culturally sensitive. 

Storytelling—over photographs, through artmaking—is 

one of the ways Maree transmits 

knowledge for future generations. Stories of 

traditional lands, belonging, and the intersections 

of people and Country are crucial to Koori 


community identity, kinship relationships, 

and cultural survival. Moving in and between 

these interconnections is integral to art/ 

culture-making in Australia’s southeast, led 

by Maree (and other matriarchal figures). 

Traveling between her Country in northwestern 

Victoria and her Melbourne backyard, Maree 

continuously animates historical photographs 

with contemporary storytelling and generates 

new photographs documenting her present, 

always with the future in mind. Via work with 

archival images and contemporary image-making, 

personal memories, family relationships, and 

senses of belonging to community, culture is 

animated and integrated into everyday life. 

Circulating Photographs as Culture-Making 

My (Fran’s) attendance at the workshop on the hot 

first weekend of March is marked by the return of 

some of the photographs to the space where we 

retrieved them six months ago—Maree’s home 

and studio. I have about 500 high-resolution 

images now on a USB flashdrive, transferred 

from the scanned files still being updated at the 

University. I sit with Maree as she hurriedly flicks 

through the photographs—now saved as TIFFs 

on my laptop. She searches for the ones she 

wants to use in the Mildura exhibition, opening 

next week. Maree’s emotional connection to the 

images is palpable; despite the fact that she has 

very little time to contemplate them, or that it 

has been many years since she has seen some 

of them, she knows immediately which ones she 

wants. 

finished. Maree’s nephew, Mitch Mahoney, 

following in his aunt’s footsteps (and who recently 

accompanied her on a cultural exchange with 

First Nations buffalo-cloak makers in Ontario, 

Canada), requires guidance in the final stages of 

making the kangaroo-tooth necklace [see figure 

10]. The threading of reeds and interspersing of 

bird feathers (galah, parrot, cockatoo) to create 

large-format necklaces also requires attention. 

The photographs are inextricable from this work. 

They have been part of Maree’s training as an 

art-maker and cultural mentor and they endure to 

reflect an Aboriginal presence in an urban context 

where it has long been contested. 

The nascent process of registering the images and 

interconnecting them with the places where they 

were made, and circulating them in Mildura (and 

elsewhere) as part of this new exhibition, reveal 

and construct the living archive as something 

that interweaves photographs with family, 

Country, significant events, and the role of art in 

transmitting culture to future generations. The 

images are not fixed in a time or place. Maree’s 

eyes move quickly across thumbnail squares on 

the laptop screen, and within 20 minutes, we have 

selected some 80+ photographs. I upload them 

onto another memory stick and label it “Exhibition 

Pictures.” Soon they will become larger-than-life, 

projected as a slideshow onto multiple screens, 

alongside contemporary renditions of traditional 

garments and adornment: the possum-skin cloak, 

kangaroo-tooth necklace, and supersized river 

reed necklaces that headline this exhibition [see 

figures 1, 7, 11, 12, 13]. 

There is still so much to do for the exhibition, 

opening in less than a week now. The possumskin 

cloak requires pokerwork designs to be 

In April, when I visit the exhibition in Mildura with 

my colleague and co-author Rimi, we remark 

on the return of the images to the town where 


57

Figure 11 

The nieces’ and nephews’ kangaroo-tooth necklace, on display in the “Reimagining Culture” 

exhibition at the Mildura Art Gallery. Photograph by Fran Edmonds (April 2019), and reproduced 

with permission from Maree Clarke. 


many of the folks shown on screen continue to 

reside. It is in this instance that, although the 

images are untitled, they are obviously connected 

to this place. There are scenes of Mildura’s 

main street with people photographed in front 

of iconic buildings; there are others showing 

Maree’s family, people who are well-known in the 

local area. Community-members visit, stopping 

to view images and tell stories to each other of 

those they know or have a connection to. These 

photographs, appearing on a continuous loop 

in the exhibition space, offer a chance for new 

audiences to engage with the living archive. 

Returning the photographs, showing them in this 

way, this exhibition reveals and extends ongoing 

relationships of people with places, creating the 

space for new understandings of contemporary 

Koori culture. 

Further Reflection: Transforming the Archive 

I (Kirsten) have spent a considerable amount of 

my professional life being surrounded by records 

and collections that objectify Indigenous people. 

As an Indigenous woman (my family are Worimi 

from Port Stephens, New South Wales) working 

in government archives and libraries, I have 

witnessed the power and the potency of colonial 

and bureaucratic records of the state. These are 

records that were created to justify the policies 

and the processes of dispossession, they were 

used as an apparatus to control and categorise 

Aboriginal people. Over the past two decades, 

I have been involved in projects which seek to 

transform these institutional archives, to open 

them up for critique and for community return. 

However, the efforts to increase access and to 

develop protocols for respectful engagement 

do little to alter or reshape these colonial and 

bureaucratic structures. Whilst options such as a 

right-of-reply exist, the support for administrative 

processes to enable this elevation of Aboriginal 

voices is virtually non-existent in traditional 

institutional library and archive spaces. 

I often say quietly to my close friends and family 

that I don’t really like libraries and archives. 

This is an odd, and even conflicting perspective, 

given that I spend a lot of time talking about 

the importance of archives and information for 

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. 

What I really mean is that I don’t like the current 

landscape of archives that are clearly in view (and 

well-resourced), as I find that they perpetuate 

colonial models of collecting, models which do not 

encompass a view of the archive as alive. 

Maree is herself a living archive and her work 

produces both tangible and intangible records, 

drawing from historic materials and transforming 

them into new sources of knowledge for cultural 

transmission. Through culture-making, Maree 

creates an archive that sits in stark contrast to 

institutional collections which are boxed, labelled, 

and categorized in ways which do not respect 

Indigenous worldviews and perspectives. A 

living archive transmits knowledge through 

relationships; it is not static or locked in time, but 

is an ever-growing source of nourishment and 

connection for the people who are connected 

with it. I am inspired by Maree’s living archive 

as it requires you to listen and be in dialogue 

with the objects that are in the process of being 

created and recreated. 

Maree’s archive presents us with a challenge, 

a challenge that many Aboriginal community 

archives currently face. That is, it needs to be 


59

Figure 12 

Supersized river reed necklace at left, river reed canoe at center, “Reimagining Culture” 

exhibition at the Mildura Art Gallery. Exhibition photograph by Rimi Khan (April 2019) 

and reproduced with permission from Maree Clarke. 


Figure 13 

“Reimagining Culture” exhibition at the Mildura Art Gallery; this wall featured three screens, 

including film footage by Simon Rose at left, and black and white photographs from Maree’s 

archive (including those pictured here as figures 2-6) at center. Pictured at left is Mitch Mahoney 

and Rocky Tregonning in one of the backyard art-making workshops. Exhibition photograph by 

Rimi Khan (April 2019) and reproduced with permission from Maree Clarke. 


61

maintained, supported, and preserved in spaces 

and places which are linked and contextual to the 

person and her work: stories, experiences, artmaking, 

knowledge-sharing. To move it from its 

current spaces (in and out of the backyard studio) 

into an institutional repository may potentially 

build systems and structures which permanently 

alter existing cultural connections. Yet we need 

to think of ways that we can facilitate the ongoing 

preservation, care for, and management of 

these materials—as an archive—over the longterm. 

That means thinking about preservation 

of Aboriginal archives (in digital and other forms) 

over generations so that they are adequately 

supported through resources and infrastructure. 

There is a major gap across the GLAM (Galleries, 

Libraries, Archives, Museums) sector in 

supporting living archives, an absence of valuing 

visual media as critical to self, community, culture, 

and history making, and a lack of understanding 

that dynamic and ongoing relationships are at 

the heart of this work. Our ability to transform 

what archives are and what archives might 

be will require a commitment to working with 

projects like Maree’s living archive to model 

new conceptions of archives within the archival 

multiverse that accommodate diverse ways of 

knowing and keeping. 8 

References 

Anderson, Jane. “Authors, Owners and Archives: A Working 

Paper.” Canberra, ACT: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and 

Torres Strait Islander Studies Seminar Series, 2004. 

Anderson, Jane. “Access and Control of Indigenous Knowledge 

in Libraries and Archives: Ownership and Future Use. 

Correcting Course: Rebalancing Copyright for Libraries in 

the National and International Arena.” New York: American 

8 The “archival multiverse” is a term coined by Gilliland, McKemmish, and Lau 2017 (see page 

17) to encompass the archiving of multiple kinds of texts and materials, culturally-specific 

memory-keeping practices, various institutions, myriad bureaucratic and personal motivations, 

community perspectives and needs, and cultural and legal constructs. 

Library Association and the MacArthur Foundation, Columbia 

University, 2005. Available: http://correctingcourse.columbia. 

edu/paper_anderson.pdf#search=%22access%20and%20 

control%20of%20indigenous%20knowledge%22. 

Anderson, Jane, and Kimberly Christen. 2013. “‘Chuck 

a Copyright on it’: Dilemmas of Digital Return and the 

Possibilities for Traditional Knowledge Licenses and Labels.” 

Museum Anthropology Review 7.1-2 (2013): 105-126. 

Balla, Paola. “Sovereignty: Inalienable and Intimate.” 

Sovereignty. Eds. Balla, Paola, and Max Delany. Melbourne, 

VIC: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2016. 11-16. 

Boast, Robin, and Jim Enote. “Virtual Repatriation: It Is 

Neither Virtual Nor Repatriation.” Heritage in the Context of 

Globalization. New York: Springer, 2013. 103-113. 

Bunda, Tracey. “The Sovereign Aboriginal Woman.” Sovereign 

Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters. Ed. Moreton- 

Robinson, Aileen. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2007. 

75-85. 

Christie, Michael. “Aboriginal Knowledge Traditions in 

Digital Environments.” The Australian Journal of Indigenous 

Education. 34 (2005): 61-66. 

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. E. 

Prenowitz, Trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. 

Edmonds, Fran, and Maree Clarke. "‘Sort of Like Reading 

a Map’: A Community Report on the History of South-East 

Australian Aboriginal Art since 1834." Darwin, NT: Co-operative 

Research Centre for Aboriginal Health. Available: https:// 

www.lowitja.org.au/sites/default/files/docs/Sort-of-likereading-a-map-amended.pdf. 

Faulkhead, Shannon. “Connecting Through Records: Narratives 

of Koorie Victoria.” Archives and Manuscripts 37.2 (2009): 60- 

88. 

Gilliland, Anne J., Sue McKemmish, and Andrew J. Lau. 

“Preface.” Research in the Archival Multiverse. Clayton, VIC: 

Monash University Publishing, 2017. 16-29. 

Huebner, Sharon. “A Digital Community Project for the 

Recuperation, Activation and Emergence of Victorian Koorie 

Knowledge, Culture and Identity.” Information Technology and 

Indigenous Communities. Eds. Ormond-Parker, Lyndon, Aaron 


Corn, Kazuko Obata, and Sandy O’Sullivan. Canberra, ACT: 

Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander 

Studies Research Publications, 2013. 171–184. 

Huebner, Sharon, and Kooramyee Cooper. “Koorie Culture 

and Technology: A Digital Archive Project for Victorian Koorie 

Communities.” Archives & Manuscripts: The Journal of the 

Australian Society of Archivists 35.1 (2007): 18–32. 

Jorgensen, Darren, and Ian A. McLean, eds. Indigenous Archives: 

The Making and Unmaking of Aboriginal Art. Crawley, WA: 

University of Western Australia Publishing, 2017. 

Thorpe, Kirsten. “Aboriginal Community Archives: A Case Study 

in Ethical Community Research.” Research in the Archival 

Multiverse. Eds. Gilliland, Anne J., Sue McKemmish, and 

Andrew J. Lau. Clayton, VIC: Monash University Publishing, 

2017. 900-934. 

Timbery, Narissa. “Archives and Indigenous Communities 

Can Work Together: One Koori’s Perspective.” Archives & 

Manuscripts: The Journal of the Australian Society of Archivists 

39.1 (2011): 145-178. 

Khan, Rimi. “‘Going ‘Mainstream’: Evaluating the 

Instrumentalisation of Multicultural Arts.” International Journal 

of Cultural Policy 16.2 (2010): 184-199. 

Khan, Rimi, Danielle Wyatt, and Audrey Yue. “Creative Australia 

and the Dispersal of Multiculturalism.” Asia Pacific Journal of 

Arts and Cultural Management 10.1 (2013): 25-34. 

Mag, Adut, Abbey Wol, and Aisha Trambas. “Bla(c)k Femmes 

Bla(c)k Visions.” Exhibition pamphlet. Wyndham, VIC: 

Wyndham Council, 2019. 

Martin, Karen, and Booran Miraboopa. “Ways of Knowing, 

Being and Doing: A Theoretical Framework and Methods for 

Indigenous Research and Indigenist Re-search.” Journal of 

Australian Studies 27.76 (2003): 203-214. 

Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties 

and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University 

Press, 2010. 

Thorner, Sabra. “Visual Economies and Digital Materialities 

of Koorie Kinship and Community: Photographs as Currency 

and Substance.” Anthropology and Photography No. 6 (Royal 

Anthropological Institute). Ed. Christopher Morton. 2016. 1-18. 

Thorner, Sabra, and John Dallwitz. “Storytelling Photographs, 

Animating Anangu: How Ara Irititja—an Indigenous 

Digital Archive in Central Australia—Facilitates Cultural 

Reproduction.” Technology and Digital Initiatives: Innovative 

Approaches for Museums. Ed. Decker, Juilee. Lanham, MD: 

Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. 53-60. 

Thorner, Sabra, Fran Edmonds, Maree Clarke, and Paola Balla. 

“Maree’s Backyard: Intercultural Collaborations for Indigenous 

Sovereignty.” Oceania 88.3 (2018): 269-291. 


63

C l i ff o r d O w e n s 

Loving Black Men Publicly 

Photographs with an Audience 

S a n A n t o n i o , 2 0 1 8 

Image courtesy of the artist. 


Photographs with an Audience, 

San Antonio 


Photographs with an Audience is an audiencesensitive 

photography and performance-based 

project in which photography is deployed to 

mediate interpersonal social dynamics between 

the attendees. The performance is structured 

as an intimate public forum. In response to a 

prompt, members of the audience are invited 

to appear in front of a medium format film 

camera (flanked by strobe lights) to “pose” for 

a photograph depicting their identification with 

a prompt. The prompt is predicated on the 

conversation that precedes it. For example, 

in the Manchester, England iteration of this 

project, a discussion about the swell of anti- 

Muslim hate crimes in the city prompted the 

photographic depiction of Muslims in the 

audience. Furthermore, Photographs with an 

Audience considers the documentary function of 

photography in the history of performance art 

versus the function of a photograph as a discreet 

work of art arrested from a live performance, 

and the limits of a photograph to fully elucidate 

the experience of being present for a live 

performance. In an op-ed piece I wrote for The 

New York Times in 2011, “The Internet is No 

Substitute of Live Performance Art,” I assert, “The 

most profound and powerful way to experience 

performance art is in the flesh and in real time, 

rather than in mediated time. Live performance 

art forces us to recognize the limits of our own 

body and psyche in relation to the artist and the 

audience, and the world around us.” Since 2008, 

I’ve presented Photographs with an Audience 

in New York City, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, 

Chapel Hill, Atlanta, San Antonio, and Manchester, 

England. 


65


Homeless 


S a n A n t o n i o , 2 0 1 8 




Queer 


San Antonio, 2018 



67


Military 


S a n A n t o n i o , 2 0 1 8 




Cruz 





69


Gun Violence 


S a n A n t o n i o , 2 0 1 8 




Latinx 





71


Nude 


S a n A n t o n i o , 2 0 1 8 




They 





73


Regret 


S a n A n t o n i o , 2 0 1 8 




75


An Embodied Archive: gestures 

and documents from "My 

Electric Genealogy" 

Sarah Kanouse 

For nearly forty years, my grandfather designed, 

planned, and supervised the spider-vein network 

of lines connecting Los Angeles to its distant 

sources of electric power. From the 1930s to the 

1970s, he made a second family of the grid and 

its substations, converter stations, and interties, 

photographing these monuments of the modern 

everyday with one foot in the aesthetic and 

another in the techno-scientific sublime. When 

he died, he left behind boxes of snapshots that 

mixed birthday parties and family Christmases 

with portraits of power plants and transmission 

towers. Years later, I learned his legacy also 

included some of the most polluting fossil fuel 

infrastructure in the country—much of it located 

out of state, on Navajo land. Those pictures 

inspired me to re-imagine electric turbines, 

boilers, and substations as problematic "uncles" 

and "cousins" whose names I should know, whose 

actions I must try to understand, and whose 

climate legacies cannot be ignored. 

“My Electric Genealogy” is an evening-length 

solo performance that proceeds from this 

imaginative re-reading of my family tree. It 

combines live narration with moving images, 

choreographed movement, and an original 

score to make intimate the crumbling, carbonheavy 

infrastructures that imperil the planet 

and to probe the aesthetic, ethical, and practical 

responses they demand. These infrastructures 

include not just power plants and transmission 

lines, but also “infrastructures of feeling”: 

closely held beliefs about nature, gender, race, 

and progress. Wearing a midcentury men’s 

suit, I alternately embody my grandfather, my 

grandmother, my teenage self, my professional 

self, and my parent self to probe the sociocultural 

roots of the climate crisis and to ask what 

intergenerational environmental responsibility 

might look like. 

This portfolio of photographs and collaged 

documents reflects my process of developing 

the performance. In the third act, I reconstruct 

a 1968 speech by my grandfather, who was 

by then General Manager of the Los Angeles 

Department of Water and Power, outlining an 

energy future for the rapidly expanding city. 

While he understood that coal would be a major 

source of electricity, he believed only a network 

of 20-30 coastal nuclear power plants could 

“cleanly” power the state’s bright future. His 

predictions of limitless growth, unwavering faith 


77

in the perfectibility of technology, and disdain for 

those who considered energy political seemed 

to foreshadow the technocratic orientation and 

cost-benefit rhetoric that runs through climate 

adaptation and resilience strategies in our own 

era. 

My grandfather delivered his speech in the 

context of a pitched, multi-year battle over the 

future of nuclear power in California—the only 

battle over infrastructure that he ever lost. 

The collaged documents reflect my editing of 

his original speech based on other archival 

materials—text drawn from contemporaneous 

press releases, internal strategy memos, talking 

points, and letters to and from elected officials. 

The words may not have been directly penned 

by my grandfather—even the original speech 

was drafted by an aide. But since he was, 

through and through, an “Organization Man,” the 

composite text reflects a position almost certainly 

indistinguishable from his own. 

Although I find my grandfather’s speech troubling, 

I turn to performance to understand how I have 

inherited his words and worldview. The repertoire 

of gestures depicted next to the documents was 

developed by examining official photos and family 

snapshots, as well as consulting the lessons of 

gendered posture I learned from my parents and 

the embodied archive of family memory I carry in 

my own muscle and bone. 

Following | Sarah Kanouse 

An Embodied Archive 1-6, 2018 

Images courtesy of the artist. 

Performance Documentation: 

Rio Asch Phoenix 


An Embodied Archive: Documents from My Electric Genealogy 

Sarah Kanouse 


79


Sarah Kanouse 



Sarah Kanouse 


81


Sarah Kanouse 



Sarah Kanouse 


83



85

Figure 1 | Leah Modigliani 

Spectre of the Future Accused, 2017. 

Photo credit Yuula Benivolski. 

Images courtesy of the artist. 


Critical Plagiarism and the 

Politics of Creative Labor 

Photographs, History, and 

Re-enactment 


Naturally, life presents itself in different forms 

depending on one's age. Between the ages of 

eight and twelve, like a lot of girls, I dreamed 

of becoming an Angel, or a Blondie, or even a 

Madonna. I longed to avenge the limitations of 

my sex, to climb through the glass ceiling and 

throw the glass shards around on the way up. 

When I was fourteen, I retreated to the studio 

to draw and compose romantic poetry, trying 

to connect to others, silently planning my 

escape from the conservative values of my little 

town. When I was seventeen, I suffered from 

unrequited love, and I drove around drunk on 

my bicycle until I broke my wrist and suffered 

the embarrassment of having to explain it. At 

eighteen I went to Cairo and dared to walk alone 

through the City of the Dead, until a young man 

chased me out, screaming apologies for thinking 

he could grab me and kiss me. I too wanted to 

scream all the time, but to do so while dancing. 

Then came America—America, with its promises 

of freedom, opportunity and meritocracy. So, like 

many before me, I went to be educated in and 

by San Francisco, the home and heart of the Left. 

Living that life, however, cost a pretty penny, so I 

subsidized my creative pursuits with student loan 

debt and waitressing work, serving cheap drinks 

to drunk cable car drivers until the manager hit 

another waitress and I quit. My youth was filled 

with the images and sounds of a changing world, 

and they leaked into my soul without me realizing 

it, so that tears occasionally rose out of me at 

unexpected moments. 

I quietly minded this empathy, not knowing what 

to do with it. And together we marched for the 

students in Tiananmen square, and together 

we watched the Berlin Wall come down without 

yet knowing what that meant, and together 

we marched for the fourteen young women 

murdered in Montreal. Through it all, we asked 

“What does it mean to be 'free?' and we learned 

to be skeptical. That skepticism was my rebirth as 

I searched for a freedom beyond what was sold to 

me. 


"The Snake and the Falcon," 2015 


87

This epigraph is an excerpt from a text I wrote 

titled “The Snake and the Falcon,” which was 

adapted from Emma Goldman’s 1933 speech “An 

Anarchist Looks at Life” (Modigliani). 1 It is one of 

several historical speeches I have rewritten and 

changed to reflect my own biographical influences 

and historical context. On paper, each speech 

is in fact two texts that occupy the same space: 

the adapted speech in the left column, and the 

citations of references and economic facts that 

ground it in the present in the right column. 2 

In 2017, I produced a much longer adapted 

speech that was performed by an actor, filmed, 

and projected as "humagram"—a video projection 

that looks three-dimensional—on the site of 

Marshall McLuhan’s old classroom for Toronto’s 

Nuit Blanche festival [Figure 1]. I edited and 

rewrote a 276-page trial transcript from Canadian 

Socialist and publisher William Arthur Pritchard’s 

1920 defense against federal charges of seditious 

conspiracy for helping to organize the Winnipeg 

General Strike. 3 Pritchard, now transformed into 

a female professor, takes the form of a Spectre 

of the Future Accused; a woman who defends her 

political views and asks the Toronto festival-goers 

to adjudicate her right to free speech in the public 

realm. Each of my speeches is simultaneously 

a political manifesto, a biography, an autobiography, 

a fact and a fiction, and cannot easily 

be characterized as art or scholarship. They 

nonetheless exist as labor in the present and beg 

for continuity with such labors of the past. 

Over several years, I have also been creating new 

artworks out of or inspired by old newspaper 

photographs. How long can we tolerate this? is 

an assemblage of framed photographs that 

functions as a city skyline and timeline of the 

physical displacement of people from their 

homes over the course of the twentieth-century 

[Figure 2]. The timeline reads from left to right 

from around 1931 until 1992; and while all years 

are not yet represented, it is roughly symbolic of 

the years that the Glass Steagall Act, otherwise 

known as the Banking Act of 1933, was in effect. 

As these two examples indicate, I have taken 

other people’s words and images in order to 

adapt them, to repeat them, or allow their voices 

to comingle with my own. Lately, with some 

healthy skepticism and quiet internal debate, I’ve 

begun to call this process critical plagiarism. What 

follows in this paper is my attempt to fix, at least 

momentarily, my reckoning with the dynamic 

thought-stream that has engulfed my work 

over several years; one that includes the social 

politics of critical geographies, considerations of 

photography as theoretical time travel, and the 

repudiation of the photograph as a lost indexical 

trace in favor of recent claims that photographs 

be considered sites of living encounters across 

time. 

1 Originally published as Modigliani, Leah. “The Snake and the Falcon,” Anarchist Studies 23 

(2015): 89-97. Print. This text was written for the conference To Hell With Culture? A Conference 

Re-examining the Commodification of Culture in Contemporary Capitalism, organized by 

Danielle Childs and Huw Wahl at the Manchester School of Art on Oct. 30, 2014. The conference 

re-visited British art historian Herbert Read’s 1941 essay “To Hell With Culture.” At the beginning 

of the event, I read and performed "The Snake and the Falcon," an adapted version of Emma 

Goldman’s speech “An Anarchist Looks at Life,” which she first delivered at Foyle’s Twenty-ninth 

Literary Luncheon on March 1, 1933. http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/goldman/pdfs/Speeches-AnAnarchistLooksatLife.pdf. 

Accessed 31 May 2019. 

2 In using this format I’d like to credit Andrea Fraser’s art and writing as an important influence. 

See: Fraser, Andrea. “Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk,” October 57 (1991): 104-122. Print. 

3 My script can be read on my website. Modigliani, Leah. “Script from Spectre of Future Accused.” 

https://www.leahmodigliani.net/william-a-pritchard-script.html. Accessed 31 May 2019. 

As we all know, plagiarism is the practice of 

taking someone’s work and claiming it as your 

own without proper attribution. According to 

the online Merriam Webster dictionary, it comes 

from the Latin word plagiarius, or “kidnapper,” 

suggesting the forcible confinement of a person 

or object under deceitful pretenses and without 


authority. While I can’t advocate the deceit or 

aggression at the base of real plagiarism, I’m 

interested in the emphasis it places on replicating 

images that are held as one’s own; the taking of 

images or texts from the past and purposefully 

casting them back into the world from the point 

of view of honoring your own place in history. 

This involves a self-reflective consciousness 

about privilege, space and time, because the 

privileged, myself included, need to think 

carefully about whose voice they take as their 

own. And, rather than treading on the minefield 

of cultural appropriation or exploitation, I am 

advocating the critical, personal, and public stake 

in aligning oneself with the past. The literature 

of decolonization teaches us that control of 

territory—physical as well as discursive—lies at 

the heart of all power dynamics (Tuck and Yang; 

Veracini; Wolfe). 4 Socio-political behaviors and 

laws engender and replicate boundaries that 

benefit some voices at the expense of others. 

What then is involved in staking specific claims 

today? Can this be more nuanced, more loving 

even, than the policing of boundaries and strident 

claims of misappropriation? 

Considering the ways images and objects define 

the territories that a subject will have access to 

or be able to speak from is a spatial perspective 

that grounds my work. Unsurprisingly then, 

my scholarly interests have centered around 

Marxist and feminist methodologies and critical 

geographies; bodies of scholarly work that 

diligently attend to the material manifestations 

and spatial dislocations of social inequity in 

cultural forms. Like many others—and here I 

might cite in no particular order Edward Said, 

4 As an example of what Tuck and Yang have described critically as ‘metaphoric decolonization’ 

particular to art-historical discourses around contemporary art within advanced capitalism, see 

MTL Collective (192-227). 

Griselda Pollock, David Harvey, Michel Foucault, 

and Amelia Jones as thinkers I admire—I am 

concerned with how power is exercised over 

particular bodies and places in different times. 

How are we able to be where we are? Whose 

voices are heard? Who is allowed representation? 

Who or what is remembered? What can the past 

teach us if we let it speak? To ask and ever hope 

to answer these questions requires seeing history 

as an asset for understanding how we live in the 

moment, and how we might live tomorrow. 

When I first read the speeches I later adapted, 

or saw the photographs I later remade as my 

own, I saw the past as the present, as if these 

voices were speaking today, as if nothing had 

transpired in the intervening years. American 

evictions of the mid twentieth-century are 

documented in photographs that stage the 

middle-class white nuclear family as the symbol 

of a temporarily displaced American dream; only 

to be re-photographed in the years following the 

2008 mortgage crisis under similar rhetorical 

framings. The cyclical pattern of history has been 

imagined by many. Some rich examples include 

the political economist Karl Polanyi’s theory of the 

double-movement, published in his 1944 book 

The Great Transformation: the idea that society 

moves like a pendulum to the left to protect itself 

once the capitalist free-market swings too far 

right. In a popular culture context, the doublemovement 

can be understood by considering 

Star Trek’s Next Generation traveling through 

a time loop in the 24th century, repeatedly 

enduring physical destruction until a technological 

discovery allows for remembering the past, which 

sets them free (Imbd); and Robert Smithson’s 

writing about the entropic monuments of New 

Jersey’s suburbia, which he described as “ruins 


89


How long can we tolerate this? 

An incomplete record from 1933-1999, 2016. 

Photo credit Nathan McChristy. 



in reverse” (Smithson, 72). In all these examples, 

a vision of the future is comprehended in a brief 

moment of stasis, a pause identified by the alert 

individual in the ongoing oscillation of historical 

consciousness. 

Photography seems an important vehicle for 

time travel. Whether theorized as a puncture in 

one’s emotional life (Barthes), as a mediation 

compelling or protecting from empathic response 

(Sontag), as an indexical trace (Peirce/Krauss), 

or as manifestation of ideological construct 

(Sekula), photographs are most often understood 

as evocative markers of the past; memorials 

of lost loves, evidence of forgotten labors and 

unresolved injustices. In a radio interview before 

his mother’s death, and before he wrote Camera 

Lucida, Roland Barthes declared his interest in 

writing about photography as “a fascination with 

what has died but is represented as wanting to be 

alive” (Calvet, 220). Camera Lucida would of course 

be the opus resulting from that fascination. Such 

a notion is linked to the photograph’s long history 

as a material trace of something once present but 

now gone. Even for conceptual artists of the late 

1960s, obsessed with cataloging a self-defined 

“urban semiotics,” (Modigliani, 2018, 114-162) 

the camera was but a tool of control; the means 

by which to fix the ephemeral and undefinable 

phenomenological experience of the body 

moving through the crowded city into a system of 

exchangeable signs (Krauss, 1981). 

But, what if, as performance historian Rebecca 

Schneider asks, we shift our attention away 

from the “hyper-celebrated invention of the 

camera” and instead focus on the photographic 

scene (140-141)? She asks what histories of 

live performance continue to cling to the still 

photograph, and “can we not think of the still 

not as an artifact of non-returning time, but 

as situated in a live moment of its encounter 

that it, through its articulation as gesture or 

hail predicts?” This invites time and embodied 

experience to travel into the photograph, to 

allow the image to reveal the world to us now, 

to speak to our future. As an example, consider 

this press photograph from July 24, 1941 of 

anti-war protestor Margaret Russel that is part 

of my personal collection [Figure 3]. She is seen 

from behind, walking on Michigan Avenue in a 

black robe that covers her head and hangs to 

the ground with red lettering on the back that 

declares “The Victory Will Be Mine” “Women of 

America!” “Your Sons Husbands Sweethearts Will 

Be Mine.” 

I would like to "critically plagiarize" Russel’s action 

by making a sculpture from it; ideally as a public 

sculpture permanently installed in a carefully 

chosen urban location. As a live-event in a new 

urban context, Russel’s hooded figure would 

now connect her implicit claim—made through 

her gendered address to other women—that 

warfare is a masculine-nationalist prerogative 

best countered by asserting female political 

agency, with the ongoing battle against the racist 

and sexual politics resurgent and enabled by 

the Trump administration. Her black hooded 

figure cannot help but remind us of the troubling 

politics of today’s most powerful visual culture 

images. Two of these images (and there are no 

doubt more) are the dark hooded sweatshirts 

worn by African Americans and supporters in 

remembrance of and protest against George 

Zimmerman’s murder of black teenager Trayvon 

Martin in Florida in 2012; and the blood-red 

hooded cloaks (and bonnets) of the enslaved 


91

Figure 3 | Leah Modiglian 

“Death Parades in Chicago Anti-war Parade,” Acme Newspictures, Chicago Bureau. July, 24, 1941. 

Unknown Photographer. 



93

Handmaids imagined by Margaret Atwood in her 

dystopian fiction The Handmaids Tale, brought 

vividly to life on screen by director Bruce Miller 

and Hulu in 2017. These cloaks and bonnets have 

since been worn by American women opposing 

the current US government’s retrograde policies 

aimed at controlling women’s bodies and lives. 

This figurative sculpture, transported to the 21st 

century as a still monument on a city street, could 

engender a mildly confrontational social space in 

which living, breathing passersby are invited to 

act and carry on the work of the dead. Instead of 

celebrating the heroic actions of a historical figure 

who is safely ensconced in the past, the sculpture 

reminds us that the work of fighting for civil rights 

remains undone and invites us to join it. 

Such "critical plagiarisms" are supported by ideas 

discussed by Kaja Silverman in her 2015 book 

The Miracle of Analogy. She returns to historical 

accounts of the development of photography to 

show how, in its earliest stages, it was understood 

as a method by which the world disclosed 

itself over time to the viewer. She is concerned 

with reducing or overturning the impact of the 

longstanding notion that a photograph is a kind of 

evidentiary proof, or a record of absence, created 

through the mechanical means of the camera. 

In a beautiful passage in the introduction to her 

book, Silverman writes: 

Not only is the photographic image an 

analogy, rather than a representation or an 

index, but analogy is also the fluid in which 

it develops… Photography develops, rather, 

with us and in response to us. It assumes 

historically legible forms, and when we 

divest them of their saving power, generally 

by imputing them to ourselves, it goes 

elsewhere. The earliest of these forms was 

the pinhole camera, which was more “found” 

than invented. It morphed into the optical 

camera obscura, was reborn as chemical 

photography, migrated into literature and 

painting, and lives on in a digital form. It will 

not end until we do. (12) 

Discussing Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay “A 

Short History of Photography,” which he wrote 

before the more influential “Work of Art in the 

Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Silverman 

notes that Benjamin discussed the long length 

of preindustrial photographic exposures as 

situations which “caused the subject to focus 

his life in the moment rather than hurrying on 

past” (143). The sitter seemed to grow into each 

photograph and “took the space in which he 

lived” with him (143). Benjamin contrasts this to 

what he called "industrial" photography, which he 

more famously argued was responsible for the 

loss of the aura in the dissemination of fine art; 

a positive force for revolutionizing the habitual 

actions of the proletariat. What I understand from 

this is two-fold: one, that Silverman is providing 

an account of the whole history of photography 

that complements Schneider’s suggestion that 

we consider the still image as a moment of live 

encounter that gestures or summons other times, 

and, two, that seeing a photograph as an ongoing 

act that discloses the world to us offers both 

the maker and viewer the possibility of political 

agency since the past is understood as an ally of 

the present and a summoning of the future. 

I want to consider how this idea of the 

photograph as disclosure of live event can be 

understood in relation to contemporary art 

practices that are variously called “re-enactment” 


or “re-performance.” In 2009, Paige Sarlin 

wrote eloquently about the issues at stake in 

re-enactment practices. She was responding 

to the journal October’s special issue of winter 

2008, which published invited responses to the 

question “In what ways have artists, academics, 

and cultural institutions responded to the USled 

invasion and occupation of Iraq (Buchloh et 

al.)?” The original editors of the journal, which 

was founded in 1976, charged themselves 

with the task of celebrating the unification of 

“revolutionary practice, theoretical inquiry, and 

artistic innovation,” through critical writing about 

visual arts, cinema, performance, and music 

that would be materially grounded without 

resorting to “perpetuating the mythology … of 

Revolution (Gilbert-Rolfe, 3). That the journal and 

the network of cultural producers it relied upon 

for content seemed to have failed to adequately 

address the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan 

now seemed to require a response. The 2008 

issue that resulted from October’s questionnaire 

attempted to do that. What is important here, and 

what Sarlin would respond to in her essay, is the 

editors’ framing of the status of contemporary 

political protest in relation to the anti-war activism 

of the Vietnam War era. They asked: What are 

we doing that separates us from what was done 

before? How can we encourage action even if 

we know that questions alone won’t accomplish 

change? How does protest inform intellectual 

history, and how or how not have we internalized 

the intellectual paradigms of the 1960s (Buchloh, 

et al., 7)? 

Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project was cited as an 

example of the ways that the history of the New 

Left has saturated the cultural consciousness of 

the present. On his website, Tribe describes this 

work as follows: 

The Port Huron Project is a series of 

reenactments of protest speeches from 

the New Left movements of the Vietnam 

era. Each speech took place at the site of 

the original event, and was delivered by an 

actor or performance artist to an audience 

of invited guests and passers-by. Videos of 

these performances have been screened 

on campuses, exhibited in art spaces, and 

distributed online as open-source media. 

Sarlin identifies and critiques a central problem 

of this work, and others like it, which is that in 

reproducing or reenacting the image of past 

political protest in the present, an artist risks 

emptying the original work of the particular 

forms of organizing and labor that engendered 

the action in the first place. She states, “Tribe’s 

‘project’ is not a political project. It is the work of 

an artist who is taking history as his subject. [The 

artwork’s] sense of vision and direction are tied 

entirely to the realm of cultural production, not 

the transformation of culture or society per se” 

(Sarlin, 142-43). She characterizes Tribe’s project 

as a form of New Left-wing melancholy, a phrase 

she has adapted from Walter Benjamin’s 1931 

idea of left-wing melancholy, which he described 

as “the transposition of revolutionary reflexes into 

objects of distraction, of amusement, which can 

be supplied for consumption” (Benjamin, 29). To 

update what this means today—New Left-wing 

melancholy, like left-wing melancholy before it, is 

essentially the objectification of a historical social 

process into a contemporary commodity in the 

cultural realm. 


95


April 27, 1972, University of Pennsylvania (view from front) 2015. 

Wood, brass, drywall, furniture, lights, paint as installed at Vox 

Populi gallery in Philadelphia. 

Photo credit Jessica Earnshaw. Image courtesy of the artist. 



April 27, 1972, University of Pennsylvania (view from back) 2015. 

Wood, brass, drywall, furniture, lights, paint as installed at Vox 

Populi gallery in Philadelphia. 

Photo credit Jessica Earnshaw. Image courtesy of the artist. 


97

This all leaves me with substantial concerns about 

my own work, and what it means to, in Sarlin’s 

words (I’m paraphrasing) “be an artist who takes 

history as her subject” (143). Can the creative 

re-use of historical images be transformative for 

viewers? How can one make aesthetic artworks 

that engage with history and politics in such a 

way that they disclose the world as it is and how 

it might become to viewers? I think this is the 

central struggle facing a lot of artists working 

today. They, like me, are driven to make things, 

to see their ideas realized in real space and time, 

but they also know that this is a historically-based 

bourgeois practice, now deeply embedded in the 

structures of the neoliberal economy, and that 

there is a new and troubling politics to this labor. 

To ignore that is naïve at best and self-indulgent 

at worst. 

develop the images in the present in order to 

reveal something about our current situation. 

References 

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. 

New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Print. 

Benjamin, Walter. “Left-Wing Melancholy.” Screen 15. 2 (1974): 

28-32. 

Buchloh, Benjamin, et al. “Questionnaire: In What Ways Have 

Artists, Academics, and Cultural Institutions Responded to 

the U.S.- Led Invasion and Occupation of Iraq?” October 123 

(2008). 3-184. Print. 

Calvet, Louis-Jean. Roland Barthes. Trans. Sarah Wykes. Indiana: 

Indiana University Press, 1995. Print. 

Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy, et al. “About October.” October 1 (1976): 

3-5. 

Many other artists have adopted reenactment 

as a strategy in their work and are consequently 

facing the problem of disclosing the relevance 

of previous political acts without compounding 

their ossification as a single commodified image. 

Working from a background in sculpture, I have 

tried to bring the viewer into a physical and 

spatial engagement with the photograph—this 

is my conscious effort to A) disrupt the habitual 

categorization of the “protest” image in an 

often-nostalgic past tense and B) to highlight 

the different forms of physical and creative 

labor that now exist in this work [Figure 4, 5]. 

Together, these tactics point to the process of 

understanding the continuities and discontinuities 

of political labors in the past and present. My 

work does not provide answers; instead, it signals 

the complexity of how we process political images 

from the past, and, using Silverman's words, 

how the fluid of our current needs continues to 

Imdb. "Cause and Effect." 18th episode of the 5th season of 

Star Trek: The Next Generation. Broadcast 23 March, 1992. 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0162905/. Accessed 31 May 

2019. 

Krauss, Rosalind. “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in 

America.” October 3 (1977): 68-81. Print. 

Krauss, Rosalind. “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in 

America. Part 2” October 4 (1977): 58-67. Print. 

Krauss, Rosalind. “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism.” 

October 19 (1981): 34. Print. 

Modigliani, Leah. “The Snake and the Falcon.” Anarchist 

Studies 23.2 (2015): 89-97. Print. 

Modigliani, Leah. Engendering an avant-garde: the unsettled 

landscapes of Vancouver photo-conceptualism. Manchester: 

Manchester University Press, 2018. Print. 

MTL Collective. “From Institutional Critique to Institutional 

Liberation? A Decolonial Perspective on the Crises of 

Contemporary Art.” October 165 (2018): 192-227. Print. 


Peirce, Charles Sanders. “On the Nature of Signs.” Peirce on 

Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce. Ed. 

James Hoopes. Chapel Hill and London: University of North 

Carolina Press, 1991. 141-144. Print. 

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and 

Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957. 

Print. 

Sarlin, Paige. “New Left-Wing Melancholy: Mark Tribe’s 

‘The Port Huron Project’ and the Politics of Reenactment.” 

Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 50.1, 2 (2009): 

139-157. 

Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains. London and New 

York: Routledge, 2011. Print. 

Sekula, Allan. “The Traffic in Photographs.” Art Journal 41.1 

(1981): 15-25. Print. 

Silverman, Kaja. The Miracle of Analogy. Stanford: Stanford 

University Press, 2015. Print. 

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, 

Straus, and Giroux, 2003.= 

Smithson, Robert. “The Monuments of Passaic.” Robert 

Smithson: The Collected Writings. Ed. Jack Flam. Berkeley: 

University of California Press, 1996. Print. 

Tuck, Eve and Yang, Wayne K. “Decolonization is not a 

metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 

1.1 (2012): 1- 40. Print. 

Tribe, Mark. "The Port Huron Project: 2006-2008." https://www. 

marktribe.net/port-huron-project/. Accessed 31 May 2019. 

Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. 

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print. 

Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the 

Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8:4 (2006): 387-409. 

Print. 


99


Molcajete, 2019 

Color Photography (printed on paper or 

displayed on a screen with visual sonification) 



Recurring Objects: Heirlooms, 

trinkets, or otherwise... 


Some objects are stuck in our memory. We 

remember seeing them as we move from house 

to house, from apartment to apartment, from 

country to country. These are the things, the stuff, 

that always find their way into one of our moving 

boxes. We remember them resting on a dusty 

shelf, on a coffee table at our mother’s house, 

or inside the cupboard of our grandmother’s 

silverware. 

Some of these objects had a definite function in 

one of their former lives; for others, we are not 

sure what their intended purpose was or where 

they came from, but still, they have a presence. 

They occupy space. These objects are the trinkets 

that you once thought you would never display 

in your own home; on the clean shelves of your 

modern dwelling. And yet these objects that you 

despised are the ones stuck in your memory, 

the ones that appear in your dreams. These are 

the things that you observed as a little girl and 

wondered— What are they used for? How long 

have they been there? Suddenly, you realize that 

you've lived with these objects for a long time, 

that they are part of you. 

You observe them again. They look different, 

smaller, softer; you can hear through them the 

crackling sounds of all those years spent passing 

from household to household, all those years that 

they stood there in a cupboard, on a dusty shelf, 

on a coffee table, in a kitchen drawer, or at the 

bottom of the cardboard box you never opened. 

In coming to terms with her memories of these 

objects, with their textures, with their past and 

present lives, with the sounds lodged within them, 

Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda photographs them. 

Sepúlveda makes two images of the same object 

from slightly different angles and with different 

color temperatures. She joins the two photos 

with a texture of illegible pixel noise. The texture 

acts like a permeable border that traces a formal 

transition between the two images representing 

her lapses of memory; the temporal distance 

that marks a difference between these recurring 

recollections. 

Issue N o 3 101


Botecito de cristal con dulces de anis, 2019 






Jarra de Agua, 2019 






Jícara decorada con conchitas, 2019 






Servidor de Plata, 2019 






Sacred Geometry / Geometría 

Sagrada 


“Sacred Geometry” (2019) explores Ingapirca, an 

archeological site in Ecuador, as a starting point 

to absorb the debates around the engineering 

feats of Inca architecture and insert the body into 

an archeological site. This project begins with an 

inquiry into the construction of Ingapirca (Inca 

Wall). Built in Pre-Colombian times by Incas and, 

subsequently, altered by Cañaris, it is the largestknown 

ruin in Ecuador, a subject of speculation 

among scientists and the general public. The site 

has been photographed ad nauseum; its artifacts, 

dispersed internationally, and the mysteries 

of its construction, are the subject of scientific 

advancement, tourism and “parafictions,” a term 

used to describe artworks that play with fact and 

fiction. In this series I appropriate vernacular 

photographs from tourist blogs, Google Maps, 

and archeological documents to create an archive 

of images that does not privilege one type of 

document over another. 



Google Search: Ingapirca Llamas, 2019 

Hand-Cut Collage, Archival Inkjet Print, 24” x 30” 

Image courtesy of Ponce + Robles Gallery and the artist. 



Google Search: Ingapirca Indigenas, 2019 





Google Search: Ingapirca Tourists, 2019 





The Ceramics from Ingapirca, 2019 





The Photograph Is Not 

Immortal… Or Is It? The 

Role of Technology in 

the Life and Death of the 

Tangible Photograph 

Meghan Lynn Jordan 

In the current age of rapidly growing technologies 

and our increasing dependence on them, 

institutions such as museums, archives, and 

libraries are conflicted about how to proceed with 

collection management and exhibition planning. 

Through the analysis of multiple case studies 

regarding photography exhibitions concerned with 

object preservation and accessibility, this essay 

aims to suggest possible solutions to the delicate 

issue of balance surrounding the possibility of 

technological innovation substituting physical 

museum collections. 

William Henry Fox Talbot: The Dawn of 

Contemplation 

Co-curated by Dr. Russell Roberts, former Senior 

Curator of Photographs at the National Museum 

of Photography, Film and Television, and Greg 

Hobson, Curator of Photographs at the National 


Media Museum, both institutions in the United 

Kingdom, William Henry Fox Talbot: Dawn of the 

Photograph included over 170 objects from the 

National Photography Collection. i Presented in 

the Media Space of London’s Science Museum 

from April 14 – September 11, 2016 and followed 

by a run at the National Media Museum from 

November 18, 2016 – February 8, 2017, the 

exhibition, according to Hobson, “investigates the 

life and work of William Henry Fox Talbot (British 

1800-1877), the father of modern photography” 

(“Fox Talbot: Dawn of the Photograph”). 

On August 29, 2016, I visited the Science Museum 

in London to view William Henry Fox Talbot: Dawn 

of the Photograph. After a rather long reading 

of rules and regulations to adhere to when in 

the institution’s Media Space, I entered the first 

gallery to find myself alone, apart from the pacing 

security guard. I was enveloped in the objects and 

the accompanying didactic texts until I realized 

that each wall panel thus far read “facsimile.” ii 

Shocked and feeling as if I had been tricked by the 

museum staff, I persisted through the exhibition 

space and felt overwhelmingly relieved upon 

seeing in the second gallery objects labeled as 

salted paper prints. As I stood in front of a grid 

made up of a sizeable amount of prints from 

The Pencil of Nature, I noticed my reception of 

the exhibition drastically shift. My experience 

of changing emotions—an initial ecstasy at 

the thought of viewing original Talbot prints, 

disappointment that the exhibition consisted 

mostly of facsimiles, and, finally, excitement at 

seeing unique 19th-century objects created by the 

photography pioneer—made an impact on me. 

Based on this experience, I decided to analyze 

the relationship between digital technology and 

original photographic objects. 

A Case Study of "Linen Textile Fragment" 

From January 17 to April 2, 1989, The J. Paul 

Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California held the 

exhibition Experimental Photography: Discovery 

and Invention. Organized as the first in a series of 

five exhibitions celebrating the 150th anniversary 

of the invention of photography, Experimental 

Photography: Discovery and Invention “was devoted 

to photography’s earliest years” and included 

multiple photographs by Talbot (Walsh 162). One 

such print was "Linen Textile Fragment," a 4 3/8” x 

1 7/8” “photogenic drawing negative” believed to 

have been created around 1835 in England. iii 

A similar print is discussed by Talbot in his paper 

“Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing,” 

which he read before the Royal Society of London 

on January 31, 1839. The first-person narrative 

summarizing his photographic experiments, 

and presented shortly after learning of Louis 

Daguerre’s (French, 1787-1851) achievements, 

gives little detail as to the chemical makeup of 

Talbot’s, as early as 1834, failed and successful 

attempts in “the preservative process” (Talbot). 

Instead, in his presentation, Talbot acknowledges 

Mr. Wedgwood (British, 1771-1805) and Sir 

Humphry Davy’s (British, 1778-1829) ineffective 

endeavors of creating a reproduced camera 

obscura image in silver nitrate as following their 

work allowed for Talbot to pick up where they 

had left off. iv Talbot recounts how he made his 

first images using flowers, leaves, and later, lace. 

To explain how accurate the imitation was, he 

utilized a picture of an intricately detailed piece 

of lace. Upon showing it to others, they remarked 

that they "were not to be so easily deceived, for 

that it was evidently no picture, but the piece of 

lace itself.” (Talbot). 


It is not clear if this was in fact the same image 

exhibited in Experimental Photography: Discovery 

and Invention, but it was the reactions of the 

initial viewers that inspired Talbot to resume his 

experiments. He continues in “Some Account 

of the Art of Photogenic Drawing” by detailing 

his thoughts, writing, “when I saw how beautiful 

were the images which were thus produced by 

the action of light, I regretted the more that they 

were destined to have such a brief existence, and 

I resolved to attempt to find out, if possible, some 

method of preventing this, or retarding it as much 

as possible.” Although, as previously stated, he 

never details his process or chemical solution, 

Talbot calls his success “the preserving process” 

which “is far more effectual than could have 

been anticipated.” As he explains, regardless of 

having been shown in the sun to the Society, the 

“specimens […] retain [their] perfect whiteness.” 

However, despite Talbot’s belief in the 

permanence of his images, during the Getty’s 

exhibition of "Linen Textile Fragment" the 

“photogenic drawing negative” faded while on 

display. The discovery was made approximately 

five weeks into the twelve-week exhibition. 

According to conservator Nancy Reinhold, the 

object was presented at an estimated 5 footcandles 

of illumination for 8 hours per day over 

the course of 35 days. v Reinhold explains in her 

article “The Exhibition of an Early Photogenic 

Drawing by William Henry Fox Talbot,” published 

in a 1993 issue of Topics in Photographic 

Preservation, that photographs made by Talbot 

before 1839 can be assumed to have been 

stabilized, however those made after February 

1839 “were not inevitably fixed with sodium 

thiosulfate.” Therefore, along with histories of 

object storage, restoration, and display, it is 

difficult to determine the level of light sensitivity 

of individual Talbot creations from this time. 

Designing Exhibitions with Object Preservation 

at the Forefront 

To allow maximum accessibility to original 

photographic objects, museum professionals 

must work together to design housing and display 

techniques to ensure the preservation of each 

unique object. In “Advances in Daguerreotype 

Conservation: The Conservation Program for the 

Exhibition, Young America: The Daguerreotypes 

of Southworth & Hawes” co-authors Ralph 

Wiegandt and Taina Meller, both photography 

conservators, detail the process of designing 

a safe gallery environment for approximately 

160 daguerreotypes created by the team of 

Southworth & Hawes. Due to the fragile nature of 

the objects and the fact that they were largely on 

loan from the collections of numerous institutions 

and private collectors, a team was assembled 

by the organizing institutions, the George 

Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and the 

International Center for Photography in New 

York City, to research past display methods and 

innovate new ones. 

During the early planning stages, conservators, 

curators, and research scientists from the George 

Eastman House, the Metropolitan Museum of 

Art, New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, 

Boston, congregated to discuss the frequently 

faced issue of how to exhibit a daguerreotype 

for optimal viewing that would both please 

visitors and extend the life of each object. The 

team introduced advancements in the lighting 

and display of the 19th-century process by 

engineering “a mounting plate [that] extended 


the bottom edge of the frame out from the wall, 

maintaining the plane of the plate at an eightdegree 

angle to the wall” and creating a lighting 

mechanism that “eliminated spillover light” 

(Wiegandt and Meller). Combined with a low level 

of gallery light, the use of new hardware allowed 

for a visitor to view the daguerreotypes without 

the frequent obstructions caused by the reflective 

nature of the objects. 

However, in researching these new methods 

of display, the team also discovered evidence 

of a white haze having developed on multiple 

plates in the 1976 exhibit Spirit of Fact that, 

consequently, obscured the images. In addition 

to this resurfaced issue, the exhibition organizers 

wanted to recreate presentation methods used by 

Southworth & Hawes; however, this required the 

use of “volatile organic compounds” often found 

in early framing materials (Wiegandt and Meller). 

In the end, the team created secondary sealed 

enclosures for the plates to form a controlled 

microenvironment, as well as secondary 

preservation housing units due to the, previously 

described, “volatile organic compounds” 

(Wiegandt and Meller). Since white hazing was 

reported to have formed on Southworth & Hawes 

daguerreotypes in past exhibitions, a rigorous 

monitoring process was enforced during the 

almost full year, multi-institution exhibition 

run. vi This included consistent condition reporting 

utilizing high resolution digital images, Adobe 

Photoshop, and a color-coded key. To ensure the 

reliability of the documents, the same camera 

and lighting system was used to create the initial 

digital files that were all formatted with the same 

specifications. vii The lighting system then traveled 

with the exhibition and was used to illuminate 

the daguerreotypes during examination, which 

occurred before and after each venue by the 

same person. This guaranteed that subjective 

views would not affect the condition reporting. 

Unfortunately, within one month of the exhibit 

opening, “a disfiguring bloom or white haze” 

developed on objects (Wiegandt and Meller). 

According to Mike Robinson, Daguerreian 

Artist and former President of The Daguerreian 

Society, “five plates changed significantly with 

an obscuring white haze, and supposedly 25 

plates changed slightly. The majority of the 

plates did not change at all.” The shift in some 

plates compared to others can be attributed to 

many factors, including the specific chemical 

composition used by Southworth & Hawes during 

processing and the age, prior handling and 

storage methods of the plates over time, as well 

as previously performed conservation techniques. 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art found itself in 

a similar situation during the planning of Stieglitz, 

Steichen, Strand, held at the institution November 

10, 2010 – April 10, 2011. Curated by Malcolm 

Daniel, the exhibition included approximately 115 

photographic objects drawn from the museum’s 

collection and displayed to illustrate the diverse 

and groundbreaking work of each artist. As part 

of this narrative, the exhibition was to include 

five autochromes by Stieglitz and Steichen. The 

utmost care was to be taken with these objects 

as the autochrome process was the first practical 

color photographic process and was only largely 

used by Pictorialists from its initial availability in 

1907 until 1910. Due to the rarity of examples by 

Stieglitz and Steichen, the exhibition organizers 

chose to display facsimiles of the five objects 

(Casella). 


In preparation for Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, Luisa 

Casella, then Andrew W. Mellon Research Scholar 

in Photograph Conservation at the Metropolitan 

Museum of Art, launched a research initiative 

to “better understand how and under what 

conditions Autochromes fade and, ideally, to 

devise a safe way to exhibit these important 

photographs.” viii By conducting experiments 

in collaboration with the Image Permanence 

Institute at Rochester Institute of Technology, 

Casella discovered that low-oxygen environments 

can drastically lessen the fading of the color dyes 

in Autochromes. ix With this information, Daniel 

and his team agreed that from January 25-30, 

2011, the five original autochrome objects could 

replace their digital copies in the exhibition if 

displayed in specially designed oxygen limiting 

housing. 

In “Display of Alfred Stieglitz and Edward 

Steichen Autochrome Plates: Anoxic Sealed 

Package and Lighting Conditions,” Casella and 

Katherine Sanderson, successor of her co-author 

at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, discuss the 

lighting and housing innovations created for 

the autochromes’ short display duration and 

the science behind their success. By creating 

low-oxygen packages for each object, using 

well-researched LED Lite Pads as light sources 

that illuminated only when activated by a viewercontrolled 

button, and monitoring the exposure 

every one second via technology, the organizers 

calculated that the five original autochrome plates 

were only exposed for a total of 7.5 hours. When 

“combined with continuous gallery lighting at 25 

lux, the total dosage for the exhibition period was 

3,753 lux hours” (Casella and Sanderson). The 

recommended annual light exposure for a “very 

light sensitive photograph”, the majority being 

color processes, is 5,000 footcandle (ftc) hours, 

which is equivalent to 53,819 lux hours. x Based 

on these calculations, the five autochrome objects 

were exposed to far less than the recommended 

annual amount of light. 

Maintaining Balance 

The question that is currently plaguing museums 

of all disciplines is how can there be an increase 

of accessibility to collections without creating 

devastating consequences for the objects. The 

digitization of collections is clearly one solution 

that would allow a global audience to see works 

that they never previously would have had the 

opportunity to view. However, G. Wayne Clough’s 

question, “are brick-and-mortar museums, with 

their curators and expensive collections, going 

to be victims of the digital museum?” is quite 

intimidating (32). With the continued pressure 

to be more accessible, how does a museum 

manage to balance digitization with being a 

physical institution that needs visitors to remain 

in operation? 

The appeal of the digital world is continually 

increasing as the population relies more heavily 

on technology in their daily lives. In Best of Both 

Worlds: Museums, Libraries, and Archives in a Digital 

Age, Clough declares, “What museums, libraries, 

and archives must ask: How can we prepare 

ourselves to reach the generation of digital 

natives who bring a huge appetite – and aptitude 

– for the digital world” (2)? Clough, both a former 

President of Georgia Institute of Technology and 

Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, is correct 

in his concerns. 


Institutions are steadily moving in the direction 

preferred by the younger generation. Mobile 

applications containing images of collection 

materials, maps of facilities, and information on 

exhibitions are becoming more common. xi If 

all sizeable museums had a mobile application 

containing images and descriptions of their works 

that can be accessed in the palm of a hand, I 

believe that more people, especially of the techsavvy 

generations, would discover a love for art 

and possibly even object preservation. 

Unfortunately, regardless of our present 

technological abilities, there are limitations 

to digitizing museum collections that must be 

resolved before an institution undertakes such 

an initiative. Cost is a huge obstacle to overcome. 

From purchasing the latest imaging equipment 

to paying the salaries for the team that such a 

task would require, the price tag would be far 

higher than an institution could easily afford to 

pay. For example, The Museum of Modern Art 

in New York City required a nearly $1.5 million 

grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 

for the execution of the successful five-year 

research project surrounding the Thomas Walther 

Collection (“Scholarly Publications”). This funded 

a website and publication that each contain high 

resolution images, including recto, verso, and 

microscopic details, of 341 photographs, as well 

as artist biographical information and interactive 

maps. "Object:Photo" was a realization that few 

institutions have ever had the opportunity to 

imagine, let alone undertake, and $1.5 million 

cannot simply be given to every collection of 

historic materials. 

Digitizing a collection is also not a method of 

ensuring its permanence. In their 2014 book, RE- 

COLLECTION: Art, New Media, and Social Memory, 

Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito illustrate their 

“best guesses on format longevity” in a table 

titled “Comparative Longevity of Various Formats 

as of 2013” (227). With eight categories of file 

formats, such as “Raster Image” and “Video File,” 

the co-authors organize them into “Short-term,” 

“Medium-term,” “Long-term,” and “Indefinite 

future” columns (228). During the publication 

of RE-COLLECTION, there were no file formats 

that the authors felt confident categorizing as 

“Indefinite future”. The most frequently used 

formats of .doc, .xls, .psd, .gif are each labeled 

as “Short-term”; PDF, .docx, .xlsx, .jpg, .mp3, and 

.mov are all considered “Medium-term”; .tiff and 

.png are categorized under “Long-term.” It is clear 

as your gaze moves down Table 13.1 that with 

eight instances of “Nothing” under the category 

of “Indefinite future” there is currently no 

immortality for photography in the digital realm. xii 

Conclusion 

So how, as a community of museum 

professionals, art historians, and scholars, do we 

proceed? I believe that researchers should have 

the opportunity to view photographs relevant 

to their scholarly interests. The issue that arises 

with this is; Must a caretaker of a collection police 

who they allow to view works in order to limit 

light exposure? If so, how does one determine 

the qualifications for an individual to experience 

the physical object? A light-sensitive photograph 

that is stored in a box for decades may hinder the 

release of groundbreaking scholarship. 

It is obvious that there is a tension between 

protecting original photographs from light 

exposure and also needing to view them to 


advance our knowledge of artists, their works, 

and processes. In a culture where the majority 

of our photographs are digital, I understand 

that it is difficult for the average art consumer 

to understand the importance of viewing an 

original, physical, photographic object versus 

a digital facsimile. Just as a digital copy of a 

painting hung on your wall is different from the 

original, a digital version of a photograph is as 

well. There are details in a photograph that are 

completely erased in a facsimile, such as the 

surface texture based on the process and paper 

choice, and the possibility of misleading size 

and hidden inscriptions. If the larger population 

would understand that a digital copy viewed on a 

screen is vastly different than the physical object 

viewed in person, I would be more willing to 

accept the seemingly certain, digital future of art 

consumption. 

Fortunately, approximately 7,000 people visited 

Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand during the one- week 

period in which the original autochromes were 

on display. Casella and Sanderson trust that 

the popularity of these five objects during their 

short presentation has drawn attention to the 

importance of object preservation, and they hope 

that the large amount of press the autochromes 

received will help people to better understand 

the difference between a facsimile or digital 

reproduction and the historic object. 

In concluding my research that began with my 

interaction with the William Henry Fox Talbot: 

Dawn of the Photograph exhibition, I believe that 

through the collaboration of professionals from 

a wide array of career paths, it is possible to 

lessen the damage done to photographic objects 

during viewing. As seen in the exhibition Stieglitz, 

Steichen, Strand, the inclusion of a lighting system 

that only turns on when initiated by a viewer, 

supplemented by constant monitoring, was highly 

effective in maintaining a safe environment for 

the fragile autochromes which were housed in 

anoxic sealed packages. Awareness of successful 

examples of exhibiting environmentally sensitive 

objects, such as in Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, is 

crucial in ensuring the longevity of physical 

museum collections. 

Notes 

i 

It should be noted that this exhibition is referred to as both 

William Henry Fox Talbot: Dawn of the Photograph and Fox 

Talbot: Dawn of the Photograph, however there is evidence that 

the use of “Fox Talbot” rather than “Talbot” became customary 

posthumously as the pioneer of photography wrote negatively 

about the name. This is discussed in depth on the William 

Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné website hosted by the 

University of Oxford in an article titled ‘Talbot vs Fox Talbot.’ 

I have chosen to write of the exhibition as William Henry Fox 

Talbot: Dawn of the Photograph for this paper. 

ii 

Photographs were forbidden in the Science Museum’s Media 

Space, resulting in a lack of installation images to analyze and 

quote. 

iii 

“[Linen],” The J. Paul Getty Museum, accessed January 6, 

2017, http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/53338/ 

william-henry-fox-talbot-linen-british-about-1835/. 

iv 

In regards to Wedgwood and Davy’s failed attempts, Talbot 

states, “The only definite account of the matter which I have 

been able to meet with, is contained in the first volume of the 

Journal of the Royal Institution, page 170 […].” 

v 

It is important to note that Reinhold was not employed at 

The J. Paul Getty Museum during Experimental Photography: 

Discovery and Invention. The information discussed in this 

article was reconstructed from Department of Photographs’ 

files at The J. Paul Getty Museum, as well as interviews with 

staff members involved in the exhibition. Therefore, the 

estimation of foot-candles that ‘Linen Textile Fragment’ was 

exposed to is cited as being from personal communication 


with Ernest Mack, Associate Conservator at the J. Paul Getty 

Museum. 

vi 

The exhibition was held from June 17 – September 4, 2005 

at the International Center of Photography in New York City, 

followed by the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY 

October 1, 2005 – January 8, 2006, and it closed in the Addison 

Gallery of American Art at the Phillips Gallery in Andover, MA. 

vii 

Per Wiegandt and Meller, Museum Photographics, Inc. in 

Rochester, NY, was contracted to photograph the objects. A 

Canon EOS D-1 Mark II camera was used to create images with 

a resolution of 4992 × 3328 megapixels which produced ~20 

MB RAW files that were, additionally, saved as TIFFs. To ensure 

the safety of the digital images, their files were saved on two 

external hard drives, two portable computer hard drives, 

and a secure network used by the George Eastman House. A 

paper copy of each digital image was also filed away in case of 

unforeseen digital issues. 

Richard Hollinger of the University of Maine Digital Curation 

program for our running debate about file formats, which has 

shaped the opinions expressed in this chart.” 

References 

Casella, Luisa. “On view January 25-30: Original Autochromes 

Produced Using the First Color Photographic Process.” The 

Metropolitan Museum of Art, The MET, www.metmuseum. 

org/blogs/now-at-the-met/features/2011/on-view-january- 

2530-original-autochromes-produced-using-the-first-colorphotographic-process. 

Accessed 11 January 2017. 

Casella, Luisa and Katherine Sanderson, “Display of 

Alfred Steiglitz and Edward Steichen Autochrome Plates: 

Anoxic Sealed Package and Lighting Conditions.” Topics in 

Photographic Preservation, vaol. 14, 2011, pp. 162-167. 

Clough, G. Wayne. Best of Both Worlds: Museums, Libraries, and 

Archives in a Digital Age, e-book, Smithsonian Institution, 2013. 

viii 

Casella notes that the abilities of low-oxygen environments 

had previously been widely studied as the original manuscript 

of the Declaration of Independence had been rehoused in an 

anoxic case to prevent rapid shifts in preservation. However, 

the use of low-oxygen enclosures with photographic materials 

had never been explored. 

ix 

Official position titles of both Casella and Sanderson were 

taken from their respective Linkedin profiles, which contain 

their work histories. 

x 

The recommended annual light exposure for photographs 

was given to me by Jae Gutierrez, at the time, the Arthur J. 

Bell Senior Photograph Conservator at the Center for Creative 

Photography, when discussing a possible extension of the 

2015-2016 exhibition The Lives of Pictures: Forty Years of 

Collecting at the Center for Creative Photography. 

“Fox Talbot: Dawn of the Photograph.” YouTube, uploaded 

by Science Museum, 15 April 2016, www.youtube.com/ 

watch?v=2u4VB6uuOHk. 

Reinhold, Nancy, “The Exhibition of an Early Photogenic 

Drawing by William Henry Fox Talbot. Topics in Photographic 

Preservation, vol. 5, 1993, pp. 89-94. 

Rinehart, Richard and Jon Ippolito. RE-COLLECTION: Art, New 

Media, and Social Memory, e-book, The MIT Press, 2014. 

Robinson, Mike. Comment on “Nano-scientists Attempt to 

Save Disintegrating Artworks – Daguerreotypes.” British 

photographic history blog, 19 November 2012., www. 

britishphotohistory.ning.com/profiles/blogs/nano-scientistsattempt-to-save-disintegrating-artworks. 

Accessed 11 January 

2017. 

xi 

See Messenger, Lauren M. Location Aware: Museum 

Applications as an Interpretive Tool. 2015. University of 

Washington, Masters thesis for more information on museum 

use of mobile applications. 

Talbot, William Henry Fox. [Linen]. About 1835. The J. Paul 

Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California. The J. Paul Getty 

Museum, www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/53338/williamhenry-fox-talbot-linen-british-about-1835/. 

Accessed January 

5, 2017. 

xii 

Beneath Table 13.1 reads: “Note: A chart like this is more 

weather forecast than scientific measurement, and we’re 

printing it not to serve as a tablet of biblical commandments 

but to illustrate how lifespan increases when formats are free, 

open, and uncompressed. We’re grateful to John Bell and 

Talbot, William Henry Fox. “Some Account of the Art of 

Photogenic Drawing.” 1839. 


The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Andrew W. Mellon 

Foundation, www. mellon.org/grants/grants-database/grants/ 

museum-of-modern-art/40900608/. Accessed 11 January 2017. 

Walsh, John, “Introduction: The Collection and the Year’s 

Activities.” The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal, vol. 18, 1990, pp. 

159-164. 

Wiegandt, Ralph, and Taina Meller, “Advances in 

Daguerreotype Conservation: The Conservation Program 

for the Exhibition, Young America: The Daguerreotypes of 

Southworth & Hawes.” Topics in Photographic Preservation, 

vol. 12, 2007, pp. 37-46. 


Future Systems 

Janine Biunno 

Right | Janine Biunno 

CCTV Building, 2015 

Hand-cut paper. 40 x 26 in. 


As both a practicing artist and full-time archivist, 

Janine Biunno builds abstract geometric 

compositions of encounters in both physical and 

digital landscapes. Influenced by her years of work 

in architecture, Biunno is fascinated with structures 

that have been deemed iconic by design and the 

mental mapmaking that each of us subconsciously 

experience in our daily lives. 

While building with her own visual archive, 

Biunno oscillates from memories of sites she has 

experienced in person to trips derived from internet 

searches. 



Janine Biunno 

Cable Stayed Bridges, 2015. 




Janine Biunno 

Satellite Dishes, 2015. 





Lobby Space, 2015. 



Opposite | Janine Biunno 

3D group 1 (Construction 

Windows), 2017. 

Sumi ink on paper. 25 x 19 in. 





3D group 2 (Construction 

Windows), 2017. 

Sumi ink on paper. 25 x 19 in. 


Opposite | Janine Biunno 

Post No Bills (zine), 2016. 

Photocopy and hand-cut 

paper. 36 pages, edition of 50. 




Untitled (Mule on Walnut 

and Hackberry) 

Kate Harding 

Artist Kate Harding’s work questions what counts 

as an archive, an image and/or document, 

who assembles it, what that says about the 

assemblers/constructors and the context and 

what information is retained as well as the role of 

time and “use.” 

In rural Missouri, where she grew up, Harding 

encounters bite marks on trees and documents 

them in photographs. Her faithfully recorded 

mule teeth marks create a more-than-human 

photographic archive, Untitled Mule on Walnut 

and Hackberry. Instead of stumbling into a room 

filled with human records, Harding’s archive 

comes from the natural world. Her work spins a 

generative dialogue between herself, the trees, 

and the mules that roam their family land. 

In her charcoal-on-paper rubbings and the 

photographic documentation of the site, Harding 

provides a view into how information-gathering 

and stewardship can be part of a working 

method. 

The tree photographs are part of a larger 

collection of ongoing documentation of a 

site in rural Franklin County, Missouri, critical 


to Harding’s art practice. However, these 

photographs are not to be perceived as an archive 

itself, but are instead documentation of a sited 

archive in the form of mule bites on living Walnut 

and Hackberry tree trunks. 

The photographs shown here are part of a 

constellation of supporting documents orbiting 

this series. The rubbings themselves are of 

trees where mules have bitten away bark in 

large swaths. Eventually, given more time, this 

"collaring," as it is called, could continue around 

the trunk's circumference, killing the tree through 

a kind of nutrient suffocation. Looking closely at 

each rubbing, it is possible to see the pattern of 

teeth marks as well as the bark texture around 

the perimeter. By the process of rubbing with 

charcoal, Harding’s own fingerprints are also 

visible in the pattern of dark marks made on the 

paper. 

of physical activity and evidence of that activity 

between a minimum of three actors: the tree 

(its external and internal makeup and any 

healing), mules (their ornery action and teeth 

marks, which could indicate factors of nutrition, 

health, pleasure, boredom, and/or personality), 

and Harding or the person (as indicated 

by fingerprints) that made the rubbings on 

paper. In this abstraction, Harding calls written 

language into context; word as the attempt to 

translate corporeal lived experience, perception 

and history into an abbreviated, conceptual, and 

very transportable form. 

In the case of these rubbings, information that 

is overtly visible in person or in photographic 

form becomes a more abstracted field that has 

been carried away from the site and stands for 

it in much the same way as writing on a page. 

The rubbings, none the less, are a direct result 



Left | Kate Harding Untitled (Marked Walnut 1), 2014, Image courtesy of the artist 

Above | Kate Harding Untitled (Mule on Walnut #1), 2014, Charcoal on paper, 24 x 18 inches. 

Image courtesy of Ryan Handt. 

. 



Left | Kate Harding Untitled (Marked Walnut 3), 2014, Image courtesy of the artist 

Above | Kate Harding Untitled (Mule on Walnut #3), 2014, Charcoal on paper, 24 x 18 inches. 

Image courtesy of Ryan Handt. 

. 



25 MINUTES 

Meditation on the Studio Wall 

562 Fisgard St. Victoria, BC 

Lynda Gammon 

In 2009, my colleague Trudi Lynn Smith rented 

a studio space in Victoria’s Chinatown. I visited. 

It was then that I re-encountered the studio I 

had inhabited twenty-five years earlier. My gaze 

turned to the long wall on which I had worked; 

layers of white paint, the mahogany plywood that 

I had nailed over the wall of narrow vertical pine 

boards. Although 562 Fisgard St. was originally 

a shelter for migrant workers, the Chinese 

Benevolent Association began renting the space 

to artists in the 1980s. 

As we pulled off the white 4’X8’ mahogany 

plywood panels a drawing that I had made on the 

wall in the 1980’s was revealed. 

Realizing that, through its layers, this wall traces 

over 100 years of lives, Trudi and I decided to 

use it as a subject of study. We began our close 

investigation by building a large format (16” X 20”) 

analogue view camera (9’ long, 6’ high and 2 ½’ 

wide). Drawing on photography’s relationship to 

indexicality, the camera’s lens was focused on the 

wall so as to expose a 16” X 20” section at exactly 

1:1 scale. We then proceeded to take an exposure 

(25 minutes), then peeling back a layer of the wall, 

then another exposure and so forth, documenting 

the layers. This resulted in 3 series of 16” X 

20” negatives and contact prints. Although 

documented at exceptionally high resolution, 

the peeling process and photographs actually 

revealed little of the buried history, a history for 

the most part undocumented and unavailable. 

In tandem, I embarked on a series of studio 

wall meditations, 25 Minutes. While the large 

camera was focused on the studio wall taking its 

exposure, I too would focus my gaze on the wall 

for the same period of time. I documented these 

"sittings" with 25-minute time exposures using my 

4″ X 5″ analogue camera. While gazing at the wall, 

thoughts emerged and disappeared, thoughts 

of the shrine room, thoughts of the inhabitants, 

thoughts of my earlier studio practice, thoughts 

and more thoughts. With this project, I was 

interested in kinds of knowledge and experience 

gained through the process of sitting and 

looking. It was interesting to me how the eye of 

the camera was focused on the same spot that 

my eyes were focused on. The same light that 

reflected off of the wall into the camera lens was 

also reflected into my eyes. 

In 2017, Trudi and I re-covered my drawing and 

the peeled parts of the wall with the original 

pieces of white plywood panelling and left the 

studio. 









Archives and Photography 


AUTHOR BIOS 

Janine Biunno 

www.janinebiunno.com 

Janine Biunno is a visual artist and archivist based 

in Brooklyn, NY, whose work is mainly focused on 

analyzing and interpreting the semiotics of the 

built environment. Janine's artwork addresses 

the subjective practice of understanding and 

representing the architecture, infrastructure, 

and density of urban space, as well as how our 

general perception of physical space is being 

altered due to the increasing influence of the 

digital realm. As an archivist, Janine is focused 

on research and collections at the intersection 

of the fields of art, architecture, and design. She 

received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, 

MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, 

Boston at Tufts University, and MLS from Queens 

College, CUNY. Her work has been exhibited 

at the International Print Center of New York, 

Tiger Strikes Asteroid and Transmitter Gallery in 

Brooklyn, Satellite Art Fair, Miami, The Museum of 

Fine Arts, Boston and ACRE Projects in Chicago. 

Nat Castañeda 

http://natcastaneda.com/ 

Nat Castañeda is an interdisciplinary visual artist 

based in Denmark. Castañeda works primarily 

in video and collage, with an emphasis on 

tactile intimacy with her materials remaining an 

important aspect of all her projects. Common 

issues in Castañeda’s work are the role of 

technology within personal narratives and the 

permanence of the historical record. She received 

her MFA from the School of Visual Arts and 

has shown at venues such as the High Line, El 

Museo del Barrio and Electronic Arts Intermix. In 

addition to her art practice, Castañeda works as 

a journalist at The Associated Press. Castañeda’s 

photography has appeared in the New York 

Times, U.S. News & World Report and USA Today. 

Maree Clarke 

Maree Clarke is a Wemba Wemba/Mutti Mutti/ 

Boon Wurrung woman from Mildura in northwest 

Victoria, Australia, and a multidisciplinary artist 

living and working in Narrm/Melbourne. She 

has been a pivotal figure in the reclamation of 

southeastern Australian Aboriginal art practices, 

reviving elements of Aboriginal culture that were 

lost—or laying dormant—over the period of 

colonization. She has over 30 years’ experience 

revivifying the knowledge and practices of her 

Ancestors, including the making of possum-skin 

cloaks, kangaroo-tooth and river reed necklaces, 

string headbands adorned with kangaroo 

teeth and echidna quills, and Kopi mourning 

caps. Her work is also at the cutting edge of 

technological innovation and experimentation, 

including lenticular prints, 3D photographs and 

photographic holograms, sculpture, and video 

installation. She conducts research to reclaim 

the information about her cultural heritage held 

in museums and galleries around the world, 

and works tirelessly to pass this on to younger 

generations and to share with the broader 

community. 


Fran Edmonds 

Fran Edmonds is an interdisciplinary scholar 

focusing on the fields of anthropology and 

ethnohistory. Her work is collaborative 

and participatory, aimed at decolonising 

methodologies. Her research interests include 

the connection between art and wellbeing, 

intercultural and intergenerational knowledge 

exchange, the creative use of digital technologies 

for storytelling, visual studies, youth identity, 

cultural revitalisation via the archival and 

ethnographic record, oral history/stories, and the 

intersection between non-European (Indigenous) 

and Western knowledge systems. She is a Senior 

Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, 

and the lead researcher for The Living Archive 

of Aboriginal Art project, funded through the 

Melbourne Social Equity Institute: https:// 

socialequity.unimelb.edu.au/projects/the-livingarchive-of-aboriginal-art. 

Lynda Gammon 

http://lyndagammon.ca/ 

A significant area of Lynda Gammon’s artistic 

production over the past several decades has 

dealt with the subject of space/place, which 

she has explored through installation works 

employing sculptural and photographic elements. 

Ideas of space, and habitation are considered 

through the disciplines of sculpture, performance, 

assemblage, photography, and collage. Gammon, 

studied at The University of British Columbia, 

Simon Fraser University, [B.A. English] and 

York University [M.F.A. 1983]. She has been 

the recipient of numerous BC Arts Council 

and Canada Council grants and is a member 

of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Lynda 

Gammon’s work has been exhibited at institutions 

including The Nickle Art Museum [Calgary], 

The Contemporary Art Gallery [Vancouver], 

Mercer Union Gallery [Toronto], Plug-In 

Gallery [Winnipeg], Presentation House Gallery 

[Vancouver], Vancouver Art Gallery, McMaster 

Museum [Hamilton] and many others. She is an 

Associate Professor Emeritus in the Visual Arts 

Department at the University of Victoria where 

she has taught for over thirty years. 

Kate Harding 

http://kate-harding.com 

Kate Harding is an artist living and working 

between New York, Los Angeles, and rural 

Missouri who examines the specificity of site 

and the local to explore concepts of landscape 

and inter-subjective perception. Exploring the 

relationship of language and topology, she 

regularly uses her body's movement through 

landscape as a tool of measure, in a process 

of "field experiments." Harding's systematic 

approach to mapping terrain intersects with 

speech and movement, inviting consideration of 

embodied communication and ways of knowing 

and memory. Interdisciplinary in material and 

approach, Harding's background in garment 

design and construction often provides a 

metaphoric structure to her work, as does 

research in science, history, critical philosophy, 

folklore and the colloquial phrase. Regularly 

engaging in collaborative and curatorial projects, 

Harding is the host of Bicoastal Carpool, a weekly 

radio program airing live on WPIR Pratt Radio 

since 2016. 



https://louishothothotart.wordpress.com/ 

Louis Hothothot (Louis Yi Liu) is a young film and 

video artist and winner of the 3 Package Deal 

Young Talent 2018-2019 prize in Amsterdam. 

Louis was born and grew up in China. He studied 

graphic design, animation and video art at the 

China Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. He 

enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program at 

the Dutch Art Institute in 2012. Between 2015 

and 2017, Louis studied at the Netherlands Film 

Academy in the Master of Film program. He 

works as a multimedia artist combining video art, 

performance and graphic design. His research 

deals with the subject of memory, identity, 

emotion and pain. Louis Hothothot receives 

support from institutions such Netherland 

Film Fonds, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, 

Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam, International 

Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam and 

Netherlands Film Academy. Louis Hothothot 

regularly exhibits his work in museums, galleries, 

art festivals and theaters, such as Eye Film 

Museum in Amsterdam, Van Abbe Museum in 

Eindhoven, Dansmakers, International Dance Film 

Festival Brussels, and so on. 

Sharon Huebner 

Sharon Huebner is a Research Fellow at the 

University of Melbourne’s Indigenous Studies 

Unit and an honorary Research Fellow at Monash 

University’s Indigenous Studies Centre. She is 

also a professional oral historian, photographer, 

and audiovisual media producer. Sharon has 

worked with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander 

families throughout Australia for the past twenty 

years, protecting and preserving intergenerational 

rights to cultural heritage, which includes the 

digital return of material culture to individuals, 

families, and communities, from archives, 

libraries, and museums. In 2003, Sharon helped 

to develop the Koorie Heritage Archive for Stolen 

Generations and their descendant families in 

southeastern Australia. She’s also been awarded 

two distinguished research grants, including a 

Creative Fellowship at the State Library Victoria 

(2014) and the Hugh Williamson Fellowship at 

the University of Melbourne Archives (2015). The 

fellowships led to the production of the short film 

"No Longer a Wandering Spirit" (2016): https:// 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCar1eaf6Gc 

Meghan Jordan 

Meghan Jordan is the curatorial assistant in 

the Department of Photography at the George 

Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY. She holds 

a BFA in Fine Art Photography from Rochester 

Institute of Technology and an MA in Art History 

with a focus in History of Photography from the 

University of Arizona. She has held positions 

at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and 

the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, 

Arizona. Her main research examines the role of 

visual representations of atrocity in the cultural 

understanding of history. She aspires to earn her 

PhD and pursue a career as a curator and scholar. 

Sarah Kanouse 

http://readysubjects.org/portfolio/ 

Sarah Kanouse is an interdisciplinary artist 

and critical writer examining the politics of 

landscape and space. Migrating between 

video, photography, and performative forms, 

her research-based creative projects shift the 


visual dimension of the landscape to allow 

hidden stories of environmental and social 

transformation to emerge. Her solo and 

collaborative work has been presented through 

the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Documenta 

13, the Museum of Contemporary Art-Chicago, 

The Cooper Union, The Smart Museum, and 

numerous academic and DIY venues. Her writing 

on contemporary art, landscape, and ecology 

has appeared in Acme, Leonardo, Parallax, and 

Art Journal, as well the edited volumes Ecologies, 

Agents, Terrains; Critical Landscapes, Art Against the 

Law, and Mapping Environmental Issues in the City. 

Rimi Khan 

Rimi Khan is Senior Research Fellow at University 

of Melbourne. Her work is broadly concerned 

with creativity, cultural citizenship, and the politics 

of knowledge production. She has published on 

multicultural arts and migrant youth participation 

in the context of unstable economic contexts and 

shifting institutional settings. Her book, Art in 

Community: The Provisional Citizen was published 

by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. Her most recent 

research looks at creative labour and ethical 

fashion economies in the global South. 


Leah Modigliani is an artist and scholar whose 

research employs the methods and languages 

of a variety of disciplines including fine arts, art 

history, critical theory, cultural studies, geography, 

and anthropology. Her academic interests 

include the history of the avant-garde and its 

relationship to political critique, the history of 

photography, the history of conceptual art, social 

dissent since 1968, and feminist politics of visual 

representation and discourse. 

Modigliani's artwork has been exhibited 

internationally at galleries and museums, 

including Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts 

Museum, Philadelphia; Yerba Buena Center for 

the Arts, San Francisco; Colby College Museum of 

Art, Maine; the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax 

and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 

Toronto. 

Her critical writing can be found in academic 

journals and contemporary art magazines such 

as Prefix Photo, Art Criticism and C Magazine. Her 

book, Engendering an avant-garde: the unsettled 

landscapes of Vancouver photo-conceptualism, 

was published by Manchester University Press's 

Rethinking Art's Histories series in 2018. 


Clifford Owens’ art has appeared in numerous 

group and solo exhibitions. His solo exhibitions 

include “Anthology” Museum of Modern Art PS1, 

“Better the Rebel You Know” Home, Manchester, 

England, and “Perspectives 173: Clifford Owens” 

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. His many 

group exhibitions include, “Radical Presence: 

Black Performance in Contemporary Art” Yerba 

Buena Center for the Arts, “Greater New York 

2005” Museum of Modern Art PS1, “Freestyle” 

The Studio Museum in Harlem, and “Performance 

Now: The First Decade of the New Century.” and 

“Lone Wolf Recital Corp” Museum of Modern Art. 

Owens studied at The School of the Art Institute 

of Chicago, Rutgers University, and the Whitney 

Museum Independent Study Program, and 

Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He 

has received numerous grants and fellowships. 


His work has been reviewed widely and he has 

written for numerous publications. His project 

“Anthology” is the subject of his first book. Clifford 

lives and works in New York City. 


http://www.gabrielaaceves.com/ 

Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda is Assistant Professor 

in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology 

where she directs the interdisciplinary 

research and media creation studio cMAS 

(criticalMediArtStudio). She is the author of 

Women Made Visible: Feminist Art and Media in 

post-1968 Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 

2019) and several peer-reviewed articles, book 

chapters, and research-creation projects on 

feminist media art in Latin America. Currently, she 

is working on a book manuscript on the history 

of electronic images and avant-garde music 

entitled Weaving the Electric Wave: Latin American 

Women Composers, 1888 -1980. She also works on 

video and performance and is a member of the 

Vancouver based art collective art/mamas. Her 

work has been shown in various venues across 

Canada and Mexico since 1990. Most recently, 

her video installations were featured at the 2016 

Computer Art Congress in Paris and the 2019 

Creativity and Cognition Conference. 


http://karinaskvirsky.com 

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky is a multidisciplinary 

artist whose practice began in photography 

and grew into video and performance. Skvirsky 

became interested in photography at a young 

age and discovered her identity by organizing her 

parents’ photo album. As an artist, Skvirsky excels 

at telling stories through images, static or moving, 

often using performance to ground them. Her 

video, The Perilous Journey of María Rosa Palacios 

and series of images, The Railroad Workers, draw 

parallels between a teenage girl’s journey through 

the mountains of Ecuador, and the indigenous 

and Jamaican workers who constructed one of 

the most dangerous stretches of railway in the 

world. Skvirsky has exhibited internationally and 

received grants from Creative Capital, New York 

State Council on the Arts, Film and Electronic Arts 

Grant, Jerome Foundation, National Association 

of Latino Arts & Culture, among others. Skvirsky is 

an Associate Professor of Art at Lafayette College. 

Trudi Lynn Smith 

https://www.trudilynnsmith.com/ 

Trudi Lynn Smith is a visual artist and 

anthropologist with an Interdisciplinary PhD 

from University of Victoria. Her research 

addresses political and material entanglements 

between photography, archives, and places. 

She reworks formal aspects of photography 

— a relationship between durable images and 

electromagnetic radiation—to emphasize the 

materiality of the unfixed image in everyday 

life. Place-specific works have been installed in 

mountain environments in Canada and the USA; 

and she has exhibited work at The Art Gallery of 

Greater Victoria (Victoria); Third Street Gallery 

(Easton); Crane Arts (Philadelphia); and Southern 

Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge). Trudi’s work 

has been published in journals such as Cultural 

Anthropology, c-theory, American Anthropologist 

and Public Journal. Trudi is a co-founder of 

the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective and is 

currently Artist-in-Residence in the Making Culture 

Lab at SFU and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the 


School of Environmental Studies at University of 

Victoria. 

Sabra Thorner 

Sabra Thorner is a cultural anthropologist at 

Mount Holyoke College. She’s worked with 

Indigenous Australians for about 20 years, 

focusing on photography, digital media, and 

archiving as forms of cultural production and 

social activism. She is broadly interested in 

visual/media anthropology, digital cultures, 

anthropology in/of museums, Indigenous 

Australia and Indigenous art/media worlds, 

intellectual property and cultural heritage 

regimes, ethnographic and documentary film, and 

art and society. Her work is increasingly focused 

on decolonizing methodologies and collaborative 

and intercultural collaboration between 

Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, activists, 

and makers. 

Institute for Indigenous Education and Research 

at the University of Technology Sydney, and a 

PhD student with the Faculty of Information 

Technology, Monash University. Her PhD 

research is focused on questions of Indigenous 

Cultural Safety in libraries and archives. Her PhD 

is funded by an Australian Government Research 

Training Program (RTP) Scholarship. 

Kirsten Thorpe 

Kirsten Thorpe (Worimi, Port Stephens NSW) 

is a professional archivist who has led the 

development of protocols, policies, and services 

for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples 

in libraries and archives in Australia. Kirsten’s 

research interests relate to Indigenous selfdetermination 

in libraries and archives. She 

has been involved in numerous projects that 

have involved the return of historic collections 

to Indigenous peoples and communities, and 

advocates for a transformation of practice 

to center Indigenous priorities and voices 

regarding the management of data, records, 

and collections. Kirsten is a Senior Researcher, 

Cultural and Critical Archivist at the Jumbunna

Mapping Meaning, the Journal (Issue No. 3)

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?