The archiving machine; or, the camera and the filing cabinet

Grey Room

Volumn , Issue 47, 2012, Pages 24-37

  Tagg, John ^a  

^a BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84860485284     PISSN: 15263819     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/GREY_a_00068     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 2-3.
2. Jennifer Blessing and Nat Trotman, Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, exh. pamphlet (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2010), 1. The exhibition was held 26 March to 6 September 2010.
3. Wall panel for "Appropriation and the Archive," in Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2010.
4. An earlier rehearsal of the same inflated conception of "the archival impulse" was offered in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, curated by Okwui Enwezor for the International Center of Photography, 18 January to 4 May 2008. This exhibition, described as a "widespread investigation" of "the archive as both a conceptual and physical space in which memories are preserved and history decided," also centered on "works by leading contemporary artists who use photographic images to rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory and loss." International Center of Photography, media release for Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, 17 January 2008.
5. Wall panel for "Appropriation and the Archive."
6. Hal Foster, "An Archival Impulse," October 110 (Fall 2004): 3-22.
7. and Blessing and Trotman. The Guggenheim curators depart from Foster who, in his discussion of the work of Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Sam Durant, concludes that the partial recovery of a utopian demand in their "archival art" "suggests a shift away from a melancholic culture that views the historical as little more than the traumatic." Foster, "An Archival Impulse," 22.
8. Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October 39 (Winter 1986): 56-57.
9. Sekula, 58.
10. Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph" (1859), in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete's Island Books, 1980), 71-82.
11. See also, Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture," Atlantic Monthly 8 (July 1861).
12. and Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Doings of the Sunbeam," Atlantic Monthly 12 (July 1863): 1-15.
13. Holmes, "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph," 77.
14. Holmes, "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph," 74, 77.
15. Holmes, "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph," 81.
16. Holmes, "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph," 81.
17. Rosalind Krauss, "Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View," Art Journal 42, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 315.
18. Sekula argues that, while companies such as Keystone Views or Underwood and Underwood did publish short pictorial groupings of stereograph cards organized according to a narrative logic, "one sees clearly that the overall structure was informed not by a narrative paradigm, but by the paradigm of the archive. After all, the sequence could be rearranged; its temporality was indeterminate, its narrativity relatively weak. The pleasures of this discourse were grounded not in narrative necessarily, but in archival play, in substitution, and in a voracious optical encyclopedism. There were always more images to be acquired, obtainable at a price, from a relentlessly expanding, globally dispersed picture-gathering agency."
19. Sekula, 58.
20. Alphonse Bertillon, "The Bertillon System of Identification," Forum 11, no. 3 (May 1891): 331.
21. Bertillon, 331.
22. Sekula, 29.
23. Sekula, 57.
24. and W.D. Wigent, Burton D. Housel, and E. Harry Gilman, Modern Filing and How to File: A Textbook on Office System (Rochester, NY: Yarman and Erbe Manufacturing Company, 1916).
25. H.D. Gower, L. Stanley Jast, and W.W. Topley, The Camera as Historian (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1916), 85.
26. Gower, Jast, and Topley, iii.
27. Gower, Jast, and Topley, 71.
28. Gower, Jast, and Topley, 94, 96-97 (emphasis in original).
29. Of the authors, Jast was deputy chief librarian of the Manchester Public Libraries and honorary secretary of the Library Association, while Topley was a member of the Croydon Libraries Committee. For the influence of bibliographical science on photographic archive organization.
30. see Sekula, 56-57.
31. Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel," in Ficciones, ed. Anthony Kerrigan, trans. Anthony Bonner (New York: Grove Press, 1962).
32. In All the Names, José Saramago writes of the inescapable incompletion of the archive, undone not only by error, decay, and the work of unseen parasites but by the fallibility of its very system, marking, in Saramago's terms, the triumph of sense over meaning, irresolvability over instrumentalization, irreducible difference over absolute fixity and the bureaucratic closure of the state.
33. See José Saramago, All the Names, trans. Margaret Jull Costa (New York: Harcourt, 1999).
34. See, for example, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977), 187-194.
35. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), section 251, p. 177.
36. Robin E. Kelsey, "Viewing the Archive: Timothy O'Sullivan's Photographs for the Wheeler Survey," The Art Bulletin 85, no. 4 (December 2003): 702-723.
37. See also, Robin E. Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850-1890 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007).
38. See Jorge Luis Borges, "On Exactitude in Science," in A Universal History of Infamy, trans. Norman Thomas de Giovanni (London: Penguin Books, 1975).
39. See, among others, Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-77, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), esp. 126-133.
40. The concept of "collective memory" was coined in 1925 by the French sociologist and pupil of Émile Durkheim, Maurice Halbwachs.
41. See Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
42. For the notion of "the ethics of memory," see Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
43. Susan Meiselas, Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (New York: Random House, 1997).
44. See also the website akaKURDISTAN, a place for collective memory and cultural exchange, http://www.akakurdistan.com/.
45. On this, see Jonathan Long and Edward Welch, introduction to Photography: Theoretical Snapshots, ed. J.J. Long, Andrea Noble, and Edward Welch (London: Routledge, 2009).
46. On the central function of "accumulation by dispossession" in contemporary capitalism, see David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism (London: Profile, 2010).
47. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), esp. 424-473.
48. Michel Foucault, "The Confessions of the Flesh," in Power/Knowledge, 194-196.
49. Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 14.
50. Agamben, 21.