Archive – Context and Narrative

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

Yes, certainly. An artist has selected the images, built a show around them, displayed them in a gallery and invited others to view them—this imbues the photographs with significance. The fact that people were willing to attend the show and buy the works demonstrates that what once had little or no value, has now gained in value.

Where does their meaning derive from?

The meaning of the photographs derives from a number of sources, but the gallery presentation may be the most important. The new context for the images changes the way that they will be viewed: they will be seen as a collection (although they did not originally belong together); they will have status because someone else has granted it (artist, gallery, media reports, other viewers); and they will be seen as art rather than simple, personal photographs (the mere act of hanging on a wall will go a long way to attracting the ‘art’ label).

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

I would expect that the photographs will gain appreciably in value (both artistic and monetary). They may have sold for a pound or two before—or not at all—but their new notoriety and ‘art’ status gives them a cachet that will raise their prices.
I would also expect that the competitive nature of human beings in an auction will further increase the selling price of the photographs. Few people knew or cared about them when they were first offered up on eBay, but the potential market has increased in size and no one likes to feel that they have lost an opportunity to a rival bidder. The aggressive behaviour of bidders I have witnessed in eBay auctions often inflates the cost of buying even ordinary items. And these are no longer ordinary items.

Reference

Question for Seller – Nicky Bird (s.d.) At: http://nickybird.com/projects/question-for-seller/ (Accessed 28/01/2020).

My work covers a number of the “unseens” that I identified as I began to think about this assignment: the past, the dead, missing people and secrets. Every family has its share of those and mine is no different. I know very little about my father’s branch of the family so, over the last few years, I have begun to unearth what I can through official records and archives in the UK. If it were left only to the physical evidence left to me—that is, the few objects in my possession—I would know very little about the people who came before me.

I present images of those objects here in the way that a museum or archive might, described simply and following archival technique (Online Museum Training – Photographing Collection Items. [s.d.]). I have done this because that is how I have come to read the pieces: for me, they are akin to museum artefacts in that they are from the past, are on display and are divorced from their original context. Individually, they might be read as objets trouvés, “objects or products with non-art functions that are placed into an art context and made part of an artwork” (History of the Found Object in Art [s.d.]).

Taken together, however, the objects form a collection that I try to fit with some difficulty and much imagination into a narrative about the people who owned them. In my mind, they hint at aspects of the daily lives of my paternal grandfather, grandmother and great-grandmother over a period of some 60 years, all before I was born. Without more detail and context, however, I realise that any interpretation I make contains a lot of projection and speculation.

And that is interesting to me. If I as a direct descendant am not able to tease out much of the context and narrative of these pieces, viewers with no personal connection are free to construct an even broader range of interpretations. We might all be able to view the pieces as signs, but it is unlikely we would all agree on what they signify (Hall, 2007, p.10). Would others’ narratives about the lives of my unseen family be any more or less valid than mine?

How would I know? Would it matter?