Archive as Art Form

For my first research paper of the semester I researched several artists who create or use an archive in their work, including the Bechers who I wrote about in my last post.  

My paper begins discussing Albrecht Meydenbauer's Archive of Historical Monuments (Denkmalerarchiv (1881).  He had proposed documenting all the historical buildings and monuments in the world; preserving them in anticipation of their possible loss.   In the end, his archive only documents monuments of the Prussian state.

The French Cathedral in Berlin (1882)

Meydenbauer's photographs of the the French Cathedral in Berlin were used for reconstruction after the church was severely damaged during WWII.

When I began this project, the first church I photographed was slated for demolition and I wondered if anyone had documented the structure before it was torn apart. I've found few images of it when it was active but many, like me, have photographed it in its dilapidated state.  

Like Meydenbauer, I felt compelled to document active churches associated with my family before they too were gone.  I've done a little reconstruction myself using photosynth.net (see screen capture below).  This site came up in our archive class during residency.  I've uploaded 266 jpgs of the church where my parents were married. You'll need Windows to run the program.  The site will ask you to create a login and download a small file.  My file is called IncarnationPhila.

I came across this Christian Boltanski quote in my research: 

“When I collect photos or heartbeats it's not to show presence, but absence. And the more evidence of someone's reality you accumulate, the more you show that they're absent. All my activity was therefore bound to fail. All through my life, I have always been amassing evidence to prevent things from disappearing, and in the end all I've done is heighten their disappearance, heightening the vision of that loss.” 

I suppose I've done the same as I look over the hundreds of photos I've made of the demolished church.  In Boltanski's Reserve of Dead Swiss and Sarah Charlesworth's series Modern History, both artists appropriated images from newspapers without the accompanying text.

For a piece I'm working on, I've taken and reformatted the text from a magazine article without the accompanying images and transferred it to some old newsprint with the help of a ChartPak Blender marker.  (My transfer to metal was not successful). Similar to Orphans I'm putting together my photographs with text.

© 2012