Catherine E. Clark (MIT) discusses the life cycle of anonymous photographic archives.
Photo Archives VI: From Trash to Treasure: Loss, Value, and the Photo Archive
This paper examines the trope of ‘trash to treasure’ in the history of photo archives. This paper’s key example is the revaluation and profit generation of an archive of amateur prints and albums collected in the 1980s by a French production company based in Marseille. They were used primarily for a show ‘Souvenirs, souvenirs’ that ran on ARTE in the 1980s. This paper will use this show and its archive to think through the life cycle of similar anonymous photographic archives. It asks: is there anything particularly photographic about trash-treasure narratives? What role does quantity play in producing photographic value? And how do photographs form new, secondary, affective meanings?
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This major international conference was convened by Geraldine Johnson (University of Oxford), Deborah Schultz (Regent's University London), and Costanza Caraffa (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz—Max-Planck-Institut). It is the sixth in the Photo Archives conference series.
This conference took place on April 20–21, 2017.
The conference investigated photographs and photographic archives in relation to notions of place. In this context, place was used to explore both...