Currently, I have found my way into a project. The project is still in development. I did not quite understand what I was doing (I am using old family photos in the project). I was given an article to read titled “Autonomy and the Archive in America” by Lauri Firstenberg and some ideas from that article are helping me contextualize what it is I am doing. These are the lines I pulled from that article that best express my current project.
The idea of “unearthing narratives in historical archives” (313).
The idea of “min[ing the archives] for visual material and conceptual strategies” (313).
The concept that the photograph is an “unmediated and objective recording process” coupled with the idea that, in this project, I am looking to mediate the recording process of the photograph and make it subjective (313).
“The photograph functions as a sociological text, as evidence” (of what?) (313).
The archive as an “instrument of engineered spectacle” (314).
The concept of my creating a re-reading of the archive by “self-framing, reobjectification, self-staging, refetishization, and reversal” (314).