DICK NIXON BLINKING

03Dec11

I will now tell you why I think photo archives are important, and why I am SUPER STOKED as a photographer/artist/visual/thinking person to work in a photo archive.

Let’s look at some things.

These are kind of boring, right? Kind of embarrassing? I have been thinking about this, how there are some really banal things that just become white noise. Like, a pretty picture of a sunset might as well be nothing. Desktop background. This discredits the fact that someone took that picture, and they probably took several dozen exposures of crap (which may or may not be more interesting.). Not that this makes that kind of photography any more interesting.

So the archive leaves this sort of thing open, in theory, in that for every picture of, say, Susan Lucci looking composed, there is a whole mess of pictures of her with her eyes half open, looking like a demon. That’s important. It’s like how Twitter reveals that celebrities can’t spell (which does not matter in 2011, ok).

I will not talk about the problems with archives. Instead, I leave you with this and the advice to never Google “whale tale” without specifying a species of whale.

Filed under: archives, art, the internet   |  Leave a Comment