Image Archives in Practice

This course receives credit under Topics in Photo
History.
Open to Art School BFA 3 and above. This course
will be open to students at other year levels,
and in other Schools, by Permission of
Instructor.

When artists, or photographers approach an
archive, we are concerned with two activites:
working with existing archives for research or
inspiration, and making work that will itself be
archived. Both of these activities can become
complicated as the archive has established an
orgaization that often hinders a more complex
dealing with images. We will start with the
assumption that the archive is not only a place
of storage but also a place of production, where
our relation to the past is materialised and
where our present writes itself into the future;
thus, that the archive can be understood as a
place of negotiation and writing. Along the
reading of seminal texts on the topic, we will
look at photographic and artistic works that
challenge the notion of the archive and propose a
different dealing with it.