Isn’t it great the way a good novel and a stimulating conversation can trigger a new stream of thought…?
On Saturday I read Oracle Night by Paul Auster, and today I was talking to Utako about it at the studio. What was surfacing in my mind was an eccentric character from the book within the book, “Ed Victory” who keeps what he calls “The Bureau of Historical Preservation”. It’s his personal archive of thousands of telephone books, stored in row upon row of gray metal bookshelves in an underground bunker. Ed employs Nick Bowen to reorganise his system, because halfway through he realises that he should change it from geographic and spatial to chronological:
“Atlanta, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, the five boroughs of New York, Philadelphia, St Louis, San Francisco, Seattle – every American metropolis is on hand, along with dozens of smaller cities, rural counties in Alabama, suburban towns in Connecticut, and unincorporated territories in Maine. But America isn’t the end of it. Four of the twenty-four double backed rows of towering metal bookcases are given over to cities and towns in foreign countries. These archives aren’t as thorough or exhaustive as their domestic counterparts, but in addition to Canada and Mexico, most nations from western and eastern Europe are represented: London, Madrid, Stockholm, Paris, Munich, Prague, Budapest. To his astonishment, Nick sees that Ed has even managed to acquire a Warsaw phone directory from 1937/38: Spis Abonentów Warszawskiej Sieci TELEFONÓW. As Nick fights the temptation to pull it off the shelf, it occurs to him that nearly every Jewish person listed in that book is long dead – murdered before Ed’s collection was ever started.” p89-90
The telephone books are a material record of our world: “The names of the living and the dead.” They reveal the most mundane as well as the most horrific events of history through the changes, disappearances and omissions of names, but they are also a document of the present. Perhaps they are a record with the most equality; everyone is reduced to a name and a number, yet when all these names are collected together they take on a universal magnitude. I wonder how the significance of the archive would change in the rearranging of his ordering system? How would the picture differ when the books are chronological?
There seems to be something inherently human about the organisation of things, about archives. It’s a way of placing a frame and a structure over the chaos of the world, so that it makes sense to us, so that we can see things more clearly, and create meaning and understanding. Could one say that this is what art does at its most basic level? To frame some part of the world, to remove it from the background blur and invest it with some kind of value (superfluous to need)?
Anyway, reading about the telephone books made me think about the archiving and ordering of my collection of photographs. Looking through some photos the other day, I realised that mostly, when taken in isolation, they were mundane or somehow obscure and unintelligible, but that they take on greater significance when they are accumulated, sorted, rearranged and ordered. It’s like each photo has a small significance that isn’t apparent until they are all brought together and amass a greater meaning. (Utako related this to the Japanese tea ceremony – just drinking tea has no real importance, but when you collect all the small gestures, customs and habits surrounding the drinking of tea, it takes on a greater meaning, and becomes a tea ceremony.) Or sometimes when I’ve grouped and edited the images, they have gained meaning through their relationships within the group. For example, with the Snowsightings book, multiple photos of white stuff on the street together form the meaning ‘snow’.
So there are two different things at play – where the small inherent meaning of the photo becomes amplified through the repetitions in a group (e.g. Light Volumes) or where the meaning is established through the relationships and differences formed within the group. Both make something visible through accumulation, repetition and difference.
It’s interesting to think of the book as a medium for collections and archives. The way it compresses all this material into a solid object, lending the immaterial materiality. A volume. And the way it creates duration in the sequence and action of turning pages…
I have been thinking about making a big “overview” book, which contains every photo I’ve taken in the last two years. So far most of these images are languishing on my hard drive and only the ones that fit into the structure I’ve imposed on them (like ‘snow’) become visible. A lot of what my work consists of is in the practice of recording and through the slow gathering of material over time. I’m not looking for something spectacular, or even anything in particular. I’m interested in opening up a space for what is already there to become more visible, to make a frame for a part of the world (albeit a flexible and elastic one).
Of course an overview book still involves an imposed framework, it’s just a question of which framework. What significance would the images take on if I just ordered them chronologically?
Or if I order them by subject matter?
Angle?
Time of day?
Activity?
Materiality?
Or any other framework? Which one is right? Could I do them all? There is always something unknown which emerges from each structure, no matter how planned out it is.
I said to Utako that the selection for an overview book would be different (from the other selections I’ve made.) It would be more equal and generous, more like a telephone book, without hierarchy.
She said, what about a huge book, as big as the street, to turn each page would be like lifting the pavement (big arm gesture); it would make these openings in the world more tangible.
Like a huge telephone book?
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