The Archive Of Lost Context attempts to expose the invisible — often deliberately obscured — organizational logic behind the construction and organization of archives by applying their logic to a private collection of photographs.

These are photographs selected from a family’s unorganized personal collection because of the unknown information about the photographs: the subject or time of the photo, the person responsible for taking it, or the motivations for its preservation. Because the selected photos range from the 1960s to the late 1990s, they play with the short-term nature of human memory: photos from as late as 1994 are presented without the requisite information to understand their context.

The interest in this collection is in the “cards” for each image (in this format, the posts associated with each image): their labeling is erratic because of the different types of information available for each object. The cards are also speculative: they draw attention to the subjectivity involved in their own creation. In interrogating the material as thoroughly as they summarize it, these labels no longer privilege the “known” information over the unknown, and the coexistence of different types of information draws viewers to think about the nature of knowledge.

The “call numbers” in the archive were determined by a personal logic. This logic will be completely opaque to other viewers/researchers (although I will say here that factors included the suspected photographer, the subject type of the poem, its location relative to other selected items, and my relative certainty about each of the previous factors.) This in some respects highlights the initially difficult internal logic of an individual archive — with its own private oddities, systems, and rules — but ultimately reclaims this “public” presentation of material as a personal collection.

The archive’s header quotes Virgil’s Aeneid: it will please us someday, perhaps, to remember even this. If an archivist’s goal in the digital age tends towards totality — or at least a broad swath — of preservation, the realm of personal memory is still one organized by whim, nostalgia, and inevitably loss. We preserve objects from our family history despite our shrinking contexts for the items; the sense of gradual loss surrounding them is part, ironically, of what gives them value.

 Archive of Lost Context

Some technical notes on this archive’s form:
–My decision to locate this archive digitally, and therefore semi-publically, resulted in the elision of most (full) names. Instead, I tended to describe people relationally: “my godmother,” “my grandmother.” While originally this was a presentation concern, the rather satisfactory effect of it is that the personal investment of the archivist (that’s me!) is highlighted.
–A larger “finding aid” was intended but turned out to be difficult in digital format, although I had a rough start on it in analog form. This is due to nothing more interesting than “technical limitations (in this case, skill gaps) prevent the adoption of certain features in an archive.” jQuery and WordPress is hard.