Abstract
This project looks to explore the potential for archival curation and the creation of new metadata tags within archives to challenge reductive stereotypes prevalent in the current standards of image and photobook libraries. Focused on the AmberSide Collection, it looks to form new curated methods within archive CMS to allow for the exploration of dualities within social documentary photography. The project looks to critique rigid historically based archiving processes, such as the Dewey Decimal Classification system and CCO metadata guidelines, which often flatten complex identities and experiences into narrow categories. It is a response to individual subject/artist identity attributes being reduced to “spectacle” through the narrowing of artistic and content terms - “this is what it is to be working-class/a woman/LGBTQIA+/POC” - an approach which, while sometimes well intentioned, can lead to interpretations that view artists or the communities they document as objects of study or representatives of societal conditions. By reviewing archiving metadata terms it proposes a “subject-first” archival framework that prioritises the emotional depth and agency of the individuals documented. This is not an attempt to remove the “hard” facts documented, but a statement on how positivity and trauma do not exist in siloes. Two things can be true at once - social documentary can be art, and those living in poverty can laugh.
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
Archives, Metadata, Collections, Subject, Object, Agency, Representation, Authenticity, Truth, Marginalised
