Reconsider: Three for a dollar

The last Reconsider post discussed the unease with which the intervention displays non-art photography within a museum space given the medium’s historically problematic reception within art institutions. It did not however discuss photography in a broad sense, as a popular medium that has structured our understanding of history, others and ourselves, or photography as a ritualized mode of understanding in modern society. This is after all a vital facet of the intervention: that depicting the American landscape was radically altered through the photographic image—that the ability to capture, reproduce or purchase an image with considerable ease initiated a new understanding of the land in American society, one alternate to but equally embedded within the visual language of an early moment, being painting. In considering the scope of the “image-world” photography produced (here specifically related to the American landscape and the West), the twenty-one images displayed in Reconsider are not significant in themselves, through there are certainly captivating photographs. What I am interested in is the picture as examples of the vast amount of photographic images produced of the West at the turn of the century, many of which are now lost. These twenty-one images, produced for commercial, tourist or sentimental reasons, were saved and are the fragments of cultural production that have survived.

Written on back: "32"

Still, little is known of each image specifically: other than what is scribbled on the back, and a general history of the collection in which the photographs were amassed, there is little “knowledge” related to these images, unlike the knowledge that is built up around art objects. We can “read” the information within the image, however that only goes so far. Thus, at least for me, there is an aura of mystery around these photographs—always something within that is perplexing, wondrous, unattainable, yet still close—which is certainly related to my own projection onto the past. Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography (1973): “It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia.” Nostalgia in the widest sense: as something pervasive within cultural consciousness—a general fascination with the past and its loss.

 Written on back: “I should of took the turn out of my mouth. The other guy is Penn. He looks like Dick Dal Pozzo don’t you think.”

Here are seven pictures. They are not shown in the intervention. I purchased the images from a vendor at a flea market held in the parking lot of Fairfax High School who has amassed many boxes of unsorted photographs and sells them image by image, three for a dollar. The pictures are the left-overs of photography democratized (thank you Kodak!), images that once had personal significance but have lost their worldly connections. It is safe to assume these images once had sentimental meaning, but their possessor lost or gave up the memory, or at least its object. I have “saved” them, at least for a while.

Written on back: "Grandma Beelie"

Written on back: “April 7, 1946 / Foggia, Italy / Didn’t come out so hi.”

I’m not entirely sure what it means to possess sentimental images that you hold no sentiment to. It’s almost perverse: to be enamored with objects you know were endowed with meaning yet you cannot assess it. Thus, it is with both a peculiar fascination and unease that I make these images public. They were (are?) after all personal objects. It’s a bizarre act of exhibitionism to show them—to make them public—yet this is what the intervention does in a way. These pictures simply didn’t end up an archive. I’m not certain how I would/will feel if/when my own personal photographs are dumped at a flea market and purchased one-by-one by strangers. Of course this assumes I print out my pictures, which most people don’t anymore. And how would I feel about having my image exhibited as an anonymous object? Miss Loomis, seen standing on Glacier Point, was someone after all. And so is/was Kelly, shown here on Halloween in 1975.

 Written on back: “Kelly / Halloween / 1975”

Even if Reconsider seeks to present non-art objects in order to reinterpret works of art, it partly works only because the archival images presented have lost a facet of their original meaning, the personal, and have been posited to hold something greater, something about America or the West or continental expansion. They hold “history.” These seven pictures are abandon things. I am not really sure what to make of them, yet they are still interesting to me, simply as images in themselves. Please let me know if you recognize anyone.

-David Evans Frantz