PROJECT ROOM B

ALLEN FRAME’s THESIS CLASS

FEATURING WORK BY:

Ava Campana, Tyler Frigge, Eonnam Kim, Anna King, Yuetong Lu, Samantha Lussos, Andy Maticorena Kajie, Meghan Moffat, Natalia Ormeño, Will Premru, Alexis Salas, Mark Sorace, Jenna Thomas, Leiya Wang, Xuelun Yu, Christopher Zarcadoolas

STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE:

Yuetong Lu

Working with Archives

I walked into my grandmother’s house just as she was about to throw away all her medium-format negatives of the pictures she took of her children and their friends during the 1930s. Her family albums contained some of the images, but nobody had looked at them for years, so she couldn’t imagine who would be interested in the negatives. They were a treasure to me, and I pored over them at first, overwhelmed by their richness. She had stopped photographing when her children became college-age. She had two hobbies: sewing and gardening. She made my sister’s clothes, as she had made my mother’s. In fact, her portraits of my mother, you might say, were also a documentation of her sewing. She took me to a nursery when I was in the 6th grade and bought plants and helped me start a garden (I was more interested in growing flowers than vegetables). She could be found in the Mississippi mornings working in her garden, before it got too hot.  

When I met the artist Darrel Ellis, whose work is going through an important rediscovery, one thing we had in common was inheriting a family photo archive. I had my grandmother’s and he had just been given his father’s. Thomas Ellis, his father, had had his own portrait studio in the Bronx in the late 40s, early 50s, but he had then become a postal clerk. He was murdered by the police just a few months before Darrel was born in 1958. Darrel was 22 when he discovered his father’s archive, and he went on to produce during the next 11 years a body of work based on that archive, rephotographing his father’s photographs and using those compositions to produce not just conceptual photographs but paintings, drawings, and prints as well. From my grandmother’s work, on the other hand, I made slides of some of the prints and projected them in an experimental theater piece about the women in my family, then also made prints and showed them in an exhibition. That was in the late 80s, and now, years later, I’m working on a large wall piece that will incorporate many of them.

The abundant possibilities of an archive can be daunting. I encourage students to jump in anywhere and work on little pieces at a time. Gradually, they coalesce, and the meaning becomes clearer. In our class, three students are working from family archives. Samantha Lussos discovered her grandfather’s negatives and is particularly interested in his pictures of her grandmother, with whom she was very close. She works in the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library, and whenever she gets a chance, she ducks into the Picture Collection to study images from the past. Will Premru, who has spent a lot of time perusing the Library of Congress’s digital archive and is particularly interested in the Farm Security Administration photographers of the 1930s, has created a book interweaving his father’s images with his own, of the same country lodge and its surroundings where they have both gone with friends to fish and hunt over the years. 

Yuetong Lu has taken photos made by her mother before she was married, scanned them, added some of her own, and made an evocative video from them, creating atmospheric effects through sound and animation. She has also asked A.I. to write a poem about them. Her collaboration with her mother’s work started when she sent her mother a camera and asked her to finish shooting the roll inside that Yuetong herself had started. Since the advent of digital photography, her mother feels that she cannot find the personal voice she once had years before with film. She has sent Yuetong her earlier negatives to scan.  Among them are dreamy images from a trip made near Lake Lugu. There are also snowy vistas of the countryside from her honeymoon. 

Andy Maticorena Kajie also collects things—memorabilia and objects to use in his work. He takes his own photographs and subjects them to chemical processes that deteriorate them. It’s not an archive in the usual sense, but he both finds and creates materials with which to play. Like Andy, Anna King looks at their ongoing work as a resource to revisit later and repurpose, so that everything is fluid, nothing is finished. It’s a good way to avoid the dispiriting sense of finality that comes with ending a project.

“Everything is an archive,” says Samantha, who is now appropriating religious imagery and silk screening it onto clothes. In our last class we staged an impromptu fashion show of her new designs, modeled by some of the students. She still makes her own photographs, though, because as she says, “We need images of the present in order to have an archive of this time in the future.”

Ava Campana says she is photographing herself as characters, sometimes to create “a snapshot of a past life,” and other times to comment on the present. She doesn’t think of it as working from an archive, but she is conscious of the work’s value as a preservation of experience, and she is attuned to the physicality of her performative embodiment of past and present styles and attitude.

Bodies of work are not necessarily intended as archives, but for photographers, especially, they tend to become archives over time, sometimes having value for unexpected reasons—historical value rather than aesthetic value, for instance. Understanding this in advance should encourage us to preserve our work carefully. I confess that I’m still chasing down negatives with every project.

—Allen Frame