Tuesday 12 February 2013

4 February 2013 - Stephen Clucas on 'Found Photographs'


ADVENTS: PHOTOGRAPHS FOUND IN THE STREET IN THE FIRST DECADE OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY.

 


Stephen Clucas introduced us to a selection of images drawn from a collection of found photographs and negatives which he assembled between 1 January 2000 and 31 December 2010. Taking his cue from Siegfried Kracauer’s claim that ‘The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch’s judgements about itself’ (Das Ornament der Masse, 1927), Clucas sees his collection of lost and discarded photographs as a ‘random archive’ of everyday life in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Clucas began by grounding his work in theories of the everyday, and particularly Georges Perec’s calls for an ‘endotic’ anthropology of the quotidian in l’Infraordinaire (1989) and the Congrès ordinaire de Banalyse – an annual conference dedicated to research on the banal – founded in 1982 by Pierre Bazantay and Yves Helias of the University of Nantes. He then showed a series of images from his collection, discussing such issues as the materiality of the images (abraded, damaged and sometimes deliberately cut or torn up), the ‘anachrony’ of the archive (he found images dating back to the 1950s and 1980s), the aesthetics of the abraded image, and the extent to which the collection proved to be an inadvertent historical testament to the decline of chemical photography.

The images included sexually explicit polaroids, negatives containing images of an Ethiopian orthodox baptism, an evangelical  prayer meeting, domestic and holiday snaps, and photographs of the war in Afghanistan found on a DVD in the streets of Islington. Clucas will be mounting an exhibition of the photographs in the Peltz Room, an exhibition space in Birkbeck’s 43 Gordon Square building, this December.