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.
