Photo Archive

(Photo of Death Valley from the National Archives. Photos by US Geological Survey.)

I've been reading and listening to talks about archives lately. There is attention, in academic study, to expanding the historical "archive" to include the people not included in the curation of history. 

(I'm using archive metaphorically here. If you want a good article about defining "archive" in library science and in Digital Humanities, read this blog post on the Library of Congress website.) 

I also watched/participated in a Zoom poetry reading and talk hosted by Natalie Diaz, with Joy Harjo and Natasha Trethewey (I wish there was a recording of this available online, but I haven't found one yet. Soon, I hope.) In the question and answer time, and I'm sorry I don't remember the question, Natasha Trethewey was talking about writing during the pandemic and emphasized how important it was that people document their experiences now, while they are happening, so that we have them for historical record. 

So, as part of researching and thinking about archives generally--I asked that students take three photos a day for a week, so that we could create our own image archive. I was influenced firstly by the poets, who are excellent at saving slivers of daily life, and secondly by a map archive of WPA photographs that I now can't find. Problems of the internet. There are heaps of photo archives through the national Archive though, so go look through that. If I stumble into the archive I was thinking of, or if one of the students remembers where we found it, I'll post that link too. I didn't give specific guidelines, primarily because I was more interested in seeing what everyone wanted to photograph. 

We now have a collection of photos, and are working on tagging them and placing them in blogs. The tags are a reflection of the class contributions, with a few additions from me. The students will post in their own blogs, and I'll create a page to host links to those blogs. They can tell you themselves something of their thinking for this process:  whether they already took photos, how they decided when and what to photograph, and what their thoughts were at the end of the week, when they looked back over the images. 

After we get all of that in order, everyone will reflect on what we think about archives.