But it got me thinking about the random nature of what is saved and what is lost, and how creative we are in confronting the relentless effects of time. Establishing an archive, or even thinking that some category of material object deserves to be shielded from its eventual demise, is to reroute those things away from their assignment as discards to a different kind of categorization. Instead of forgotten cast-offs, they become cherished traces. Deciding that anything deserves an archive is kind of like the impulse of the villagers in the movie ‘Woman in the Dunes,’ about a community that wages a daily struggle against the vast, drifting sands that would otherwise overwhelm and obliterate it.
First there were the general materials of the class. Every example we studied came from Weaver’s extensive collection, which ranges across centuries and continents. He has put it together over the years by visiting countless flea markets and eBay vendors. In other words, he diverted each piece from its transformation into a discard, and in doing so, he changed its meaning, value, and use.
The inevitability of deterioration was also a subtheme. Each image was made of ephemeral materials – things like paper, gelatin, silver, potassium. We learned in the workshop that the two biggest threats to photographs are temperature and relative humidity. No surprise there. Unless extraordinary measures are taken, pictures have a relatively short life – a few years for the most fragile, a few decades for some others, and maybe a couple of centuries for the most durable. In the grand scheme of human history, that’s not much time.
Archives meant to house and conserve photographic materials and other kinds of records – paper-based documents, films and videos, maps, and even things like tools and uniforms – exist specifically to slow the disintegration that is visited upon all these objects. It’s the same impulse that creates grand monuments and architecture. It proclaims the presence and the importance of those whose work or history are reflected in whatever is collected, set aside, and cared for. It links the past with the present, and lets us hope that perhaps some of our own material traces will outlive us, will survive the ineluctable dynamics of decay and dissolution.
It is a deeply human impulse, poignant and hope-filled. Will it succeed? Will any archive truly endure? Only time will tell.