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Archaeology Now
As in my previous projects, circumstance and chance is essential to my practice. In the line of street and documentary photography I use the camera as a way of making sense of what surrounds me. Essentially, it is a tool that I carry within me and choose to use in moments that need clarification or a greater insight.
The focus of Archaeology Now is on the remnants of the former inhabitants of 43 Gerrard Road in Islington. After their eviction and gaining access to the apartment, the act of photographing allowed a more detailed and prolonged observation of a micro-culture that only existed at that time and place through the unity of its parts, which are now separate, and would have disappeared if not for my involvement.
The process of photographing became that of taking and keeping. In this case, images stand in for objects and the photographic objects themselves (the family photographs). Through representation, they are stripped of their function, which Marianne Hirsch argues is to be the “primary instrument of self-knowledge and representation—family memory continued and perpetuated”. Instead, these images of memories now function in order for the spectator, the “archaeologist”, to create a narrative and meaning that is most likely to be different than their original one, but not less true.
The photographs of porcelain statuettes, glass flowers or oil bottles, represent cultural items of the subjects and stress the perception of Chinese culture and its truisms. In this line, the deterioration that the family photographs suffer in the process of re-presenting them leaves only the basic physiognomies of the subjects recognizable, preserving their ethnical specificity but revealing the multicultural characteristics. It is a play between a clichéd perception and an emic perspective on cultural expansion.
In this respect, the camera becomes the tool that allows us to interpret and understand the fast-paced cultural changes currently occurring in the Middle East and the Far East. Thus, the camera buries and the photographer rediscovers in a post-modern archaeological act that occurs almost simultaneously.
This simultaneity destroys the conception of time as linear, as we have conceived it so far. Time begins to look more like a spider-web than a thread, and this can be seen in post-modern culture, where an overlapping and transposition of cultures and historical periods occur on a global scale.
Tomas Hein
Stephen Shore - Uncommon Places
