I am currently cataloging a collection of approximately 600 35mm slides, made by an amateur photographer during the 1970s and 1980s. The extent of the original archive is unknown. Some of the slides are titled; the remainder are identified through a numerical system whose logic I am continuing to investigate.
The photographer’s name survives on some of the original slide containers, but little else is currently known about him or the circumstances in which the photographs were made. The collection appears to have entered the secondary market following the dispersal of a domestic archive.
I am interested in the traces of a particular way of looking: the subjects repeatedly photographed, the occasional acts of naming, the numbering and ordering of images, and the gaps and absences within the collection. Alongside this, I am developing my own provisional systems of classification and selection, while wondering whether the photographer’s numerical system might itself encode a private taxonomy – a grammar of looking whose logic has not survived with the images.
The titles have begun to form a separate body of material. Detached from their photographs, they become fragments of language: descriptions, suggestions, and perhaps the beginnings of narratives. An image may be absent while its title remains; a person may appear repeatedly without their identity being known.
The work is not an attempt to reconstruct the photographer or the complete archive, but to explore what can emerge from its fragments, repetitions and uncertainties. I am interested in the space between what these photographs record, what they might once have meant, and what can now be imagined from what remains.
