Picturing the archive: Photography, families and collections
Installation view of 'Picturing the archive'
Currently on display | Queensland Art Gallery
Since the mid nineteenth century, photography has been a key archival tool, used for historical and social records that range from medicine and scientific research to criminal investigation. Photography now shapes how we see the world around us.
Many technical advances were made throughout the nineteenth century. In 1884, George Eastman pioneered film to replace glass plates, leading to the technology used by cameras for most of the twentieth century. In 1990, Kodak unveiled the DCS 100 – the first commercially available digital camera, although its initial high cost precluded uses other than for photojournalism and professional photography. Digital point-and-shoot cameras now prevail for both professionals and amateurs, and the camera function in mobile telephones is increasingly used, with new ways of capturing the world in images continuing to develop.
This display shows the advances of photographic technology and the ways in which these have changed how the lives and loves of our families and friends are recorded.
While photographers adopt the latest innovations, many continue to use earlier methods. Many artists allude to photography’s archival role, from Vivan Sundaram’s account of his family in India and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century to Martha Rosler’s witty videos of the 1970s, shown in the screening rooms. Photography has also recorded family life in Queensland, with Rose Simmonds in the 1930s and Ruth Maddison in the 1970s; while Indigenous artists Tracey Moffatt, Destiny Deacon and Fiona Foley have explored photographic archives to illuminate complex issues of identity and race.
What unites these disparate works is the artists’ sensitivity to the various ways archives may be used. They suggest that, while photography offers to record a family or an art collection, archives are always open to interpretation.
