Hi, I'm Anna McNally, an archivist and researcher.
This month I’ve been mostly thinking about personal papers, the archives of individuals. I’m teaching a class on the topic later this month, as well as working with a personal archive three days a week. It’s an area I’ve only recently returned to after over a decade of working with institutional records, and one that I’m approaching with more of a critical eye than last time around.
Watching: Barbara Ess - Archives Zoom discussion White Columns YouTube Channel
Working with someone’s personal archive is an intimate and at times uncanny experience. You spend eight hours a day rooting round in the digital and physical remainders of someone’s life, trying to figure out how best to represent them, accurately and succinctly, for the research community. When I worked with personal papers at the start of my career, the creators of the archives I was cataloguing had usually died 30+ years previously. With an increasing awareness of archives across the arts, that time-frame has since decreased significantly. I’m now working with the papers of someone who died 4 years ago ; and this zoom discussion relates to Barbara Ess, who passed in 2021.
Barbara Ess was a photographer, educator, musician and editor whose life and work embraced many different media and forms of self-expression. New York gallery White Columns recently held an exhibition of material from her archives which, although I wasn’t able to see in person, is documented on the gallery’s website. The website also includes an essay by her archivist Kirby Gookin, in which he describes the archive evocatively as “a silent cacophony of information that reflects the record of a life that is materially fixed but never complete”.
The discussion video that I’ve linked to brings together seven of Barbara’s colleagues, friends and students, covering different activities and time periods of her life, to present an affectionate patchwork portrait of her as an individual. I only knew a little about her work prior to watching this discussion, and what struck me while watching was how similar it felt to the process of those early first days of working with a collection of personal papers. Usually when you start working on an archive there is no comprehensive biography of the individual for you to refer to - that will be written once you have completed your work - and so you’re trying to piece together a story from the fragments that you’re reading. Often this will include aspects of the individual’s life that were less well-documented , and information that challenges the received narrative.
The section of the video that stuck with me the most is a moving tribute by Leor Miller (starts at 31 minutes), who had been a student of Barbara’s. Leor reads a prompt that Barbara gave to the students in her Photography class: “What is the self? Can the self be represented? Can the self be known? How can we know and represent ourselves in others?”. [punctuation my own]
These are questions that I think it’s worth keeping in mind while both cataloguing and researching personal papers. Archival theory is designed for business and institutional papers and applied to personal papers with more or less success. Unlike organisations, individuals don’t have clear separation between aspects of their life. During the archival process decisions have to be made which affect the representation of the individual by their own papers. I’ve been looking back at collections I catalogued 20 years ago, fresh out of archive school, and at times I can see that I allowed the archival theory to overwhelm the individual. There are definitely things I would do differently today.
Reading: A Genealogy of Distant Reading by Ted Underwood [Open Access, peer-reviewed]
I came to this 2017 essay via the recently published Distant Reading Two Decades On: Reflections on the Digital Turn in the Study of Literature [Open Access]. While Distant Reading Two Decades On focuses on digital humanities approaches to studying large-scale text corpus, Underwood’s A Genealogy of Distant Reading interrogates Distant Reading as a mode of enquiry separate from any technology that might underpin it. This makes it easier to see the applicability to the hybrid (digital and physical) archives that most of us are still managing.
One of the central ideas of Distant Reading, as Underwood construes it (like most terms in academia, the definition is hotly contested), is “framing historical inquiry as an experiment, using hypotheses and samples (of texts or other social evidence) that are defined before the writer settles on a conclusion”. Given the potential scope and scale of literary works to be drawn upon, a literary scholar could be tempted to cherry-pick examples to support their argument; by defining the sample in advance, literary historians can “minimize misleading confirmations”.
As archivists our work is implicitly bound by a defined sample - the body of records that have been created and accumulated as the result of an organic process reflecting the functions of the creator - aka the archival fonds. As discussed above in relation to Barbara Ess, our knowledge often comes almost exclusively from within the papers that we’re processing. Researchers can move between different repositories to join the dots but an archivist stays intellectually, and usually physically, rooted in one collection.
One way of looking at the cataloguing process then would be as an experiment on the archival fonds as a predefined sample, with the arrangement of the papers as the conclusion. An experiment might seem an unusual way of describing an archivist’s work (even though we talk about archival science), but there’s often more trial and error in the process that we would admit. I was recently re-reading Athanasios Velios’ 2011 article on the John Latham Archive (Open Access version) in which he describes (section 4.2) trying out various arrangements for the archive: “these concepts were soon contradicting each other and consistently collapsing any content structure tested”. While Velios was upfront about the other possibilities he tried for the arrangement, usually these aren’t recorded; the System of Arrangement field is used to describe the structure that the archivist finally settled upon, not the alternatives that were considered and discarded.
Underwood raises the issue of whether Distant Reading can truly be described as an experiment because “[we] cannot intervene in the past and then ask whether it changed as our hypothesis predicted.” However as archivists we could be said to be *literally* intervening in the past. If we explicitly framed our cataloguing in this way, as an experiment, what would we change? Would it alter what we recorded about the process or how we judge what success looks like?
Exhibition: Lutz Bacher: AYE! at Raven Row, London, UK [closes 17 December 2023]
This show of work by Lutz Bacher at Raven Row is not archival in the same way as the Constance DeJong exhibition I wrote about last month. However the title - AYE! - derives from a post-it note in Bacher’s archive, reproduced on the cover of the gallery booklet. Possibly relating to her work Are You Experienced? (1992), the curator Anthony Huberman describes AYE! as “an exclamation, an affirmation, a sound, a noise, a feeling, or perhaps a spell”.
The exhibition is based around the idea of song and voice. Many of the works feature short loops, where the repetition creates a hypnotic tension between time moving forward and standing still. There are references to real world events - the funeral of Princess Diana, Hurricane Sandy - that were contemporary when the works were made but are now gradually slipping into the past.
Bacher designated her archive itself as an artwork titled The Betty Center (not on display as part of the Raven Row exhibition) . The Betty Center is a neatly organised collection of folders and boxes (you can see a photo here) for each work. In the exhibition booklet Huberman writes of one binder in the archive where he found Bacher’s reflection on conversations they’d had together as they started planning this exhibition, before her death in 2019. Alongside are materials she had gathered together - a novel, a description of a scene from a film, notes on duets. There’s a sense of Huberman feeling that the archive allows him to continue those conversations and enables Bacher to speak in reply.
Bonus track: Carlos Niño & Friends -Youwillgetthroughthis with Koto (with Jesse Peterson) [Bandcamp link]
Carlos Niño describes himself as a communicator and the fantastic Carlos Niño & Friends albums are generous explorations of sound produced by a network of talented musicians. It’s a delight to see any kind of art project that consciously celebrates collaboration and these dreamy soundscapes will convince you it’s not actually raining outside, and that your daylight lamp is actually the gentle morning sun.
Thank you for joining me for this fourth issue, and particularly to Dan for alerting me to the White Columns recording. If you have any recommendations for materials you think I might enjoy, please get in touch - links to my email and social media are on my website - I’m also on Bluesky as @annamcnally.bsky.social
Anna