The Lives of Images, Vol. 3: Archives, Histories, and Memory
The Lives of Images, edited by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, is a set of contemporary thematic readers designed for educators, students, practicing photographers, and others interested in the ways images function within a wider set of cultural practices. The series tracks the many movements and 'lives' of images – their tendency to accumulate, circulate, and transform through different geographies, cultures, processes, institutions, states, uses, and times.
Volume 3 in this series, Archives, Histories, and Memory, addresses the ways repositories of images are complexly bound up with the formation of histories, the perceptual limits of the photograph, the exercise of state power, and with subaltern practices of countermemory. The reemergence of the figure, subject, and methods of the archive in contemporary twenty-first-century artistic practices is considered, as are non-art engagements with archival production in the formation of counter-hegemonic histories, whether in the heat of revolutionary struggle or as recuperative practice for marginalised subjects. Questions of imperialism’s influence over archival practices and the contested state of the image and the document recur in varying contexts. Taken together, the essays in this volume probe what remains and persists through strategies of preservation, what the politics of preservation accommodate and disavow, what exceeds inscription within the photograph but persists as a ghosting of the image (or the archive), and what the limits of artistic strategies centered in the archive might tell us of our present moment.
Contributions by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Lara Baladi, Claire Bishop, Ann Cvetkovich, Saidiya Hartman, Marianne Hirsch, Julietta Singh, Katrina Sluis, John Tagg, and Jalal Toufic
Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa is a photographer, writer, and graduate director of the photography MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. He is the author of a book of selected essays, Dark Mirrors (2021); and his most recent photographic publication, Hiding in Plain Sight (coauthored with fellow artist Ben Alper), was published by the Harun Farocki Institute in summer 2020. His work was recently exhibited at the International Center of Photography, New York, and in the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie, Mannheim, Germany. He has contributed essays to catalogues and monographs by Rosalind Fox Solomon, George Georgiou, Paul Graham, Steve McQueen, and Vanessa Winship. Wolukau-Wanambwa has guest edited The Photobook Review and written for Aperture, FOAM, and for both the Barbican and the Photographers' Gallery, London. He was an artist-in-residence at Light Work, Syracuse, New York, in 2015.
Filipa César is an artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. She bridges contemporary and historical discourses in her films, video work, writing, and publications. Since 2011, César has been researching the origins of cinema of the African liberation movement in Guinea-Bissau as a laboratory of resistance to colonising epistemologies. She premiered her award-winning first feature-length essay-film, Spell Reel, at the Berlinale 2017, and her film Quantum Creole was shown at the Berlinale 2020. Her work has been exhibited and screened widely, including at Jeu de Paume, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; São Paulo Biennial; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tate Modern, London.
Arwed Messmer began his career as an urban documentary photographer. Since 2006, he has worked predominantly with image collections in archives with a focus on postwar German history, including East Berlin of the 1950s, the early years of the Berlin Wall, and the Stasi archives. He explores and analyzes strategies of visualisation to create new ways of reading images. In 2019, his project RAF: No Evidence (2017) was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Other titles by Messmer include Berlin, 1966-70 (2018) and Zelle/Cell (2016).
