With every move and country I’ve visited, there was always the photographic evidence to prove that it actually happened. It’s a bit of a miracle that in this day and age we’ve moved toward a digital repository format that allowed for storage options to go beyond the binder look book. You know – those heavy books with 35mm photographs that you waited at WalMart for an hour to develop. Then you went home, sat in a circle with family members, and laughed and cringed at each succeeding photo. Each and every photograph was different. This meant that each time there was a different person behind the lens. It’d be a lie to deny there’s more control for curation and personal photography, but the very act of curation could lay in the process of placing physical pieces in their own way in a photo album, away from the silos of random folders where digitally compressed pixels exist beyond the control of our fingertips.
There’s no denying that digital management has allowed for space storage in the physical space, considering many archives suffer from minimal space. Lack of space forces archivists and managers to consider the options to open up room. There are offsite storages, but these could often be costly and impersonal. There are also possibilities to negotiate space allotment to maximize archival efforts in home institutions, but territory is human nature and humans are less willing to budge to justify the storage of old paper. With the possibility of digital asset management systems, there’s an all-in-one center where the archivist serves as the controller. But what happens once a storage reaches its limit? What happens when the limits of an archivist doesn’t meet the qualifications of managing thousands of digital files? It was simple to drive home from the store after retrieving photographs, opening up a fresh new binder, and placing photographs according to our gut feeling. No technical specifications and storage limits triggering that all too familiar notification that “You are running out of space.” All we had was just our psychological tabula rasa, our gut feeling, and the motivation to run wild on the blank canvas.
And once you completed a binder, you had to buy a new one. Every book had its limits, its end. The word limit defines the finite nature of anything or anyone in particular. For an archive to go beyond the limitations of space, skillset, and approach all lies in the “affect,” or the psychology, approach, bias, or feeling (Marika Cifor and Anne Gilliland in “Affect and the archive, archives and their affects: an introduction to the special issue,” 2015). What direction does the archives goes when it is took stuck in the past? Where does the future lie if the road to get there is too abstract.
For digital collections, it’d be a disservice to not consider the implications of affect. There are countless illuminations, tabs, and folders on the screens in front of us to begin with, added with the layers of COVID-19 remote work, the hyperawareness of the violence underneath it all (violence against Black people, Asian people, Non-binary, Elder, [need I continue?]), and the misinformation of the sprawling facets of the global world and the intersecting dialogues of climate, aid, human rights. Whether any of this makes any sense, one thing is for sure: there’s a psychoanalytic element to this work that would have an effect on any practitioner, myself included. And highlighting the important conversations keep us connected.
Yet, we continue to take pictures. We take screen shots. Then our phones bark at us, then we unload our data onto the computer, take barking orders from the computer, rinse and repeat. If by some miracle, we find the pocket of time to reflect and understand what exactly is in front of us. Then we arrange, describe, duplicate, store, preserve, and disseminate – hoping that at least five years down the line someone gets what we are doing. At least the photographs make us remember that things or events have happened and give a visual.
Perhaps this is centering, but I think the divide between the obligations of digital work and the digital world, which seems to have become our physical reality as we patiently await for the world to retrace any semblance of normalcy, play a major factor in managing digital collections. There’s room to explore the workflow, data life cycle, identify stakeholders, and produce deliverables, but what does it matter when we start realizing just how much the physical world has changed under our watch. You ever take a picture of one thing, waited years later, then took another photograph of the same thing – just to see how much has changed? Society is evolving, and it’s important in this present moment to consider how. How does an archivist go about documenting this change? Much of our practice is preserving the past, but how do we adjust to capture history as it unfolds, especially when it’s happening at a rapid pace?
Returning to this present moment, maybe the clearest thing I can surmise from this mental dump is that it’s always key to be kind to one’s self. The best we can do is remain present, grounded, and wait for the photo to develop.
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