PHANTOMS - FANTÔMES

Back in 2014, when I opened the first box of cyanotypes I stumbled into what looked like a copy of Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas (1921-1929). The blueprints in the archives depicted a series of vitrines from the 1913 Exhibit of Photography, but the affinity to Warburg's image panels screamed out. I always thought of Warburg encountering Smillie - they were both in D.C. in the late 1890s, so it could well be that the men did meet.
Smillie created his own record, a bit like an atlas, one that also echoes and resonates with the atlas of images (and after-images) in this book. While some negatives from Smillie's collection were lost, many of the cyanotypes were reproduced as photographic prints, and some exist only in this form: all this made the possibility of tracing each object in the photograph difficult, if not impossible. Looking at the cyanotypes individually, my attention often switched between looking at each as a whole (as an object), or looking at what was in it (at the object being photographed). It is in this moment of zooming in or out, and of focusing the point of attention on either the object or the subject, that I impose myself on the back of the photographer, on the back of the archives, thus looking not just at the content of the collection but at the framework supporting it.
  Smille knowingly kept a logbook in which he registered all the images he took, listing the date, the image number and (I am only guessing here) the subject of the photograph. Unfortunately, the logbook is now lost. I have tried to fnd it on several of my site-visits, hoping it would miraculously appear. I tracked down Smille's log numbers in the digital database of these archives. Yet the collecton has not been fully digitized and so many of the cyanotypes are not regstered in the catalogue, while the institutonal captioning often remains shadowy. Missing image; missing caption; wrong caption; different title; same number; different image. This book is perhaps my attempt to reconstruction the lost logbook by attributing images to captons and moving through the gaps n the archive, looking at how achive, institution archving itself can never fully achieve the task. Every time I dare to name what is ine an image, I have lost. What remains are lists of captions, phantoms of captures and ghosts of other images.
  I intended to make a book of images with not just one beginnng and one end but with many of both. With this loop - like the one of the film reel or the rotating drum in the gun - finding its rhythm in the flippng through the pages, and the loopi in each iteration of an image and in the grain. I like the idea of the reader being lost in the noise, in those dots, in the materiality of the printed images, the same way that I often got lost scanning over images in the archves. Objects of attenton captured from afar or above in the eyes of the photographer, the sources of which remain unclear without the logbook to gude us.
One can then only associate. Let the form migrate from one spread to the other. Ghost images, ghost captures: like Warburg's Atlas, the more one looks at the images, the more one starts concentrating on the space between them. The succession of images functions like montage. It creates a film, one that takes place in the act of reading, and in the manipulation of the pages themselves. (I repeat:the cost of film was cheaper than ammuniton.) Thanks to the photocopy machine, quite similar to the one I encountered in the Smithsonan reading room, each image gained in grain and noise and, in a sense, in dpth. As the layers accumulated through this mechanical reproduction process, they acquired new narratives.
  Questions around what is being excluded or noted in the collection emrge as much as the conflicting tension between the desire of an official narrative (as written by the institution) and the many other unofficial narratives embedded within the image's own history. I should add. that I have never spent so much time stalking men, tracing them, or sneaking at their back - usually dedicating my practice instead to tracing the absence of women in official historiography.
The last full spread gives us the last reproduction of a cyanotype: an original print exposed from the negative, yet in reverse. It reads upside-downi "Clean (Glass of the vitrine)," bringing us back to the reverse/mirrored image in the daguerreotype apparatus that opens the book, looping back to the display cabinets at the beginning of the sequence. This reverse image is like looking through the lens before the photographer presses the shutter.
Shutters and stutters. I see the montage of the images being language, the noise in the images clumsily yet fiercely creating sentences:
Stuttering, also known as stammering and dysphemia, is a speech disorder in which the flow of speech is disrupted by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words, or phrases as well as involuntary silent pauses or blocks in which the person who stutters is unable to produce sounds.