Archival addresses: photographies, practices, positionalities

Abstract

The articles in this special edition parallel, and in instances are extensions of, the papers, panel discussions and artists' presentations comprising the VIADUCT 2015 platform, hosted by the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD), University of Johannesburg, 18-20 March 2015. 1 Presenters engaged with the complexities of contemporary archival practices, and how these play out using lens-based and new media technologies (hereafter termed 'photographies'). In this edition, authors consider contemporary possibilities for, and practices of, addressing (primarily visual) archives; how these possibilities might impact on how archives are collated, disseminated, accessed and received; and what implications they may have for understanding the functions, meanings and significance of archives in diverse contexts. Although the edition is widely scoped, covering a broad range of contemporary addresses and multiple archival forms, it is not intended to provide a 'snapshot' of either. Rather, in highlighting a diversity of practices, it brings into view a (thin) sliver of archival addresses currently being undertaken, although not all the authors necessarily refer to them as such. Charles Merewether (2006: 10) notes that as 'the means by which historical knowledge and forms of remembrance are accumulated, stored, and recovered', the archive may be one of the defining characteristics of the modern era. While this edition's thematic is grounded in, and its conceptual framing draws on, the vast context of scholarly work done on the archive, 2 it is not considered as a discursive form in and of itself, but rather as a dialogical site of address through

Sex in the Archives: The Politics of Processing and Preserving Pornography in the Digital Age

“…Locating the relationships between the positionalities of archivists and archives users, as well as the archives', archivists', and archives users' "historical, political, geographic, social and cultural" contexts, allows us to determine and outline appropriate "processes of exchange." 42 Porn collectors amass materials according to their own tastes in a deeply personal act of consumption and compilation. Much like porn processors, porn collectors-upon offering materials for donationmake themselves a nexus of the elite and the illicit, the sacred and the profane.…”