Cultural archives are both organized accumulations of objects and records, and spaces of productive crises in which overlooked traces, fragments, dust and residues function as critiques of dominant knowledge models. In 2010 the Archaeology Department of the University of Amsterdam discarded a big part of their collection of analog slides. The slides with reproductions of  Greek and Roman art  were in boxes in disorganized piles and with various traces of damage. I kept a number of boxes containing hundreds of slides. The slides are a historical photo-object, and in the state, I received then, an anti-archive of sorts. No matter that they have lost their documentary function and their order and organization, they still carry historical knowledge and an image potential. They are characterised by visual and material presence, structurally similar to the archeological ruins and fragments they document.

Since the early years of its existence photography was used to make reproductions of works of art. This opened the possibility for forms of research based on juxtaposition of many images and their comparative analysis. It allowed cataloguing museum collections by using index cards illustrated with photographic images, thus establishing the co-presence of both textual and visual information. Art historical reproductions in the form of slides established the slide lecture as the dominant form of lecture in the field of art history. Analog photographic slides were an important medium of reproduction of works of art and were used broadly as an educational and research tool between the 1950s and mid-2000s. Despite their broad use they were not considered as having value in themselves and were overlooked as mere reproductions. At the present moment slides are largely considered obsolete and are replaced by digital images.

Often reproductions and copies are considered less valuable than the space they occupy in a university, or museum archives, no matter that as material objects they are part of the history of their media. Artworks are never single originals, but exist as an image-network including the different material media of their reproductions (prints, slides, digital images), which form a constellation of variations. As viewers we are trained to overlook the material articulation of a medium. Even if they claim a standard procedure, photographic reproductions are far from being identical. They form a heterogeneous group with variations in composition, background, color, ways of photographing, the qualities of their material media and the different rates of their decay and discoloration. Reproductions are interpretations characterized by modulation of the artworks they portray.

What happens when the photograph of a ruin itself becomes a ruin? What is the outcome of this double negation, is there a positive image that can emerge, and having lost its status of being a copy, can it exist as a deviation, modulation, an open image in its own right? As the ruins they document, the slides I kept, are a subject of decay. They are documents of the passing of time and changes in media. Slides are vulnerable to destruction and forgetting in contrast to the artworks they document. In many cases they have lost their documentary function as correct reproductions of artworks. They are an object on whose surface is written a double history – of the art of antiquity and of analog photography. The slides are a complex transhistorical photo-object, a material critique of privileging of original objects, but they are also an image-reservoir laden with latent images and with an enormous potential.

Unclaimed Images addresses the need to approach the slides visually, not only as an object of looking, but as one that can generate new images on their own right enfolding the different media, they are indexically related to: sculptures, photographs, printed reproductions. Many of the slides were made as photographs of pages of books with reproduction and thus include a constellation of fascinating artefacts: margins of a page, caption, a hand that holds the page. There are also traces of damage and decay: discoloration, dust, scratches. The slides are images of images of images, of visual layers bound to different moments of time and different material media.

I treat the slides not as rigid documents, but as open images characterized by plasticity, and as a departure point for creation of multiple divergent variations. Through my method of rephotographing, I investigate the image potential of the slides, which have lost their documentary status of art historical reproductions, and can spill into series of multiplications and modulations, which resonate with the space of mental images (memories, dreams, imagination) and with the plasticity and liquid-like nature of AI generated photographs. This operation simply follows from the condition of photographic reproductions, which are never faithful copies but an interpretation of the artworks they represent, and also an image on their own right. The image as a divergent multiple behaves more like a life form than a document. It is in contrast with operations of ordering, cataloguing, attributions to a period or style, which are based on a desired certainty that a reproduction or a copy are precise and rigid, in a sense immutable. My approach explores an opposite tendency towards living plasticity and modulation, which while maintaining a contact with its original, deviates and differs and makes visible emotional, traumatic, or grotesque registers. The emerging series of new articulations of the face and the body will interrogate the fixity of classical form and ideal types, and has visual and stylistic resonance with different periods modernist aesthetics to AI generated images. Through disorientation of the gaze in my photographs I can question our habitual ways of looking associated with quick judgments of recognition, reading and assigning an identity. 

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In 2021 I worked on Portraits in Reverse a research and development project supported by the Mondriaan Fund in collaboration with photographer Johannes Schwartz. The project focused on two sets of analog photographic material. In 2010 I kept some couple of hundreds of educational slides discarded by the Archaeology Department of the University of Amsterdam because they were no longer in use. In 1991 Johannes Schwartz  acquired a large number of black and white negatives of studio portraits made in India between 1930s and the 1970s. The  photographers who made them had no more use of their negatives. My work on the project resulted in substantial collection of research material and an extensive article. During the work on this project I started rephotographing the slides, initially as a way of looking at the different aspects of my material.  Gradually this revealed a rich and complex perspective to explore through making images. 

Image credit: AA