archaeography

Media Archaeology

Found photo.

I decided last year that our archaeology lab - MetaMedia@Stanford - needs to take seriously the materiality of media. Not just the picture content, but also its texture, style, feel, ambience, aura, substrate. And its instrumentality - how the picture came to be made, by what means, agency, mechanism.

We are, after all, archaeologists and should understand precisely the materiality of the means of recording the remains of the past.

This might simply mean exploring the differences between large format field cameras and 35mm or digital.

It also involves exploring the different relationships between viewer and viewed that come with different kinds of camera. The classic Cartier-Bresson snatched moment. The deliberated and slow construction of Andreas Gursky [Link].

So, since June 2004, I have been buying old cameras.

One is a Graflex Pacemaker Speed Graphic.

Weegee used a Graflex in New York in the 1930s and 1940s.

They are big 4"x5" field cameras. In your face cameras.

I got ours on eBay from an estate sale. It was bought new in 1947 and belonged to William A. Blind of 137 East 13 Street, Casper, Wyoming. He had converted an old leather suitcase into a carrying case. Everything was untouched from maybe the late 50s. It all smells strange - a combination of the camera materials and the room or attic where the camera was kept … and William A. Blind. There is an unexposed film pack, a lot of paperwork (instructions, guides, notes he kept, the original guarantee), and six negatives. It looks as if he took copies of his 1957 driver’s license and medical card, and then finished a length of film on someone he knew …

He was born in 1911, was 5 feet 4 inches tall, drove a grey 1956 four door Oldsmobile.

These are some photos of the contents of that camera case.