The Wiener Library Archive

http://www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/

I arranged to go the the Wiener Library and research in the archive. I was very aware that I didn't know what I am looking for, and to use a favourite Rumsfeldism, am in the realm of the known and unknown unknowns. I am unlikely to use the actual imagery from the library for all sorts of reasons; copyright complications and reluctance to use appropriated imagery. Paradoxically, I may well use some of the old school photos I have in my possession. http://eleanormacfarlane.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/old-school-photos.html

I felt privileged to be given some archive boxes of photographs to look through. these are well archived, but random and unmediated. There are no captions except for he occasional pencilled scribble on the back, and sometimes there are jumps of decades. They are a mixture of family photographs, outings and occasions, and school or work groups, with occasional leaflets or other documents. a family archive, and what's more the archive of a family ruptured by war and the holocaust.

I found the experience of looking through these photographs unlike any other, browsing in a vintage shop, art fair or other way of seeing such artefacts, even when elements are pointed out in a book. I don't even give my own family photographs such a level of scrutiny. It's the element of discovery, of looking for clues and connections, not just within the images themselves, but how they all relate to personal and cultural history. I brought my magnifying loop with me - it's such a joy to examine shop windows of another time and another place, to examine the pattern on clearly what was a rather alarmingly coloured jumper now only in black and white, the wallpaper pattern in a school room. Details signpost to whole threads of history - the way the children are dressed, the adverts in the street, the severe hairstyles of youths.

These photographs, like my old school groups, are mostly from prewar Eastern Europe, such a flower of civilisation, such a solid reality, about to be erased and altered. Again, it is the sheer outrage at the interference of lives.

I became fixated with a particular small and heavily folded and damaged photograph. It looks like a workforce outside a factory or establishment, all lined up in layers. It's hard to describe how many anomalies and strange things I found in there. Some I could figure out - the photographer had used the technique of waving a card during the developing process to lighten the faces against the dark background - I forget what that is called, but had done it badly, with shapes and angles around the faces instead of the more desired gradation. This made some of the people look unreal, as if they had been superimposed from another photograph and crucially, from another era. Seemingly identical faces looked out from different ends of the lines. People dressed formally, in suits mostly baggy or creased though much wear, but someone looked like they were wearing an elaborate, admiral type uniform. Other seemed to dress from another century, and some faces simple didn't make sense - they were too far away from their fellows, or not in scale, a bit like some prosaic sepia version of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Heart's Club Band by Peter Blake. The photograph is not a fabrication but it looks like one. Fascinating. There were high windows at the background dark brick wall - magnified I could see disembodied hats, probably some sort of double exposure, but because of the other elements, such as the window bars, actually quite difficult to replicate, and must remain a mystery.

Ideas, conceptual links, visual clues, inspirations. My pen was flowing.

I'm going back.

16th December 2013