Collective

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Collective

Letter from the artist

Humans are sentimental, disruptive creatures. Peering into homes, items are displayed, hidden, and forgotten with purpose. Collective is a reflection of connection through collection via vernacular photography of families, the self, the places they go, and the tension between physical and digital archives. When I think of human experience, I think of the joy through the memories I have found in my spanning collection.

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8 Why We Collect 14 Slide Collection 18 Disconnection 22 Life, By Proxy 30 Harmful Sentimentality 36 Left Behind 42 Archive: An Anthology Table of Contents

WHY WE COLLECT

Postage stamps, bottle caps, teeth, fast food toys, stuffed creatures, hair, medical oddities, coins, trading cards, clothing, and barbed wire; it’s no secret that humans are collective creatures.

I started collecting vernacular photography about 3 years ago when I discovered the following photograph in a secondhand store. A sepia-toned man gazes into the camera as he smokes, a woman sitting adjacent to him, with ‘Sunday-3-27-22-’ written across the top. There’s a motion blur on the woman’s head, the paper is worn but intact, and priced at $2. I purchased the photograph and hung it up on my bedroom wall. I couldn’t shake the haunting connection I had felt for them.

After 200+ more photographs from conventions, local sellers, and friends I found myself picking select kinds of images that pulled at my soul like the first one did. I like portraits with decorative borders and locations of studios, cats in people’s outdated houses, and women

standing proudly. The best way I can describe this feeling is sentimentality; the feeling of my chest hurting from relating to these individuals photographed, the feeling of not being alone on this earth, and a morbid understanding of generations. I hope one day when I’m gone someone will find photographs of me that old lovers have thrown out, and steal me because $2 is steep for one photo. Humans tend to keep the items that they relate to in multitudes. We search over and over again through digital, audio, and physical platforms to find what we as individuals align with. The rush and joy of finding what feels like you in a replicated state builds a collection. Collective habits present themselves in nearly 40% of our population, making collecting far too vast to generalize. This presents itself in the types of collections, and backing human desires like lust, envy, fame, and recognition. The moral of collecting stays the same, however. The physical collection is hardly the start of the pursuit to find desired aesthetics. Each piece of a collection is vetted by the individual and approved as adequate. This mental attachment to the hunt

and following thrill is the lying undertone in every collection. On a morbid level, we can only die with what is inside of us, and our material items will decay and remain on a different timeline. That doesn’t mean our material items can’t manifest into tangible memories, it just means that humans make peace of our short time by finding what already exists. The joy in collecting to me is finding what someone once cherished, and nurturing it as an artifact. There is a certain quality of life we place on our belongings, whether displaying with care or forgotten in a closet; they remain as a lifelong pursuit of tangible feeling.

Similar to the feeling of small children opening gifts on Christmas morning, collecting can be seen as a mundane approach to delight and surprise from a mysterious deliverer, the universe.

ByLife,Proxy

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I paused collecting for a few months when I found a ziplock full of a man’s every identifying factor. His social security card, a picture of who I assumed to be his partner, a military dog tag, receipts, and more were inside the bag. This tipped me into the

range of over understanding my temporary placement as a decaying human on this earth. Part of me has guilt for not taking it home with me, other parts feel like I wasn’t meant to take care of him.

When I resumed collecting I started searching for larger collections of work online to see what other collections consisted of, researched dating vintage photography, made some artists books about collecting, and ended up finding an eBay listing from a man around my father’s age. He posted a binder full of slides from his great uncle-inlaw’s travels through the years, advertising he hoped someone would find joy in owning the collection now.

I paid for shipping and received the package a few weeks later; they are exactly what I hoped I was getting myself into. A range of waterfalls, architecture, the North Korean border, and repeating faces. Some locations I’d seen with my own eyes, and it felt like staring into a portal of my past blended with his past. I began to assemble every photo in my collection with something that I directly related to. I ended up realizing over time that I was collecting a scene of my life.

My photographs depicted my wants, my daydreams, my desires, and my traumas through unconscious sentimental connection. When I think of my personal human experience, I think of the joy through the memories I have found in my spanning collection. I dove into this phenomenon of socio-emotional ties to photographs specifically, and found that through almost every state of life we as humans are communicating to validate our experiences. Much like picking up a camera and documenting what is physically stimulating in front of us, humans share with the world what they have understood of the world. A parent photographs their child, meals are replicated to cultural pasts, and coworkers share their weekend plans, all of this is sentimentality. As humans we desire a lens of our own understanding, and to share this lens is to create a medium for it to manifest. Collecting is the manifestation of others taken care of in one central archive of sorts.

Who are we as individuals to feel we desire to archive and search for validating life experiences? It came to me unknowingly as a

hobbyist collector, but there’s no denying the presence of underlying psychological factors. To me, as someone who spends life primarily alone, I was searching out of envy. The need for connection and the desire to hear about the lens of other’s time together shows the lack of this in my personal realm. I yearn to expand a collection into deeper grounds of the human experience and bonds through photography simply based on personal documentation. The lack of creative planning in vernacular photography is a small window into what others see through their physical eyes. It’s the closest one can get without being in another body. Although the original validator of the collection is gone and does not know, his photography is admired, sorted, scanned, and archived in my personal collection. I believe most of my understanding of people and relationships of any kind is viewed through my photographs. They depict connection, memory, body language, and beautiful gruesome life as a human. I make sense of my lived experiences through a lens of others’ memories entangled in my own.

HARMFUL SENTIMENTALITY:

WHERE ATTACHMENT MEETS FABRICATION

Collecting, even with little intent, can harbor the mind to fabricate its experiences. While there’s no shame in keeping other’s feelings and experiences in mind as we forge our own path, harmful sentimentality is where we reject our own footing without realizing it. By confirming our place on this earth with material possessions, we often overlook the process of recognition on our own.

This can be extremes of parasocial relationships with people, institutions, and manifestos, or as simple as repinning mindless content. To observe and mentally tack others as solid ground in our mind, makes our tangible reality even more fuzzy. The harmful part of this is leaning into the fuzz, and letting it blanket your experiences and expectations yet to come.

Collecting is often the creation of a perfect ‘world’ to live inside. With vernacular photography it can be especially easy to fall into a point of no return. The sentimental bond between collected and collector can form the brain into believing the collected is a dependent.

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This dependent becomes something the collector feels the need to care for, thus causing a bond that can dwindle into an overextension in the parasocial realm. The people as average as they are depicted in images can start to feel like family, and blend into your own understanding of relationships. With understanding comes empathy, but when do we fall into the trap of hoarding based on sentimental attachment?

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Left

Often regarded as the “most important day of your life”, wedding day photos are a gem filled with disturbance. When something with intimacy is left for others to find, human mortality presents itself.

Behind

photos

There’s long standing tension and debate between physical and digital archives. While the digitization of archives has provided the general public with easy access to a plethora of documents otherwise stored onsite, it’s time to talk about the level of human error in them. While working on this project, the presence of poorly designed archives, low quality film scans, and user accessibility at an all time low, it seems the majority of archives transferred to the internet still lack the magic of discovery. While by no means is a box of photos in my home accessible to others, I still wanted my project to feel like the viewer is discovering bite-sized mundanity. On large scale digital photography archives context is put before the viewing. As far as the internet goes, information is sectioned off, contextualized, and presented in a sterile manner. The type of photo, year taken, and historical notes are all important when it comes to research and education, but the joy of the search is lost when categories

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are placed. The internet should feel like a large cardboard box with junk inside it. Every viewer pulls bits and pieces out without the standards being raised. You can’t wrangle the structure of a physical archive into a digital format without taking into consideration the way internet users dig. The best archives are the ones that show but don’t tell. Early net art and the chance of clicking around to discover something new is much like collecting. Chance discovery is the balancing factor internet archives need to adapt before the archive becomes the voice instead. The branding and push to be an advertisable entity on the internet is omnipresent with the growing number of voices online, with each standing to be the sole voice. It quickly turns from sole to soul sucking when sterilized for easy consumption. The hunt for found images and information on the internet should be to collect the useful, by removing the undesired hunt for quality. Often, the best resources are materialized through artists and niche communities.

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Collective was designed, printed, and hand bound by Claire Evan.

Printed on 110lb soft white text and handmade chipboard.

Coptic with paired needle exposed binding. Images sourced from the last 3 years from various thrift stores, acquaintances, and deceased relatives.

Printed in Richmond, VA with the support of the Kinetic Imaging department. Spring 2023.

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