Archival Thoughts

Archival Thoughts a group exhibition of 4th year photography students from York University. The artists involved are: Alex Clarke, Partrick Eugster, Andrey Osipov,Michelle Hodgson, Aaron Macfadyen, Ian Bethune,Jordan Browne, Briar Murawski,Aidan O’Boyle and Monika Wahba.

Photography archives the world, one small piece, and one instant at a time. That has always been true, but never more than now. Social networking has created a generation whose personal lives have been archived unlike any other. How we feel, what we are thinking, where we are, what we are doing, what we look like, who we are connected to, our likes and dislikes: all preserved by websites. As a generation of photographers in this era of all-encompassing recordkeeping, how can our medium reflect the overflowing archive that we have created?

 

Photography as an art form not only possesses a huge range of expression; it creates a physically huge mass of byproducts, from negatives to final prints. Every individual photographer is left with an ever-increasing collection of images that requires storage. Photography has always had a strong relationship with archiving. Yet that is not the only level where archiving and photography are intimately connected.

 

Photography is the only art form that captures a moment in time. Many people believe that images taken with a camera are “true,” and while any photographer knows that is arguable at best, what is not open to debate is the fact that any image automatically becomes an archived moment in history. Photography is the container for an immense series of archival thoughts, feelings and moments that happened around the world.

 

This photography exhibition is the work of ten students from the 4th year photography course at York University. We are putting on a show based around Archival Thoughts. Though the medium of photography we intend to explore the connections photography has with the idea and practice of archiving. This student-curated show is intended to demonstrate the skills and knowledge we have obtained throughout our time at York and serve as an ending to our final year in university.