Millie Burton, Jan Čihák, Claudia Frickemeier, Lydia Goldblatt, Hannah Guy, Elena Inga, Penny Klepuszewska, Wiebke Leister, Jason Manning, Kevin Newark, Sian Pile, Kate Potter
Concept: Val Williams
The exhibition Family Archives Lost and Found originated as a joint project of a group of what are now already former students of the master’s degree program in photography at the London College of Communication in collaboration with Photography and The Archive Research Centre, resident at the school. The challenge to address an assigned topic lead most of the participants to rather personal confessions, which are almost unsettling in the public space of the gallery, and also presented an opportunity for exploring the possibilities as well as the limits of the medium of photography per se. Though most of the artists involved still employed photography as the fundamental basis of their work, the resulting installation is in fact quite multi-medial in nature, featuring as it does alongside framed photographs also objects or "mere" texts presented on the gallery walls. The original exhibition has been expanded by several artists for its present version as presented in the Školská gallery. Its translation into a different cultural context offers an opportunity for comparison, both of approaches to the universal theme of the family and – as seems ever more popular in the Czech Lands – creative work with archival sources. I would like to use this opportunity to thank all who participated in the preparation of this exhibition. Jan Čihák, exhibition organizer
The Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC) and the MA Photography, both London College of Communication, have worked together on this project for several months in 2005. It was PARC’s first substantial collaboration with a postgraduate group and, as such, was vital to the development of the Centre. Through working intensively with the students, we developed ideas around both content and curation, culminating in an exhibition and a mini study day, in which students presented their work and responses came from leading members of the London photography world, including Professor Mark Haworth-Booth (University of the Arts London), Sophie Howarth (Tate Modern) and the photographer Anna Fox. Prof Val Williams, Director of PARC
What distinguishes family archives from other archives? What is included in them and what is left out? What is their value, what do they look like and how are they kept? What kinds of events do they portray? How do they affect personal and collective memories? Who is the family archivist and who the photographer? What do their images mean to an outsider? What happens when their family archives get reconsidered within a new context? And what do they say about the passage of time? Well, these are only some of the questions we discussed when embarking on the project ’Family Archives Lost and Found’. In fact, the works shown in this exhibition are all engaging with recent and not so recent family narratives. Some of them constructed, others rewritten. Some done in response to actual family images including names, specific dates or places, others based on family memories dealing with secret or confessional details. Bound to change over time, the ’archival potential’ of these exhibits is just as open as these works are now disclosed from the past. Allowing us to cross the vulnerable border between Private and Public, they hide as they reveal, giving us keys to places that do not exist any longer or did only ever exist in our minds. They make us think about what was and what could have been instead. They trigger our contemplation – only of course if we are willing to engage with them as reflective mirrors of our own Family Archives. Dr Wiebke Leister, Senior Lecturer MA Photography
