Perhaps it is the conditioning of our relationship to photography: we have an especially difficult time seeing the photograph as forming, as something which might bring-into-being, relating as much to the future as it does to the past. It is the that-has-been condition of the photograph which appears to leave the image as retreating into history, even though our observance of the act of both producing and encountering photographs continually demonstrates something altogether more generative. At the beginning of an essay on Walter Benjamin’s Ragpicker, Frederik Le Roy quotes Eduardo Cadava, considering Benjamin’s understanding of historical fixity:
“For Benjamin, …the truth of history is performed when we take the risk of making history rather than assuming it to belong only to the past. It happens, in other words, when we understand historicity as a kind of performance rather than as a story or a form of knowledge.” Eduardo Cadava (1997: 72-3)
Le Roy’s study identifies an important counterweight to the flâneur’s luxurious observation of the city: for a flâneur that “chases furtive sensations and remains a passive consumer of historical images” the ragpicker goes about “creating the potential to transform sudden acts of historical remembrance into a politics of memory.” (Le Roy: 2017: 129) For any experience that resides outside of the reproducing cycle of a historically determining privilege, we all find ourselves as ragpickers: we must actively construct a version of the world which we wish to inhabit. And so it is with the photograph, one of Benjamin’s other recurring interests: we either consume its account because it seems to replicate our social or political imaginary, or we set about the image with a sense that something more is possible, that the photograph can be written.
In a practice which concerns itself with the image as a form of live and embodying knowledge, Pablo Lerma opens out the historical conditioning of the archive towards a multiplicity of generative voices. His work as an artist and publisher returns recurrently to this form, seeking in it as yet unspoken or unseen potentiality. Take for example, his Greenfield. The Archive, a project which gives multiple interpretative accounts to a found collection of images from a small Massachusetts town. Lerma gives form and also puts into motion those images which are otherwise out of sight, forgotten, and removed from the discourses of history. Rather than simply organise the images and proclaim his collection an archive – nominalism sometimes seeming to be sufficient – Lerma enacted an enquiry into those images by commissioning a range of different writers, whose thoughts, discussions and range of positions do more than momentarily activate their contents: given life and conversation, they begin to travel beyond the confines of fixed time and fixed location. Lerma’s book is giving place to a place, a subtle and yet insistent form of history in the process of being.
For some time, Lerma has considered his practice as the production of counterarchives – the necessary formation of collections to address and remedy the absence of representations. Central to this is the structured and limited photographic historical account of gay experience – the absence, that is, not of images of sexuality but of everyday life and routine queer experience: the very omission of everydayness, of images which might participate in the vernacular record. These would be images which reveal the commonalities and consonances across sexualities and give space to subtle, rather than exaggerated difference. The omission of these photographs in canons and archives – and the necessity of erasing the subtle violence of their exclusion – is a concern that he shares with one of his former tutors, Carmen Winant, whose celebrated My Birth revealed the absence of fundamental female experience in the same ‘universe’ of images. Lerma has produced a sequence of projects – A Frame of Darkness, and You Have Shown Me A Strange Image – looking at subtle signifiers which resist expectations about gay subjectivities, and which work in composite modes to undo the erasure of queer representation and memory from the visual lexicon. The counterarchive is necessarily working against the grain that confronts the frictions of an orthodoxy which the archive delimits: it is searching not for this friction however, but for an accommodating site in which it can be neither stigmatized nor pushed to the margins.
Producing new work for the exhibition Pass It On. Private Stories, Public Histories at FOTODOK in Utrecht, Lerma has challenged his project and its position as outside of the archive – working inside one of the few, though also one of the largest, European public collections dedicated to documenting and providing a forum and resource for the LGBTI community, IHLIA Heritage in Amsterdam. Lerma questions his own assumptions and practices just as he questions those of photography. Accessing the archive at IHLIA, he has set out to explore how gay experience has been historically represented, and how it might figure the present. He has set out in a process that is familiar to everyone: “to find myself in the materials”, to look for his own experience and to see if it was represented. A key discovery for Lerma was the magazine Homologie, a Dutch publication produced around the University of Leiden from the 1970s to the 1990s. Its view was international and intersectional, intellectual and yet also, nevertheless, at moments operating in a register that conformed to expectations about what gay experience should look like from a hetero-normative perspective: Lerma notes that a striking quantity of printed matter in the archives collections proposed either silent integration or exaggerated difference. Homologie instead situated gay experience in a more complex range of interests and concerns, which moved beyond a singular emphasis on sexuality: an ethics and politics of living and working together.
Lerma’s resulting work, It Doesn’t Stop at Images, presents archive materials from Homologie across three vitrines, a series of three enlargements, and a centrally positioned glass working board with further image materials and a partially visible text by the artist and writer David Wojnarowicz. The work borrows its title from this text: “It doesn’t stop at images”, Wojnarowicz writes in the essay ‘Postcards from America X Rays from Hell’ in his book Close to the Knives, as he shows the visible quickly limits the speakable. Wojnarowicz’s context is not only the direct obstructions of Senator Jesse Helms’ conservative attacks on the arts, but also the quiet elimination through what is collected and even discussed, even from progressive positions: “I’m beginning to believe that one of the last frontiers left for radical gesture is the imagination”, he writes, critical of a discourse that returns all-to-easily to being swept under the carpet. Lerma’s installation similarly seeks a necessary imagining: it asks questions about unpacking expectations and finding everyday life when it was routinely left unspoken. A site of ongoing arrangement and enquiry, Lerma has continued to research throughout the exhibition, configuring materials and allowing his archive to remain generative.
Three wall images identify themes in the display – iconic or celebrated representations of homosexuality; images of the body, standards and expectations; communities and love. Three vitrines mirror the wall works, with archival selections from materials found at ILHIA, staggering their contents in a significant form of montage that begins to transform the archive into a live object: in the three-layer vitrine, original layouts serve as a base or foundation, whilst in the middle Lerma brings images into new arrangements as he modifies the archival material, subtly performing a play of visibility between the two surfaces. The upper, most immediate layer is left empty: a space for the viewer to themselves modify or contribute, to shape their own image, an invitation to unpick not only Homologie’s vision of the world, but Lerma’s too. So it must be with the archive: it is not an object which simply constructs remembrance, it provides what we might describe as models, too: when the photograph becomes a model, it is a setting into motion. The images we construct, and what we opt to make visible, is a project emerging from a politics of memory to become a condition of both possibility and increasing probability: history, as Benjamin makes so clear, is written when we take the risk to perform and construct the world as we want to inhabit it collectively. We might characterize Lerma’s project as a searching for that image we are yet to see.
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Pass It On. Private Stories, Public Histories was exhibited 27.11.20 – 28.03.21 at FOTODOK, Utrecht (NL) and curated by Daria Tuminas.
Here you can experience a virtual tour of the exhibition, and here you can find out more about the publication Pass It On. Private Stories, Public Histories – a book and an exhibition in one.
For further viewing: Pablo Lerma IHLIA Heritage FOTODOK
With thanks to Duncan Wooldridge for this essay.
