Ancient Relic of Modern Civilization

We have been making hand-bound journals of our photographs for quite some time - usually of personal work, sometimes based on a specific time and place, but more often on having compiled a volume of work that we want to contextualize or corral into a meaningful collection.

When we started putting together our most recent journal, the idea of examining our own fragmented and reimagined story resonated with our ideas about what a photographic document is.

Photographs can generally claim to portray specific moments in time - they are at their most basic level a record. The record though is so thoroughly subject to interpretation, and reinterpretation, that what exactly is being portrayed is never precisely settled. The photograph is increasingly unclear in its relationship to the truth as decontextualization naturally continues, and the alteration of the images themselves seems epidemic and unavoidable. So we become amateur archaeologists, for lack of a better analogy, stumbling upon the remnants of lives and the visual representations of ideas, and we piece them back together using whatever evidence we can. “Truth” is not even a top priority.

This brings us back to our own journals - this piecing back together of the story happens even with one's own photographic record. Our memories are constantly rewritten at any given moment in time. The thing as it was captured, immediately ceases to empirically contain whatever the original meaning was. Our journals are a part of this messy process - they are just one rewrite of our record.

Jessica Haye & Clark Hsiao are part of »Guest Room: Boaz Levin & Sophia Greiff«.

Check out their Artist Feature Inland Sea.