Separate States

ABSTRACT

This piece separates various parts of a series of readymade archival image descriptions and relocates them into new, categorised spaces. With separation and relocation, the narrative of events apparent in the descriptions and in the album of photographs they define is de-emphasised (although the narrative can, in part, be re-built, due to archival systems of enumeration). The rules, conventions, tropes and repetitions of description writing are exposed in this piece, and this allows new connections to be made and imagined across the unseen images themselves.

KEYWORDS:

• Archive
• description
• enumeration
• photography
• narrative
• separation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jane Birkin

Jane Birkin is an artist, designer and scholar. She is a Research Fellow at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton (UK) and has worked in archives for many years. Birkin’s art practice and writing functions at the intersection of text and image, combining media culture and techniques of the archive, as well as contemporary discourse on art, photography and conceptual writing. She is specifically concerned with institutional description techniques that define and manage the photographic image, and her academic monograph Archive, Photography and the Language of Administration, was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2021.