January 18–May 4, 2008

 

T A C I T A   D E A N   b. Canterbury, England, 1965

A central preoccupation of the archival processes found throughout this exhibition is predicated on the analysis of images as materials of cultural transaction and exchange. Tacita Dean's Floh (2000) is embedded in the analytical procedures of this transaction, using found photographs to lend ethnographic insight into the production of domestic photography. Accumulated over a period of seven years from secondhand bins in flea markets across Europe and the United states, the 163 images that comprise Floh can be generally categorized as amateur rather than professional photography. They are consistent with types of images common to most domestic photographic production: portraits of individuals and groups (some quasi-institutional) attending to some aspect of civil life, pictures of objects, vacation shots, snapshots of pets or family. Though "found" in the conventional sense, these images were carefully selected and resourced for the specificity of their cultural meanings, as much as for their typological differentiations between image species. In Dean's careful organization of the images, the line between amateur and "fine art" photography somehow becomes blurred. Through the curatorial methodology used by the artist, the concerns of this photographic cache can be read as fundamentally cultural, with the images arranged within the space of an ethnographic logic.

 

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