Interpreting the collection

Looking at each of the images separately, they do not look anything more than family snapshots taken by somebody, but when they are put together as part of a larger collection they become interesting to look at. Kessels is very much interested in displaying found photos and collections at the museum. He describes how the meaning of an image changes when it is put in a context of a collection and displayed in a museum. Therefore, being part of a broader context such as a collection gives added value to each piece: ‘By isolating an object and giving it a place in a museum, for another fabricated purpose, object take on a new meaning or significance. The collected work …… also question matters such as authenticity, originality, authorship, craftsmanship and the role of the image in current society’ (Kessels).

As Susan Sontag describe in her book On Photography from 1977 ‘photography is just a sort of note taking’. She describes how photography was used by everyone to show and remember their lives. People made family albums of their snapshots or took snapshots for their family album. Furthermore Peters provides an extra insight into what such family photos were (and are) all about, in her article Instant Images: ’The emphasis on authenticity and individual experience and making images (publicly) accessible once more seems to have been made over to the notion of photographs as memory stores.’

Photos of family members and in family collections are memory stores, as Peters points out. In my book, Lost in Photography, there are family snapshots where people are posing happily on holidays, in their home or at social gatherings. They catch that moment to remember themselves or their family and friends and probably kept them until nobody wanted them anymore. Very often old images are thrown away or end up at second-hand shops. They are no more part of a family collection. This kind of photographs end up being collected by collectors who maybe want to put them together in a new context and display them to new viewers, just as I have done. Some collectors make artist books out of these photographs and other display these images in galleries or museums. I am one of those, collecting old family snapshots for a new purpose: that of making a book with insight into times long passed.

Artists’ books are inexpensive publications that came to importance after the 1960s. Ever since, it has been practised by many artists such as Dieter Roth, Edward Ruscha and Sol LewWitt. Sol LeWitt says (Quoted in Ekdhal) ’Artists’ books are, like any other medium, a means of conveying art ideas from the artist to the viewer/reader. Unlike most other media they are available to all at a low cost. They do not need a special place to bee seen. They are not valuable except for the ideas they contain…
Art shows come and go but books stay around for years. They are works themselves, not reproductions of works.

These artists’ books are also attractive to a bigger viewer and reader market than museum works and prints, where anybody can buy them, look through them or study them whenever they want. Artists use the books as an album where they put their ideas and collection together. And looking at artists’ books makes the viewer to think that they, the content and images, belong together as a group. ‘On the whole, the images create a collective vacation atmosphere, a view of the world oriented towards the nice things in life. Here, the snapshot serves to overcome the banality of everyday life and turn it into .’ Peters.