On this page you see a representation of the scan of an original archive image. This image was the basis of the portrait created for the project and visible in the Recognition Machine. These images are troubled. In many cases the institutions charged with caring for the images have been reluctant to put the digital images online due to these troubles. We see the archival images as generators for new encounters and questions rather than a goal per se.
Antje Van Wichelen:
In 2012, visiting institutional archives I discover large collections of pre-colonial and colonial 19th century photographs made by western photographers in an ever failing attempt to categorize people into races and a hierarchical order.
Together these collections form the ‘filthy’ archive of how the colonizing West has been busy constructing a dehumanizing portrait of all peoples that were to be dominated. Today this filthy archive is more a witness of the mechanisms of this construction than that it could ever pretend to be a portrait of any of the photographed individuals or societies; it tells us more about the people behind the camera than of what they were staging in front of the lens.
That is my starting point when dealing with these archives. My aim is to corrupt the original objectifying goals of these photographic series as much as possible.
