I have discovered the miracle known as audio books within the past year. I will drive between St. Paul/Mpls area to Madison visiting my family for the holidays and that can be a 5-6.5 hour trip depending an traffic and which interstate I choose to take. This entry is partially inspired by Richard Cox’s blog, Reading Archives and partially by the content of the book itself.
This book is not “about” archives. At least, it doesn’t say it is. I will also say that I am not finished with the story, I’m on CD 3 out of 5 and I’m saving the rest for my ride home on January 2 or 3. These are the points that I am most interested in: The girl works at a homeless shelter and one of the elderly men that they had known for about a year passed away. They had helped to get him an apartment of his own and when they cleaned it out, they found a box of photos that were among the few possession that he brought with him when he arrived. Upon his death, the shelter director had gone to Laurel, our protagonist, to help her curate a show of the photos. The elderly man had often talked about having a show someday and the director wanted to make sure he didn’t have family who would want the photos or copyright, etc. Laurel is also chosen for her experience in photography and she prints out photos from the negatives and does some research on his former life before the shelter with clues from some of the older photographs.
While the genius in the writing is the other, more personal part of the story and the interconnectedness between herself and the elderly man, I was facinated by the writing and the understanding of the process of what she was doing. First, this is the kind of archival work that I would like to find. I have earned my photography minor, possibly putting more work into that than I did into my Spanish major. Secondly, the steps of intense archival work are there. She has no archival training, but she does have photographic knowledge. There is description of her thought processes on how to store, selection of what to print, creating an inventory of the images and negatives as well as searching for copyright restrictions or anyone else who may hold copyright.
This book is not just a novel, but it also has documentation of how a non-archivally trained professional would go about taking care of a collection. It is a little slow going at times and I do need to take a break after each CD or so, but the ties to the archival world are fairly strong. If you are interested in reading/listening to it, however, I would suggest reading or re-reading The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. There are a lot of references to the characters/people of that book as well.
Tags: Archives, photographs, The Double Bind