In 1859, Oliver Wendell Holmes published The Stereoscope and the Stereograph, a text in which he speculated on the possibility of creating a universal encyclodedia of photographs. In the fiduciary metaphor of his archive, “there must be arranged a comprehensive system of exchanges, so that there may grow up something like a universal currency of these bank-notes, or promises to pay in solid substance, which the sun has engraved for the great Bank of Nature.”
The image banks of today, in much the same way as their historical ancestors, the stereographic societies, are confronted with the main stumbling block of the archival paradigm, retrieval. The polysemic potential of photographs is in direct conflict with the organisation of these vast corpuses. Text is called upon to classify images in typologies, as abstract concepts. The rationalisation of this process, through brute competition and a desire for profitability, has given rise to a world view, a universe of values and emotions, valuable instruments of consumer culture.
Bank of Nature : Concepts (2007) represents a list of ‘concepts’ found in a promotional brochure for Getty Images which explains the process for localising an image in their database.
Digital Lambda print, Diasec, 100 x 200 cm. Produced by la Société française de photographie in the framework of their exhibition space, La Vitrine.
Exhibitions
- La Vitrine de la Société française de photographie, Paris, France, 2007
Texts
- Paul-Louis Roubert (in French)
Entretien, le site de la Société Française de Photographie, 2007
Publications
- The magazine horsd’œuvre, number 22: special edition”Access to Document - Access through Document“, initiated by Session 17 of l’École du Magasin, Grenoble. Invited by Lucile Bouvard.
Collections
- Private collection, Paris, France
