This photo especially gets at silence and absence as forms of toxicity. Silence produces toxicity, as does absence. These toxicities actually continue to haunt the archive even today.
I think some of the metaphor of having to really search the photo for the settlers actually is part of the ethnographic import of the image, but another tactic could be to actually blur the home, the picket fence, and everything in the photo except the settlers, actualling landing the focus on the people themselves. This might represent what you’re trying to do with the project as a whole. So it would be a sort of reversal of what is being portrayed in the photo now.
Found image. Black and white, completely old school. Different shadings. The light on the right side of the picket fence caught my eye first. Is there something unique or historical about the picket fence at this time? The interesting thing here, too, is that the focus is on the house, not the settlers themselves. In fact, they are almost invisible in the photo. You have to really stare and search for family, which actually seems to be a metaphor for the archive at this time in general. The contributor had to really search for this photo even in the first place.
I think a conversation about haunting as really disrupting whole processes of knowledge production could be important here. This is one smudge/trace/part of the archive. One that is often neglected or completely ignored/written over. The interesting part here, though, is unlike many archives where there is a complete absence, this photo almost renders a partial absence. There is documentation. There is proof. There is some visibility, though small. What can you do with this small puzzle piece? How does something that was only documented on the periphery become the center?
This photo is one of only a few images that include African American pioneers in the “settler” story of Los Angeles. By including this image--front and center--the contributor is making visible a different narrative and history of LA at this particular time and space. In many ways the archive is haunted by this absence and the contributor is asking the question, what does it mean to make this history visible? What does it mean to do so now?
This image functions as a metonym in multiple senses. First of all, as it is one of the few images of early black settlers in Los Angeles, it stands in for the whole set of images an information about black life in this place during this era that does not exist. At the same time, this instance of metonymy is also metonymic itself; that is, it evidences an absence of attention and record of the subaltern which is generalizable across the entire project of "the archive."
What I find interesting about this image and about this project is that, as a recognition of the archive as a "toxic place" and more specifically as a pharmakon (in Derrida's sense of both toxin and cure), it has the potential to change, extend, or rather diversify the functions of the archive.While at first light, it might appear to be a worthy goal of the archive to be fully encapsulating, representative, and comprehensive, the famous distinction between the map and the territory has shown how this futile effort ultimately defeats the very purpose of the archive as an intelligible space.
I think this image could use a discussion of your own experience of this archive, how you came upon its gaps and exclusions, and how this informs your understanding of toxicity. How did you find this image? Where was it located? Did you ask anyone for help? What do/did the people who work there have to say about your investigation/critique of their space? How does this archive, as a physical/digital space that also has a specific cultural connotation as authoritative source of information feed into the toxicity? Is it this archive in particular that is toxic or "the archive" in general?
This image is a found image. It is a metonym of a mode of black life in early settling of Los Angeles as well as a metonym of the exclusions of the archive.
Perhaps the rarity of this image could some how be represented to create a visual argument that aligns with the caption. This is an interesting problem because, with the caption, the image is metonymic of a lack of other images... but visual representations of lack are conceptually tricky. So I'm not exactly sure how to go about that. You combine the image with a pithy statistic, or perhaps include some of the metadata of the image that signifies its rarity? Or perhaps you could include a lot of blank space around the image to indicate the absense?
