Out of the Frame
60 Digital Images
Sizes Variable
2002
If a text or picture is going to represent a reality which is different from, and perhaps determinant of, the picture itself, then this representation will only be possible through an act of negation, through a demonstration of incoherence of the system of dominant images.
John Tagg, The Burden of Representation
Out of the Frame is a series of over 60 photographs derived from Leonard Frank’s Board of Trade commissioned, Industrial photographs of Vancouver.
For a four-month period, I was hired by the Vancouver Public Library to help create a database for the Leonard Frank Photo Digitization Project. I spent 40 hours a week scanning, documenting, and indexing Leonard Frank’s photographs. This database, composed of several thousand images, is seen as a key tool in allowing a larger audience access to the collection of Frank’s industrial photographs taken between the two world wars. This collection represents a wide range of historical images documenting both the ideological and physical index of modern progress in the development of the city of Vancouver. A cursory glance of the archive reveals images of commercial construction and expansion, the exploitation and processing of natural resources, and even the occasional opening of a bridge or pool
There are few images of people in this archive. In their infrequency they exist in two forms: composed portraits of industrial developers and their families or as incidental laborers who appear literally on the periphery or margins of these images. It is this second represented group that I began to question and investigate. In these “portraits” there are two common elements: human representations are dwarfed by the very objects they construct through their labor and each figures stares directly back at the camera that captures their image. They appear in the frame, though possibly imagine themselves, as many of us do when we do not see ourselves the subject of a photographer, out of the frame. They are physically represented by the very system that controls their labor and marginalizes their importance. Their common expressions of questioning and distain opens up an alternative avenue of historical investigation in this once determined map of history.
Out of the Frame attempts to represent this fissure of exclusion in a very specific historical document. Ironically it is only through the technological processes of digitization, image manipulation, and distribution that this exclusion can be revealed. By literally cropping out the material “objects” of Frank’s photographs, these portraits attempt to refocus the lens of history away from grandiose material production and onto the often the invisible makers of history.
60 Digital Images
Sizes Variable
2002
If a text or picture is going to represent a reality which is different from, and perhaps determinant of, the picture itself, then this representation will only be possible through an act of negation, through a demonstration of incoherence of the system of dominant images.
John Tagg, The Burden of Representation
Out of the Frame is a series of over 60 photographs derived from Leonard Frank’s Board of Trade commissioned, Industrial photographs of Vancouver.
For a four-month period, I was hired by the Vancouver Public Library to help create a database for the Leonard Frank Photo Digitization Project. I spent 40 hours a week scanning, documenting, and indexing Leonard Frank’s photographs. This database, composed of several thousand images, is seen as a key tool in allowing a larger audience access to the collection of Frank’s industrial photographs taken between the two world wars. This collection represents a wide range of historical images documenting both the ideological and physical index of modern progress in the development of the city of Vancouver. A cursory glance of the archive reveals images of commercial construction and expansion, the exploitation and processing of natural resources, and even the occasional opening of a bridge or pool
There are few images of people in this archive. In their infrequency they exist in two forms: composed portraits of industrial developers and their families or as incidental laborers who appear literally on the periphery or margins of these images. It is this second represented group that I began to question and investigate. In these “portraits” there are two common elements: human representations are dwarfed by the very objects they construct through their labor and each figures stares directly back at the camera that captures their image. They appear in the frame, though possibly imagine themselves, as many of us do when we do not see ourselves the subject of a photographer, out of the frame. They are physically represented by the very system that controls their labor and marginalizes their importance. Their common expressions of questioning and distain opens up an alternative avenue of historical investigation in this once determined map of history.
Out of the Frame attempts to represent this fissure of exclusion in a very specific historical document. Ironically it is only through the technological processes of digitization, image manipulation, and distribution that this exclusion can be revealed. By literally cropping out the material “objects” of Frank’s photographs, these portraits attempt to refocus the lens of history away from grandiose material production and onto the often the invisible makers of history.
Click image for larger version.
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