We are surrounded by archives, archives personal and national; our externalized memories and their material placeholders line the shelves of our cupboards and drawers, just as they crowd the vaults of our national repositories. As format obsolescence and material degradation inexorably wend our archives towards digital storage, and as digital imaging technologies are increasingly inserted into everyday practices, we multiply archives, almost without thinking. Let us save everything, we say, it costs so little and is so easy to do. Let nothing slip from our grasp.

But what does it mean, this mandated will to preserve? How do we relate to these images as material memories, and to their durable existence in an archive? What do we gain when we preserve them, and what, if anything, do we lose? How do we feel about these things – and how would we feel if they were destroyed?

This project addresses these questions. after | image is about archival preservation and dissolution, it features time-lapse macro-photography of photographic negatives being chemically and physically destroyed. The photographs come from my collection of negatives produced when I studied photography at high school. This archive records my youthful obsessions and experiments, it is a personal record of a specific time and set of circumstances, and contains the images of family, friends, and an inexplicable assortment of violins, nails, trains and umbrellas. This archive has been sitting in a ring-binder in my parents’ attic for 20 years – and now it’s time to go.

About Grayson Cooke

Grayson Cooke is an interdisciplinary scholar and media artist, Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University. He holds an interdisciplinary PhD from Concordia University in Montreal.