This contribution critically reflects on my project Travelling the Archive (2015-2016). Commissioned by Atlas Arts, the project is a collaboration between artist, archivist and a local history society from the village of Kyleakin on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. At the project’s heart is a collection of 35mm Kodachrome slides taken from 1959 to 1973 by an English tourist, Joan Wilcock (1895-1994). She was a frequent visitor to the Island with ‘snap-shot’ photographs of her in Kyleakin, dating from the 1930s.
In 2008, over 400 of her slides were gifted to the Highland Council Archive. Other than the date on the slide mount, contextual information was minimal. Landscapes, fishing boats and ferries appeared among many unidentified portraits of local people, especially children. When the Kyleakin Local History Society first viewed the collection in 2010-11, not only did they find family, friends, and neighbours, but also their younger selves.
The Joan Wilcock collection therefore presents challenges to both archivist and artist. The archive comes to ‘own’ donated material where photographed subjects are still living. Alongside ethical questions (ownership, permissions, consent), the presence of local voices trouble artistic appropriation of the Wilcock images and the definitions of the ‘found’ and ‘vernacular’ photograph so popular within contemporary art practice (Langford, 2008). The processes of identification - from people to place -bring specific memories, narratives and histories: in short, a particular community gives meaning to the Wilcock collection. However, such local people are not simply ‘context providers’ for the collection (Pollen, 2016). How they look at the images, and what they have to say about them, is important. Details within images, easily overlooked by outsiders, hold significant meanings that move between the past to the present (Kuhn, 2007; MacDonald, 2015). Narratives also move from the personal to a collective portrait of a once tight-knit community (Cohen, 1985) that has significantly altered since Miss Wilcock visited. Once the gateway to Skye, Kyleakin experienced a dramatic change to its way of life when its ferry service ceased to operate with the 1995 opening of the Skye Bridge. Other ‘vernacular’ photographs from personal albums and private collections, along with the Wilcock collection, consequently all play their part in mediating personal and shared memories.
I will demonstrate how travelling with this photographic archive is to encounter memories, identities and lived experiences belonging to others. It also asks what is the role of the contemporary artist when ‘vernacular’ photography reminds a present-day community how ‘we are social history’ (Macdougall, in conversation with Bird, 2015).
