Short stories and essays on photographs selected from the Horus Archives

By Joan Fontcuberta

In collaboration with Hungarian cinematographer Sándor Kardos’ vernacular photography collection, the Horus Archives, we invited three everyday imaging enthusiasts who have a way with words to select a photograph from the archive and write us a text in the format of their choice. Here is the third text by Joan Fontcuberta, Spanish conceptual artist, researcher of the post-photographic condition and photographer.

In his book “Theory of Ruin Value” (in German, Ruinenwerttheorie), the architect Albert Speer proposed: “Today's buildings must be designed in such a way that their ruins can, after centuries, offer an impression of grandeur comparable to that of the ruins of antiquity”. To conceive forms and volumes that in their decay, the remains would continue to convey beauty: Such a recommendation may seem paradoxical to us, but it only vindicates the poetics of the decline caused by the passage of time: the epic return to dust. Can we think of this idea transferred to the field of photography? What beauty oozes from the degradation of photographic images?

We make funerary steles, we make monuments, we make images. We do it to endure, to leave a trace of our passage on earth, a trace that feeds the hope of not being forgotten, or at least of delaying oblivion, that is, of postponing the disappearance of our survival in the memory of others. Because true death is oblivion. In some cosmogonies, such as that of the Swahili in Central and East Africa, the spirit of those who pass away remains in the sasha, which is a form of life in which the soul survives when it remains lodged in the memories of others. Only when the sasha fades away does everything end. The sasha inhabits the present, but spilling into a near past and future. The faded sasha becomes zamani, which is the spirit no longer recognized by the living but unfolding into eternal duration. The old family albums offer us a clarifying testing ground to distinguish the sasha from the zamani: those absent characters we recognize in the photos are the sashas, but those with whom we have lost the link and no longer know who they are, are the zamani. It is as if life condemns us to an unpleasant Alzheimer's disease: someone who belonged to our sphere of experience (and whose presence in our graphic biography is proof of this) becomes a ghost. And it is painful because it reminds us that soon we ourselves will be unknown to the generations that will succeed us. 

Everything, then, withers, the flowers and us, but as a ruse to gain time we resort to images. We want them to transcend us, even if it means reducing us to the condition of sashas or zamanis. That is why we treasure images in repositories and archives, with the illusion of recognizing ourselves in them and making them tell our story. But this is a vain illusion; paintings age and fade, and photographs fade. In the long run, every material support is perishable. Time punishes us all; it also punishes photography.

Photograph: from the Horus Archives

There are images in a traumatic state, sick, agonizing photographs, photographs that suffer some kind of disorder that disturbs their function as documents and disqualifies them from continuing to “inhabit” the archive. The link with the represented reality fades away as ghosts emerge. Photography was originally a promise of eternity: our bodies are doomed to disappear but our image will survive us forever. The camera was committed to serve as a memory device, but what happens when the photograph loses its memory? That is, when it becomes amnesic. 

To continue preserving those agonizing images is the post-photographic gesture of paying tribute to what remains of that photographic materiality in the process of vanishing, while nostalgically bidding farewell to the ruins of the photographic, its vestiges, the end of a biography crossed with wounds and unskilful stitching. Then, instead of a battered photograph becoming useless and we discard it without compassion, its function is transformed into an active message: the deteriorated photograph surpasses its condition of mere object to act as a symbolic gesture that reveals a powerful transformation: the damage and the wound go from being a trace of darkness to being a window of light. The wound becomes the place where the light enters. And the scars are then beautiful to us because in them we recognize the paths that have tanned our life. In the same way we recognize beautiful grooves that open the skin of the photographs, but which actually should open our eyes.

The Horus Archives: Kossuth Prize recipient cinematographer Sándor Kardos’s collection of vernacular photography, is the largest private collection in Hungary in terms of size, comprising close to one million images.

Take a contemplative look at the digitised part of the archive through Horus Archives' webpage here.

Read our interview with Sándor Kardos, founder of the Horus Archives here.