A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
Barthes

i was at the provincal archives today, looking thru photos for the ford show, looking at fords, and there were a few folders that caught my attention

a collection of modernist public and semi public buildings in small towns in the 50s, as part of the population and building boom post war. a new bank in czar, a grocery store in sexmith, a service station in killiam, a town hall, a library. v. little people, the toronto dominon bank in killiam had a family beside it, just one f amily, and not posing, i think that one of the reasons why i love modernism so much, and albertan modernism more, is that it was the first attempt to do something delibrate, non functional and new--it was aping functions, but after a century of farm houses built for the weather, and schools built forever, it was the first mark of fashion in these towns. the images did not come labelled with producers or authours, so that the buildings became collective, they were labelled not with the banker or the realtor or the photographer, but the name of the town. i keep thinking that is what i want from my photos, that they will be patterend according to geogrpahy, time, style--and i keep trying to kill authorial voice, but these shots, so documentary, so impoosible to view as anything but a mark of alberta history. looking esp. at this folder, the tension b/w what i want to do (have my photos made anonymous, have my voice replaced with an anon archival offical, theatrical one) and what i have been doing (making my photos part of an offical conceptual project, make my voice loud with personal baggage and quxiotic eccentricity), became starkly clear.

speaking of that, i also saw photos of a shiners parade from the mid 70s, pmarching down jasper ave, in front of what is now the family good sign, but then was a hazard orange safeways, the way it was shot, we had dancing girls in polyester aqua costumes dancing belly first, in front of a sign that said safe disco--the camp possiblity of that line, saftey disco, and its realtion to edmonton, and the neighbourhood (now a fairly high end queer one) came clear to my mind, the pyschogeographic underpining of edmonton on my pysche, my history, and the cities history made me realise that the oblieration of authorial voice was a discourse and not a monologue. not only northcentral modernism imprinting its pysche on me, i was imprinting my personal history on it, what was an intractable problem about authorial voice became an intractable problem about authorial voice in a historical landscape.

i think one of the things i am trying to do with the ruscha show, is related to this, to talk about the issue of memories that infect yr brain, that you cannot have yrself, that safe disco and the toronto dominon bank near killiam (and i have family near killiam, and i saw photos of the fort, of sundre, of olds, of forrestberg of the places where t hose buildings where shot new) become part of a corperate history, of both belonging and isolation. ruscha was from oklahoma, and the aesthetics/politics/gendering of the ford, of memory, of being an artist, of history, is in that one small sentence.

(totally not going to use this for the didactic panel, but it was interesting)