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Finding ourselves - in boxes of scraps and photos online: A Carson & Miller Photo Album

This chapter is a visual essay that challenges the concept and purpose of the photograph album as an artefact, which while traditionally being seen as an innocuous domestic item, has become “increasingly unruly and eclectic” (Langford, 2007, p. 24). The work investigates and expands the boundaries of the photograph album, exploring its purpose and the way in which it is now made and used. The research methodology employed the parameters of a game structure, including the imposition of rules, in order to generate the chapter content. The research was undertaken through a mode of practice that focuses on appropriation, selection, arrangement and curation in relation to contemporary ideas of the digital album. It builds on what Kendall Walton (1990) describes as the ‘collaborative daydream’, and references Andre Breton’s (2011) Surrealist notion of ‘objective chance’.

The research insight presented in the chapter addresses the effects that online culture is having on the ways in which we define and make visual representations of ourselves. The chapter is significant for those interested in the contemporary context of the photograph album and its shifting existence (including artists, photographers, archivists, curators, historians and theoreticians). The work contributes to the expanding body of knowledge on the photograph album and its place in 21st Century culture, and contributes to the discourse in contemporary art on collaborative practice (particularly with regard to the difference between collaboration and participation, as defined by Beech, 2008).

The chapter was created as part of the authors' collaborative art practice as Carson & Miller. In addition to authoring this book chapter, Carson (with Miller and Wilkie), was co-editor of the volume. The 480-page publication examines the photo album in both visual and written form, and contains contributions from twenty respected international authors, including academics, curators, photographers, collectors, researchers and writers (http://museumsetc.com/products/album).