Periodically, during the pandemic, memes would appear about how Generation X folks are better than anyone at lockdown. Known as the latch key generation – coming of age during a time when divorce rates soared and adults shifted their attention away from their children toward self actualization – they are well practiced in spending time alone, at home, entertaining themselves. Gen-X people also lived through the demise of analog photography and weathered a loss of innocence as social media, pervasive data mining, algorithmic behavior manipulations and invasive surveillance technologies like biometrics have altered what it means to make and share an image.
The pandemic kept most people away from family and friends, particularly gatherings and life rituals such as birthday parties, weddings and vacations. During this time of forced isolation and introspection, people may have reflected more on the dynamics and feelings they experienced through their families or longed for these connections. The orphan images shown here, all analog photography from the late 1960s-early 1990s, have been collected from eBay and thrift stores. This subset of the larger collection only shows scenes that likely would not occur during the pandemic. The conditions of the pandemic add poignancy to the experience of looking at images of the intimacies and mundane encounters of everyday life, images from the shoeboxes and margins. By organizing them here with custom taxonomies, orphan images can be recuperated, connected with viewers and put into relation with one another in new ways, celebrating a minor photography.
Ariella Azouley has described a “civil contract” of photography and, when viewed through this lens, a kind of ‘family citizenship’ can be read or borrowed from these images. Saidiya Hartman’s work has invited viewers to reread the lives of those depicted in photographs in ways that honor their agency and their resilience in the face of challenges or to fill in the blanks with “critical fabulations.” Lauren Berlant has addressed how the affective attachments people have to their circumstances sometimes represents a “cruel optimism” that masks a devastating precarity. Perhaps we can acknowledge the minor struggles encountered by the multiple subjects depicted here. At the very least, this set of images can be a catalyst for finding momentary kinship.
Rachel Stevens | New York City
If anyone appears in an image and would like to have it removed, or request the original, please contact me at racheljstevens [at] gmail [dot] com.