Anatomy of an archive
Giorgio Di Noto
Anatomy of an archive is the first chapter of a project on analogue photographic materials, such as paper and film, that have now expired and remain unused in the warehouses of various Italian museums. These same materials were once used by photographers to document the landscape, architecture and historical, artistic and archaeological artefacts in the museum.
In the storerooms of the Sigismondo Castromediano Museum in Lecce, I found a series of packages of photographic paper that had expired decades ago and were used by photographers of the time.
Time and oxidation of the silver salt emulsion had caused the paper to become unusable, immediately blackening on contact with the developing liquid. After several attempts, I tried to find a way, in the darkroom, to use this material while obtaining readability of the images. So I tried to print some photographs I had taken in the museum's storerooms, of those same exhibits that had been photographed and printed with that paper in the past, representing important fragments of the Apulian landscape.
The result is not the same, what emerges are unrecognisable images, very grey and dark, in which the signs of chemistry and alterations to the paper are superimposed on the printed subjects.
I also worked on some unfiled glass plates found in the museum. On the one hand, I photographed the surface of these plates, focusing on their appearance not as photographs but as photographic objects, showing the marks left by time. On the other, I printed a temporary and ephemeral archive of these never-catalogued images with the same expired paper: using the "lumen" technique, which avoids developing and fixing the paper, I impressed it only under sunlight, so that these photographs remain visible on the surface for a limited time, until they vanish in the unstoppable blackening process of unfixed paper exposed to light.
This experiment attempts to investigate various aspects of the relationship between photography and the archive, between temporality, materiality and documentation, with the intention of proposing a different point of view on the museum landscape.
The first chapter of this project was realised during the 'Anatomy of a Museum' residency at the Polo Biblio-Museale di Lecce.
Born in Rome in 1990, he studied photography and darkroom printing techniques and since 2011 he began his research on photographic materials and the relationship between visual languages and printing processes. In 2012 wins the Pesaresi Prize with the project "The Arab Revolt", which is selected in "The Photobook. A History Vol. III" by M.Parr and G. Badger and later acquired by the MET of New York. In 2017 he published "The Iceberg which received a special mention for the Author Book Award at Rencontres d'Arles 2018 and is among the finalists for the Prix Bob Calle du livre d'artiste. He lives and works in Rome where he teaches Photography and Printing Techniques.
There's plenty of room at the bottom
There's plenty of room at the bottom is the title of a 1959 speech by physicist Richard Feynman and is considered the first scientific reference to the potential of nanotechnology: "What would happen if we could arrange atoms one by one as we wish?".
These images are part of a long-term project and visual research into the possibility of representing, through photography, a technology and science that has been particularly important in recent decades and at the centre of major technological developments.
The daguerreotype, the first photographic process in history (coinciding with its discovery in 1839), has been identified by recent studies as one of the earliest examples of nanotechnology. Dealing with infinitely small things, with visibility and invisibility, with light and matter, nanotechnology seems to have a special relationship with photography.
Through the use of scientific images made with powerful microscopes and photographs taken in the laboratories of the most important nanotechnology centre in Italy, There's plenty of room at the bottom is a project that seeks to create visual connections about one of the sciences that deals with what we cannot see.
The project involves the use of different materials and photographic techniques, including daguerreotypes, whose properties are somehow related to nanotechnology, from both a historical and a more contemporary point of view.
Some of the works in this project will be realised thanks to SIAE's Nuove Opere 2023 call.