The second in the series of publications "Notes on Archives" dedicated to
archival practices, Culture is Our Business offers a comparative
case study on the archival policies of a commercial agency and a
non-profit independent organization through the example of a 1919
image by photographer Willy Römer.
In the process of transferring analog material to digital data banks,
small independent archives are often not able to keep up with bigger,
economically driven archives, such as stock-image companies. Notes on Archives 2: Culture Is Our Business considers the case
of Willy Römer, who in 1919 took a photograph of the street battles in the
media district of Berlin during the German Revolution. Circulating widely
throughout the twentieth century, Römer's photograph in 2004 came to be
owned simultaneously by a number of archives. Among them were the
commercial stock-image agency Corbis, founded by Bill Gates, and the
Agentur für Bilder zur Zeitgeschichte (Agency for images on contemporary
history), an independent organization established by photo historian
Diethart Kerbs. Both Corbis and Kerbs's agency handle and make available
the same image based on extremely different concepts and working
processes. The book considers the complex issues around these two
agencies. At stake in these differences are how the image's story should
be told, and how this telling is embedded in the viewing and understanding
of history. This publication includes material from the artwork Culture
Is Our Business by Ines Schaber along with a conversation with
Diethart Kerbs and a text by Reinhard Braun.
"Notes on Archives" is a series of publications by artist Ines Schaber
about archives and the
practices we conduct in relation to them. Produced over the course of more
than ten years, the publications feature a series of case studies,
research, concrete projects, and reflections on the questions and problems
that image archives pose today. The aim of the work is not to find or
create another institutional archive per se, but to develop a practice in
which the set of problems that archives produce is in fact part of the
process one engages in.
The artist understands the archive as a place of negotiation and writing.
"There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of
memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential
criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its
constitution, and its interpretation," writes Jacques
Derrida.
Ines Schaber (born 1969 in Reutlingen, Germany, lives and works in Berlin
and Los Angeles) is a visual artist. For fifteen years, she has worked on
the notion of the archive
through which she has examined a set of questions underlying archival photographic
practices. The projects, case studies, writings, and artistic works she
has produced in relation to these questions seek to trace new or alternate
archival practices. Since 2014, she teaches at the California Institute of
the Arts, in the School of Art, Program of Photography and Media.
