Exposed in the Shadow Archive
How do vernacular images as (audio)visual archives move and live their own lives?
This question is at the heart of my in-progress book project Expose and Punish: Trial by Moving Images in China and Beyond. My paper suggests the overlooked importance of ephemeral media (newsreel, orphan film, amateur photos, vernacular images, etc), especially what’s called cinephmera, in archival work and in exposing revolutionary violence as image-based abuse. My paper historicizes the incriminating catalogue genre (a cluster of ephemeral artifacts/materials with which people were all familiar in socialist China but that did not have a coherent way of naming it and that has never been treated as a genre or theorized): the systematically listed and ordered collection of “bad subjects” as evidence displayed for the purpose of public shaming and punishment. The paper is an excerpt about my auto-ethnographic encounters with images in both archival and recycled forms during fieldwork as well as a methodological self-reflection on found footage as archive. The paper reveals the role of found footage as key to a testing ground for approaching the lost, the silenced, and the forgotten. Such exploration also enables new archival accesses and redefines the audiovisual archive itself.
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