Living archive of my children’s physical play events

Over a period of five years (from 2013 to 2018) I have collected images of the physical play of my own children, with their friends and neighbor kids. Living archive is here defined as the documentation and collection of a series of play events over a period of five years. ‘Living’ refers to the act of archiving, as the documenting, recording and (re-) arranging of traces over time (Van Alphen, 2014). The archive is “not a passive storehouse of old stuff”’ (p.16), but an active site where knowledge (such a memories, traces) is not only stored but constantly re-constructed. The living archive is open, fragmentary and unstable (Ketelaar, 2018). It consists of more than a hundred photographic sequences and stand-alones that all serve as kinetic markers/traces of the original physical play event. The archiving itself can be seen as an iterative process that makes use of the following organizing principles: capturing, selecting, ordering and arranging. The process is open and unfinished – any adjustment or change can be made at any time.

The living archive consists of photographic material of my children’s physical play events. Similar to photographer Sally Mann and her project ‘Immediate Family’, my journey starts close at home, taking pictures of my own children living their lives, playing along. At times I pick up the camera spontaneously, at times I carefully choreograph the situation – thereby drawing a thin line between staging the play event and engaging with the ‘real’ thing.  Choreographed or not, the pictures undoubtedly carry a certain aesthetic that intervene with the lived experience.

The photographs are taken over a period of roughly speaking, five years (2013-2018). At the start of the archive, my children are respectively 7 (Lisa) and 9 years (Luuk) old. At the end they are youngsters in highschool. The photographs are taken with a simple camera, the Canon EOS 6D, with a 20.2 megapixel CMOS sensor for high resolution. No tripod is used. All photos are taken by hand and captured in a raw image file, so that all the original data are preserved and no information is compressed. The camera is always close-by. At home, I can grasp it immediately from the closet that is situated behind my working desk. When I go out with the children, I bring the camera along. Most physical play events that I have captured are improvised moments that just spontaneously happened. However, some play events (especially in the category ‘movement ecology’) are choreographed, that is to say the physical play still happens on the spot but I interfere as I give my children instructions or I ask them to repeat an action. The photographs are mainly taken in and around our home in Amsterdam, and supplemented with photographs taken during holidays, especially at out watermill in Lisseuil/France.

This way, I have collected thousands of images since with each event I took around 200-300 pictures. After I have taken the images, I import them from the camera to my laptop, and from here a long and labor-intensive works starts: opening the images, looking at them and selecting the images that I want to keep. This is not only a rational but also an intuitive act since the choice-making is based on aesthetic aspects, content and degree of expressiveness – so affective values play a huge role in the selection process as well. This also means that images are left out in this stage: they are erased, forgotten, neglected or stored somewhere else. Three criteria are used in this selection process: aesthetic (e.g. no clear composition, too messy, sexual connotation, pictures where children are posing for the camera), technical (e.g. over-exposed, blurry, oblique, too far away/too close) or content-wise (action is unclear/ambivalent, there is no physical expressivity).

Selection is necessary in building up the archive, since it is impossible to keep everything (Breakall, 2008). The archive becomes an archive because choices have been made and information has been ordered and systematized (even if the latter is done in a rather intuitive and playful way). 

The images are slightly edited and manipulated. Editing actions include the adjustment of brightness, saturation and contrast. All images are shot in full colour, however, in the editing process I decide that some physical events/movements should be framed in black-and-white while others remain in color. It is not easy to explain why I sometimes decide for a framing in black and white, and why in other times I decide to use full color.  I guess it has partly to do with aesthetics: I most often decide for black-and-white when the original photographs are rather flat and when the action itself does not come to the fore. There is however another reason. The black-and-white photography provides a different access to the physical event/movement as colour photography does. Jon Erickson (1999) suggests that color photographs point more to themselves (as objects in their own right) while black-and-white photographs are more obedient as they draw less attention to themselves. White-and-black photography display a sense of utility, and therefore they are very useful in documenting events. “Moving into color photography […] becomes less a record of a conceptually interesting event than a visual work to be appreciated for itself. (p.98) This is also the reason why I use a mix of black-and-white and color photograph – and why most events are rendered in color. The yellow shirt in the living room dance, the red shirt in hotel room dance, the ominous blue sky in sea dance: the colors reveal affects, intensities and forces that were once present in the initial event but that are exaggerated and amplified in the color photography. With the use of both black-and-white and colored photographs I show the friction between the archive and the photograph. The photograph points to the original event (as evidence/as a record), while at the same time it becomes a visual in and of itself. In some ways the photograph also detaches itself from the original event, and in the colored photographs this becomes most clear. 

From the selected images I now start to re-construct the physical play event again. In general, the images are put in a chronological order. However, sometimes I decide to put images together that resonate with each other or I categorize them in terms of the theme (‘shelter’ is a good example of such a category). All images are put in a sequential structure, except for a few images that are so ‘singular’ that they can only be grasped in isolation. I refer to them as stand-alones: they outlift a specific moment or movement and in a sequential order this would get lost (the upside-down legs in the category hide-and-seek/Coventry hotel is an example of a stand-alone).