what this research has been trying to do recently – and hence a recent hiatus in posting research online – is to identify, source and more directly engage with the relevant collected research materials, ie. the photo-albums of late nineteenth / early twentieth century ulster photographers james glass and william fee mckinney, these physical photo-objects, the internal and external digital databases and the archive sites in which they circulate – as the preliminary work to some kind of process of defining a typology or taxonomy – centred upon the relations of site, display, access and agency within the circulation of these archive albums.
that notion of negotiating the relations of site, display, access and agency within the circulation of objects perhaps works also as a definition of the act of curation itself.
some images from these preliminary research encounters with the physical photo-albums of late nineteenth / early twentieth century ulster photographers james glass and william fee mckinney, held in institutional and private collections, are reflected visually here only after their translation through simple online sketch software – as of course a practical issue re copyright and access, although as a device it also seems to envision the metaphor of a research process in which elements are yet to be defined:
the empire of the senses 