With Discovered Faces? Figures of Writing and Photographic Archiving, by Graziano Arici

Abstract

What happens when a photographer-archivist archives his own pictures of writers on a large scale? What becomes of his archive? Does it read as a manifesto? What of? The survey of the Archivio Graziano Arici, comprising thousands of unpublished portraits of writers, provides an opportunity to analyse what is at stake in this photographical exercise and, thus, in the very constitution of the archive and the devising of its program: could it be seen as a text without words? The relation between the photographer and his writers offers an opportunity to observe interactions between artists at work. Photographing the writers of the present time, building up a memory of them: wouldn’t this be a dazzling writing of the archive and archiving of the written in which the photographic archive would write its own program while archiving the authors’ faces?