Practice mapping the relationship between personal artifacts and the understandings they lead you to. No additional context is required for these images to tell a story. All you need is two photos and a pen. Free PDF download provided below!
Ever heard of 'reparative description'? In archival work, this is the practice of updating an artifact's description to correct outdated language, harmful representations, or historical inaccuracies. Basically, this is how we remove derogatory language that may have been commonplace in the past, but is no longer viewed as acceptable by cultural institutions or the general public. It becomes necessary when you have decades of Black life archives, for example, categorized under slurs we would never use to describe ourselves.
The title of this exercise, 'Restorative Description', alludes to the faulty logic of the former approach and a desire to return that descriptive authority to the subjects of our photos. What we're working to restore is your inner world and intuition. I hope this exercise helps to restore confidence in yourself as a storyteller, no matter your archival skill level. If generations of racist and exclusionary institutions felt emboldened enough to think they could tell our stories, we're overqualified for this work already.
Instructions
Select any two inherited photos from your archive. Try to find Place them on opposite ends of the page. Work from the outside in, filling out the descriptive boxes to the best of your knowledge until you reach the center. The who/what/when/where can refer to the personal context of the photos or inferences you can make by associating the different images. There are no right or wrong answers. The category prompts can be interpreted however you'd like.
The central 'Story Link' space is for you to share what gives these photos significance in a personal context, what you can infer about the subject of the photos or about yourself.
Try not to leave any categories blank. If you don’t know these details about the photo, offer yourself a question to revisit in its place. I'd love to hear what this exercise brought up for you in the comments below!
What's new with version 2?
Initially, I received feedback that there weren't enough instructional guidelines to make the prompts clear. I amended that by creating different categories for both internal (feeling) and external (found) context.
I also noticed that a lot of folks didn't know what to make of the central story link category. Identity can be such a polarizing word. Some people (whose worksheets I didn't think to scan at the time) wrote a lot in that space! But that's mostly true for those who are more comfortable with writing as a part of their practice. I don't expect that of everyone, especially elders who are already reluctant to share. The storylink prompt was changed to 'your why' in an effort to make it more inviting and less self-scrutinizing.
What are we practicing here?
- Making inferences with the indirect context of found artifacts.
- Starting with the image and creating meaning from it rather than the reverse, which often results in self-imposed limitations.
- Dispelling the myth that history is an objective and unbiased practice.
- Getting comfortable inserting ourselves as the handlers of personal artifacts and intimate histories.
- Accepting that the unknown details surrounding these artifacts don't prevent us from engaging with them.
- Critical Fabulation: A term created by radical Black historian Saidiya Hartman to describe the collective responsibility to amend the archival silences that have failed to characterize historical records of Black life, especially the lives of Black women. Not "fabricated" as in made up. FABULATION, as in a necessary act of creation and repair. Instead of just patching a story riddled with holes, we cement ourselves as a part of the solution.
Recommended Reading
Venus in Two Acts by Saidiya Hartman (Free PDF linked)
By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done. By throwing into crisis “what happened when” and by exploiting the “transparency of sources” as fictions of history, I wanted to make visible the production of disposable lives (in the Atlantic slave trade and, as well, in the discipline of history), to describe “the resistance of the object,”36 if only by first imagining it, and to listen for the mutters and oaths and cries of the commodity.
This text continues to inspire. I read it repeatedly, a couple years before I even considered designing archival workshops. Funny enough, It wasn't at the forefront of my mind when I originally created this exercise. It wasn't until a workshop participant pointed out the similarity that I began to associate this exercise as a practical application of Hartman's theory. Not only filling a space, but acknowledging that our presence is also a transformative event in the story these artifacts tell.
