ED IT
— the substantial system for
photographic archive maintenance
‘surely a world with far to many images is a world that does not know itself’ — Fred Ritchen
We live in an image-choked world. Taking pictures has become one of the principal ways to experience reality. With a camera in our pocket at all times, snapping away has become a daily act. And what becomes of all those pictures, or rather: files? They end up in hard drives, memory cards and clouds. The rapidly expanding size of the photographic archive threatens to render everything as trivial.
A collective of young female photographers, designers and thinkers developed the antidote to this devaluation of photography. Using their systematic approach to selecting and editing, a person’s complete collection of digital photos is reduced to ten pictures that represent the whole. Ten pictures, to become meaningful again. A practical, hands-on solution to an abstract, omnipresent problem. In a world of ongoing picture taking (het leven vastleggen?), editing becomes the skill of the century.
The result of this research project is presented in two books. One with an elaborate and precise dogmatic system of editing an archive using one complete real-life sample archive. And an appendix with telling discoveries found in this proces.
The project was initiated by Marloes Krijnen and presented at UNSEEN in Amsterdam in 2013.
In collaboration with Ola Lanko, Sterre Sprengers, Nikki Brörmann & Simone Engelen