Portsmouth Open: Liv Harris

The series in the twilight and when the sky is clouded is a material exploration of my great-grandfather’s archive of 500+ glass negatives, documenting family life in England, during the 1930’s – 1950’s. Creating a dialogue around materiality and ephemerality, I re-print photos from this archive using sustainable analogue photographic processes, collaborating with my great-grandfather whilst also commenting on the need for further sustainability in the wider photographic industry.

The photographs in this archive explore a range of subjects: childhood, play, boats, planes, machinery, animals and landscapes, often depicting a romantic view of everyday life. A sense of hope for the future of industrialisation is evident in the photographs, with construction and engineering being a consistent theme. This led me to examine links between the poetic language describing the rapid technological advancements of the mid-twentieth century and the playful, fleeting nature of childhood.

Works in this series are titled using borrowed phrases from the archive, of phrases taken from early photographic manuals now used to represent notions of time and ephemerality (‘psychic manifestations on the sensitive plate’).
Despite this series engaging with photographs from my family archive, when viewed 100 years onwards, within the context of the climate emergency and current research into the large-scale pollution resulting from this early era of photography, these archival images hold more weight.

With the current rise of digital systems and artificial automation, I use a range of physical techniques to intervene with the archive in different ways, shaping the cropping, sequence and scale of prints. The triptych using found wooden panels references cabinets of curiosity, a precursor to museums. With a variety of family and industrial photographs displayed across the wooden panels, equal importance is placed on the subject of each photograph, disrupting ideas of what is worth photographing, archiving and displaying.