Archive and Affect in Contemporary Photography

This article concentrates on two contemporary photographers, Greg Staats and Arnaud Maggs, whose work generates an affective response by engaging in an archival practice. Drawing on Jill Bennett\u27s analysis of affect in contemporary art, including her discussion of the way work can be transactive, Bassnett considers how the work of these artists addresses viewers, and how different archival practices unsettle conventional viewing relationships. In the case of Staats, affect is activated by his engagement with archival sources. Staats draws on family history and Iroquoian traditions to address individual and cultural loss in a process that translates what Bennett calls “sense memory” into “common memory” through art discourse. With Maggs, it is the artist\u27s archiving of cultural ephemera that engenders an affective response. The objects Maggs photographs have been taken out of their cultural and historical contexts and relocated within the discourse of art. Through an analysis of the way selected works produce affect, Bassnett argues that these approaches to photography as an archival practice offer ways of negotiating individual and cultural loss