A journey through American photo archives in five books

The date of creation of the numerous photographs contained in the small but substantial A Field Measure Survey of American Architecture is stated on the cover, in order to avoid misunderstandings: they are not the result of a single, albeit complex, journey across the United States, but that of a careful selection and compilation process carried out over the years stored in the archives of the Historic American Buildings Survey at the US Library of Congress. Although the remarkable formal homogeneity suggests a typological seriality with a strong authorial component, the photos were not even taken by the same person, let alone by the author of the book (himself a photographer and an editor well known for his essays). In other words, we are about to delve into the sentimental map of an architecture which was not conceived by big names but rather moves between the codified and the vernacular and cuts across the country through its contradictions, starting with those made evident by the facades of the buildings—abandoned, ambiguous, fascinating—and often arriving at those revealed from other unexpected points of view, without forgetting those hidden in the interiors.

In 1886, at the age of three, Lora Webb Nichols moved with her parents to the small mining town of Encampment, Wyoming. At the age of 13 she began to keep a diary and at 16 to take photographs. These two activities continued until her death in 1962, giving us a good idea of what life was like in an isolated rural community at the beginning of the 20th century and during the Depression. Having fallen in love not only with the original materials preserved thanks to the enthusiasm of Nancy Anderson, a family friend of Nichols’, but also with the technological and legal challenge of recovering and preserving them, artist Nicole Jane Hill accidentally becomes an archivist and, as the new link in an all–female story, tries to finally put the 24,000 images in the collection in order. Far from the metropolitan charm of a Vivian Maier, the style of Webb Nichols—who then ran a photographic studio in Encampment—is direct and amused, affectionate yet anthropologically impeccable, and provides us with a privileged and intuitive access to a mine of information and suggestions still to be interpreted.

I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine is in some ways the summa—but only one of many possible—of the conceptual work of visual artist Pacifico Silano. Having always been interested in the tangible heritage that resides on the one hand in printed art and on the other in archives, Silano has worked since his earliest works on the rediscovery, recovery, reduction, reformulation and recontextualisation of materials in public or private archives—including his own—connected to queer culture. Whether it is a matter of materials collected by the Richard Marshall Collection of Gay Pornography or re–photographed from 1970s erotic magazines such as Blueboy, Honcho or Drummer, the feeling of melancholy and tenderness, reinforced by a family biography affected by the stigma of AIDS, and the attempt to dismantle from within the iconographic logic of homosexual desire persist throughout the creative arc of the Brooklyn–based artist who, through cuts and superimpositions, creates large installations similar to delicate memorials, where the main object of the research is, although evident, more often evoked than openly declared.

Although often complicated today by the sometimes lunatic demands of political correctness and cancel culture, the one for human rights is unquestionably one of the most important struggles that still needs to be carried on, no matter what. Doris Derby was not only a witness to the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, but also a frontline activist. Her archive, which recounts the birth, development, victories and disappointments of the movement, has the double strength of a private and public document where, as in any well–crafted story, the intimate and everyday stories of important but forgotten figures are intertwined with those of great protagonists such as Muhammad Ali, Alice Walker, Fannie Lou Hamer and Jesse Jackson, and in which major events such as the Jackson State University shooting, Martin Luther King's funeral or the 1968 Democratic Convention dialogue with minor but not trivial events such as the lives of African Americans in the Mississippi Delta. An invaluable first–hand documentation, a still very fresh testimony that lives on in a truly engaging enthusiasm.

Who is Bernard Taylor? This is the question director Peter Ward, who seems to share only his birthplace with the mysterious character, asked himself upon discovering and acquiring his archive. Elusive and withdrawn, before his death Taylor had spent his life collecting the most diverse materials (cadastral maps, landscape photographs, vintage postcards) on the small village of Hastings–on–Hudson, in the state of New York, with the intention of putting them together in a book that was then self–published in only a few copies destined for relatives and friends, and of which a second edition is now finally being published. How does this new catalogue differ from the original idea? And how far can Ward and the publisher go in interpreting and attributing the eclectic texts and in essence deciphering the elliptical narrative on which the work hinged? In this delightful volume, rare–book expert Tom Lecky (also from Hastings–on–Hudson, as it happens) gives us a light and amusing, yet not insubstantial, reflection on the thrill of discovery and the art of knowledge, but also on authorship and self-irony: a journey steeped in melancholy in which one smiles at every page, and in which every detail represents an extra step towards solving the Bernad Taylor case.