This person’s name has fallen off the page due to the photo album’s wear and tear over time. Although she was once documented in the archive, now only her image is left. Her gradual named erasure from the archive both limits and makes limitless how we can imagine who she was. In, essentially, becoming a blank canvas on which the viewer/observer paints meaning, however, we must be careful to also sit with her unknown, inevitably complicated, convoluted life.

Questions

What do you imagine from this picture?

What do the details of the picture tell you about her? What do you imagine about her?

How can her agency be maintained (and can it exist to begin with) in an anonymous artifact?