The Lives of Images, Vol. 3: Archives, Histories, and Memory

"The essays republished here contend with institutional and governmental deployments of images in efforts to occlude the forms of attenuated knowledge and proximity that they might otherwise generate. They ask and engage questions as to what practices might afford us a transformed sensitivity to what is present in and around our images, or what structural position(s) we take up when we are addressed by images, and relatedly what forces organize such positions and our responses. They ask and answer the question of what happens when we attend not only to an image's facture and form, but to its constitutive exclusions-its beveled edges-and to their unstated codes of intelligibility."
- Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, from the Introduction

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa is a photographer, writer, and graduate director of the photography MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. He is the author of a book of selected essays, Dark Mirrors (2021); and his most recent photographic publication, Hiding in Plain Sight (coauthored with fellow artist Ben Alper), was published by the Harun Farocki Institute in summer 2020. His work was recently exhibited at the International Center of Photography, New York, and in the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie, Mannheim, Germany. He has contributed essays to catalogues and monographs by Rosalind Fox Solomon, George Georgiou, Paul Graham, Steve McQueen, and Vanessa Winship. Wolukau-Wanambwa has guest edited The Photobook Review and written for Aperture, FOAM, and for both the Barbican and the Photographers' Gallery, London. He was an artist-in-residence at Light Work, Syracuse, New York, in 2015. Filipa César is an artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. She bridges contemporary and historical discourses in her films, video work, writing, and publications. Since 2011, César has been researching the origins of cinema of the African liberation movement in Guinea-Bissau as a laboratory of resistance to colonizing epistemologies. She premiered her award-winning first feature-length essay-film, Spell Reel, at the Berlinale 2017, and her film Quantum Creole was shown at the Berlinale 2020. Her work has been exhibited and screened widely, including at Jeu de Paume, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; São Paulo Biennial; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tate Modern, London. Arwed Messmer began his career as an urban documentary photographer. Since 2006, he has worked predominantly with image collections in archives with a focus on postwar German history, including East Berlin of the 1950s, the early years of the Berlin Wall, and the Stasi archives. He explores and analyzes strategies of visualization to create new ways of reading