Abstract
My feminist, practice-led research engages with photographic archives as sites of omission and possibility. Focusing on the Wallal Archive, held by the State Library of Western Australia, documenting the 1922 solar eclipse expedition, I explore how fragments reveal what is occluded, particularly women’s labour and presence. I draw on Sara Callahan’s view of the archives as dynamic spaces to open new readings. This unfolds through two modes. First, during Covid 19 lockdown, unable to access collections, I turned to Polaroids. These materially unique, unpredictable processes, shaped by temperature, chemistry, and chance, mirrors the contingency of archival memory. Inspired by Peter Buse’s idea of the Polaroid as a photo-object without delay, I use this medium to foreground presence and touch, rephotographing archival images and staging them with domestic scenes, elevating banal moments into sites of significance. The second mode, culminating in Archiving Totality, involved rephotographing the Wallal Archive using a Hasselblad film camera. I captured fragments guided by Barthes’ punctum and an art-historical lens that transforms the mundane into symbols of care and labour. Material traces like dust, mouse points and task bars underscore the entanglement of analogue and digital. By centring what peripheral my practice is, it resists archival tendencies to privilege grand, masculine narratives. Instead, it reimagines the Wallal Archive as a living, speculative site open to multiple, contradictory stories. This approach aligns with Banu Subramaniam’s call to activate archives in ways that reveal uncertainty and care. Ultimately, my work transforms photographic archives from static records into active spaces where overlooked pasts and new futures can emerge.