The methods and methodologies quandary

This is my project revised.

What I want to do

What has the digital age meant to the Family Album?

Having completed earlier projects in the area of family album, I would like to explore this further, on a larger scale and in greater depth. I would like to explore the effects of the digital age of photography and computing on the traditional analogue and storage of family photos and mementos and the reasons for the change. Is it all about convenience and ease? If so, is it worth what has been lost? Do people even realise what society is losing as a price for their convenience?

I would like to further my understanding of the objectification of the photograph and discover how this is changing almost daily with the introduction of social networking and digital imaging and storage. I would like to explore the loss of the treasured object and perhaps how it can be regained to work alongside our new technologies. My aim is to define what exactly it is that has been lost (if it can be defined) and explore how, if at all, it can be rediscovered.

Having purchased a wedding album on eBay, my ideal project would be to follow the history of the album, tracing the family and working with them to rediscover their memories, whilst documenting by means of analogue photographs, cine film and audio recordings.

As the cooperation of the family is paramount to this project going ahead, and I have not yet had contact back from them since I wrote them a letter before Christmas, I have put into place an alternative working plan.

I will work on my own, tracing my own family history throughout the UK, tracing people that I have lost contact with, or indeed that I have never met before. Following the same lines as above, I would work on recollecting memories, and documenting the communications involved by letter, photos (old and new), audio and cinefilm.  My plan is to go back to my Grandparents, then work across siblings and back down to my generation, discovering second and third cousins, who may have similar memories of people and places to me. This will involve travel to Scotland (where my roots are based), to study and research family history, meeting and spending time with the people I discover, recording meetings and photographing as well as collating pre-existing photographs and documents and communicating by letters. It may involve visits to other parts of the UK, dependant on what I discover during the research.  I plan to use as little digital technology as possible, to emphasise the loss of the object in the telling of family history. It’s all about the process of recording memory. Has memory been discarded? Is it no longer trusted? What is trusted instead, if anything?

I would like my written thesis to concentrate on the future of family album in the digital age, and my practical work to be more about what has been lost and how it can be regained, thus supporting my written work.

I would like to review my work periodically using exhibitions to gauge responses from the public and my peers outside and within the university. I would expect this to help me understand whether my work holds any interest to the wider public as I view my work as of public interest.

I would like my final outcome to be in the form of a book and an installation exhibition of the final selected work.

Ideally, if I have worked with the family who the wedding album belongs to, I would invite them to the final exhibition and present them with their original wedding album and a history of the project they have been key in creating.