Combining critical fabulation and speculative annotation my project works towards creating a story for the otherwise unknown or unidentified sitters. Through a combination of speculative questioning, provocation, annotation, factuality and fictional storytelling, my project invites viewers to listen to what the unknown sitters in the images are trying to convey to them. This project encourages viewers to examine how visual forms of identity are recoverable through the ruptures in archival photographs. By engaging in conversation with historically dismissed photographs of unidentified sitters, this project invites viewers to (re)consider how the mundane and everyday collide with complex possibilities that transport these sitters into imaginative moments of refusal beyond what is permissible in the archival record.

This project recognizes that there are absences and erasures in the archive and that the historical record is tainted by lost histories and personhoods. The archival process of collecting and preserving is not neutral or objective. Archives and the archivists curating these records have their own positionalities inevitably shaping how photographs in archives are framed. Including what is deliberately left out or haphazardly lost or forgotten, archives are a structure of power, determining what materials do or do not survive. In doing so, I am suggesting new methods for (re)reading the histories told in the photographs while working with and around the lapses in information to create stories for sitters about whom there is little recorded history. Drawing upon crowd-sourced annotation as a way of responding to archival erasures, this project brings the photographs, and ultimately their subjects, back to life.

By asking “who may these unidentified sitters have been?” this project rejects the permanence and fissures in the archive and leans into the practice of speculative realism by blending the material record of the archive with informed imaginings that seek to bridge archival erasure. This project counteracts the silences and anonymity in the archive by bringing attention to the vastness of unidentified sitters and by encouraging viewers to give the unidentified sitters a story, a belonging, and a background, therefore giving them a connection to and a place in the present. By looking closely and listening intently, we can visceralize how even those who are labeled as unidentified carry an undiscovered or unexplored personal narrative waiting to be uncovered.

To get started visit “Narrating the Lives of Unidentified Sitters” Zooniverse page to begin interacting with these unidentified sitters through annotation.