Interview with Paul Druecke

David Robbins
New Art Examiner, April 2000

Initiated in 1997, A Social Event Archive solicits, collects, and preserves a category of social document–the casual photograph of an informal social occasion--that's been right under our noses for well over a hundred years. Ever since the camera got popular we've been snapping photos of birthdays, of anniversaries, of friends hanging out in the basement on Friday night, and we've been saving them somewhere. A Social Event Archive invites us to consider these images apart from the personal value we've attached to them and to put them together, one photo per contributor, into a neutral framework. Rescued from the obscurity of photo album or shoebox, recycled, and collated for public view, the photographs netted--currently the Archive's collection numbers 600--comprise a remarkable record of our attempt to make contact with the species. The critical mass they attain turns out to be is tragicomic, at once a chilly appraisal of human habit and a testament to human ingenuity.
 
Any person may contribute a photograph to the Archive. Submissions are restricted to single photograph - color or black and white - measuring 3x5" or 4x6". The occasion pictured may be public or private, recent or historical. Photographs are archived in the order received. (Photos cannot be returned, and submission indicates agreement to participate in all presentations of the Archive.)
 
David Robbins sat down to talk to the Archive's founder and manager, Milwaukee artist Paul Druecke, about the project.
 
David Robbins: In your opinion, which photo defines the most extreme point in the collection to date?
 
Paul Druecke: Probably one that was submitted at a benefit held for the Archive. Visitors were encouraged to donate photos at the door. Someone donated, anonymously, a blank Polaroid with the anarchy symbol painted on its surface.
 
DR: That's a bit of a stretch!
 
PD: Well, it is a photo and it symbolically depicts a conception of the social. The untitled anarchy photo fits nicely into the Archive at #501.
 
DR: What are some other unusual entries?
 
PD: There's a snapshot of a funeral scene.
 
DR: Weird.
 
PD: Isn't it? It's often obvious whether someone is trying to be weird, or sentimental, or arty with their contribution, but how many people take a snapshot at a funeral!? We can see the casket, the solemn people.... Someone else submitted a photo of a gravestone of an unknown soldier from the Civil War, with no people around, just the gravestone.
 
DR: How is that a photo of a social occasion?
 
PD: That one is incredibly smart. It's a photograph of a marker of a social occasion, twice removed. The photo is an artifact commemorating another artifact of a social occasion - of a particularly horrendous sort, obviously.
 
DR: So the contributor chooses which layer of the definition of "social" is to be activated.
 
PD: Absolutely. By leaving the definition open, I've ended up with a much broader one than any I could've devised. It travels well beyond my personal limitations. I find contributors making the point that all social ocassions are not pleasant moments.
 
DR: Okay, so "social occasion" is purposeful contact between human beings? These aren't photos of random groupings of people on the street, after all. But how do you then explain the inclusion of the photo of the kitty on its back?
 
PD: Very early on I became aware of respecting the decision made by the photographer. You have to acknowledge the invisible presence of the photographer, and their decision to record what we're now looking at. The kitty on its back was a moment that touched the photographer. There was a connection - a social connection. Or consider the one of the seals on the pier in San Francisco. It's just seals on a pier. But seals are very social animals.
 
DR: I see. It doesn't have to be social occasion among humans - although the seal gathering was most likely a social occasion among humans, too. There were probably lots of humans gathered together, ogling, outside the frame of the photo. That photo depicts two instances, really.
 
Okay, so "social occasion" becomes any exteriorized experience that has as its focus another life, even if, in the instance of the gravestone, the life has passed. Does that definition work for you?
 
PD: I've just gone on instinct. If I had tried to calculate the range evidenced in the Archive, I'd still be planning.
 
DR: Where'd you get the inspiration for the Archive?
 
PD: I came upon a photograph of a social occasion which pictured myself with a group of friends in Montreal. This was, oh, maybe a year after the occasion, and I hadn't much memory of the incident, so the image struck me in a fresh way. Everybody in the photo was having fun - except me. I looked sulky, removed from all the action. Seeing it was a shock. It got me thinking about how film captures telling psychological moments, and how frequently that occurs in the vernacular, mundane, social-occasion photograph. Some kind of story is being told in every one of them. Question is, what's the story? Photos of this sort are so familiar that we don't think about them. I began to wonder what would happen if you took them out of the personal context and brought them into a public context, and presented them to people who would have no connection to the original occasion. So I started inviting people to contribute one photograph from their own collections.
 
DR: Directing it away from yourself was a smart move. The project could have become a narcissistic one, all about, say, inserting yourself into others' social occasions.
 
PD: I have other art projects that fill narcissistic needs! In this proposed archive, the interest was in getting the public to participate. I had a gut feeling about how the Archive should come together. Blurring the distinction between artist and public was one aspect of it.

In that the project would be evolving, growing, ongoing..."the public" would be the largest segment of people that I could reach. First, I approached a circle of friends. Getting a photo from each of them was easy. But once you want to move beyond your immediate circle, how do you proceed? I just started knocking on doors, walking around various neighborhoods in Milwaukee. "Hello, I'd like to tell you about a community art project called the Social Event Archive. We're asking for one photograph per person of any social occasion." It was amazing how many people wanted to hear more, that this solicitation was something they could tolerate. Lots of times I had to leave a flyer, hoping they would follow through on it. Most people didn't, of course; I visited 150 to 200 houses but got no more than 12 photos from that phase of it.
 
DR: The response depending on the neighborhood?
 
PD: Definitely. In a neighborhood near, say, a university, people were sympathetic. In a more working-class neighborhood, I encountered more resistance. In a truly poor neighborhood, people just didn't have the luxury of paying attention to something like this.
 
Most of the photos in the archive have come via word-of-mouth: people I knew telling people they knew, once, twice, three times. Slowly I started to get photo contributions through the mail. At this point I personally know less than half the contributors. The archive has grown slowly. The logistics of outreach requires ongoing attention, energy, invention.... I'd like everyone from my grade-school principle to Vaclav Havel to know they're invited to contribute a photo.
 
DR: Right now the collection numbers 600 photos. Is there an ideal size for the Archive?
 
PD: Since there's obviously no limit to the source material why impose an artificial terminus? These photographs are almost invisible, there are so many of them. It's mind-boggling how many there are.
 
DR: The number of them, the fact that it's a kind of photo found everywhere, all over the world, is due of course to the democratization of the camera. Right now we're hearing a lot of talk about how the Internet is democratizing the production and reception of information. A Social Event Archive is underwritten by the twentieth-century democratization of a nineteenth-century technology. You've hit upon a lowest-common-denominator material that's been undervalued.
 
PD: The fact that they're taken for granted makes them excellent subject matter.
 
DR: It's a kind of photo everyone has made, but it doesn't end up there.
 
PD: The experience of the Archive is built on an accessibility that quickly blossoms into complication. Some people won't notice all the complications. But I do think everyone encounters one they can't get around: here's a group of photographs that wouldn't normally be grouped and organized. I mean that in a physical sense, too: photos in the Archive are presented in a single horizontal band, as opposed to the way they're presented in a photo book or a collage. The fact that they've been organized at all complicates the experience of looking at even a single photograph in the Archive. It lends an allure to the photographs. People love to look at them. I appreciate accessibility anytime, but in this project it's particularly important.
 
DR: And yet the Archive doesn't simply replay that old Pop strategy of taking common, banal material and introducing it into the context of art. I think, that's because the Archive is itself a kind of museum, or at least an elevating context. It doesn't require further sanctioning by an "official" museum in order to activate it. The system you've devised for gathering and mounting the collection already has the effect of elevating the status of all the individual photos within it. It's do-it-yourself.
 
PD: Because I'm an artist, I do consider the context of the Archive to be art. But at the same time, its relation to art is tricky. This trickiness is purposeful. It keeps us on our toes. It keeps contributors on their toes, as well. Some contributors will think "Oh, this is my chance at some sort of fame. I'll put in the most artistic photo I can." The nature of the Archive is such, though, that the artistic photo may not hold a candle to the casual informal shot.
 
DR: That may be because the Archive changes the photos that are introduced into it, in a way that a traditional archive, which is a purposely neutral mechanism that really just serves to preserve and make available the photos in it, does not. A Social Event Archive activates context, as an idea, and that changes the quality of attention we bring to these photos. We look intently at the Archives' snapshots and informal photographs of social gatherings - more intently, certainly, than if we were looking at them in someone's photo album, an experience that is usually pretty banal, sort of the visual equivalent of listening to someone tell you about last night's dream. When we're looking at the Archive we're engaging the idea of this collection as much as the photos in it.
 
PD: The photographs do acquire an ambiguity. For one thing, contingency is introduced. Once a photo is placed in the context of the Archive, the possibility for perceived contextual relationship is overwhelming. Remember, photos are archived in the order received. Photo #457 'Aunt Helen's 100th Birthday' exists between a photo of a sparsely attended dance in a church basement, and a photo of a gay pride parade. It also groups nicely with the other 25-30 "birthday shots", which is understandably a common theme. But the immediate relationships of proximity, or of similar content, are just the beginning. Five photos away from "Aunt Helen" is an eerie snapshot of an Arab marketplace in Medina c.1954.The 'Medina Market' is a murky composition with a mysterious, foreboding sense of space, while Aunt Helen, at 100, is in focus, happily surrounded by flowers and loved ones - the well defined center of her world. The Archive allows for, even accentuates specificity, but not independence. The viewer has to bounce back and forth between the photographs in order to construct a world. Their juxtapostion makes them dependent on one another. Within the construct of the Archive an individual photo is a partial world, and you really feel that.
 
DR: Do you think there's a kind of violence done to a photo by introducing it into the Archive? You've forced the photo to accomodate a new meaning.
 
PD: I think there's a struggle, a tension between the photo's old status and its new one. It's not a matter of taking something away - the photos don't lose their primary fascination: "Who are these people?, What's going on? Look at that amazing dress she's wearing!" - it's instead a matter of adding layers. There is an accumulation of positions, and it becomes hard to settle on any one. Yet while you can spin various positions from the photograph, at the same time you can always work your way back to the particular pleasures of the photograph of Aunt Helen's party.
 
DR: What's not exactly clear, though, is just who has added these layers. How do you define your role?
 
PD: My role keeps shifting. Who am I in relation to these photos, to the photographers, to the contributors? There's been an evolution. Today I'm comfortable with being the organizational force behind it. I'm the organizer and the manager of the Archive, in a traditional sense. Actually, the Archive is a project of Art Street Window, another project of mine. So I've distanced myself with yet another layer. Of course, there's more to it than just the organizer's role because, initially, there was an imaginative leap involved in the decision to bring these photographs together.
 
DR: Right. The system for gathering the photos is an invention, as is the idea behind their gathering. You are the author of the context for the photos, but not the author of the photos. There's the individual photographer's relation to the project, and there's your relationship to the project.
 
PD: And the contributor's relation to it! Contributor and photographer are not always the same person, remember.
 
DR: I hadn't thought of that!
 
PD: The contributor is the most vital component. The power lies in them, more than in the photographer. Anybody viewing an installation of the Archive will note it's accompanied by a 'Contributor's List', with a title and date ascribed to each name. A 'Photographer's List' would be impossible.
 
I think that your "authorship" language breaks down when we talk about the Archive. "Author" doesn't seem right. These are collaborators. Participants.
 
DR: Collaborators on something that remains elusive.
 
PD: Wonderfully so, I am consistently interested in the hard-to-pin-down, and every once in a while, as in the case of the Archive, that tendency serves me well. It has in the Archive, which sets up a lively, precarious context for "ordinary" photos and then invites everyone to participate. We can say it's a collaboration between myself, the organizer, and the people, many of them strangers, who contribute the photographs. But how do you assign authorship to such a thing?
 
DR: And you're not a curator because you're not making selections for inclusion.
 
PD: The only thing that would prevent a photo from being included is if it violates the guiding principle, which is that it be a photograph of some social occasion. I haven't excluded any photos yet, though of course I reserve the right to do that.
 
DR: Don't most of the photos depict middle-class experience? The Archive doesn't seem to include much at the high or the low end of the social spectrum. Not that the middle-class bias of the pictures to date is only a limitation; it's a virtue as well. We're provided with an incredibly complete picture of middle-class American social life.
 
PD: Until recently the Archive has been confined more or less to my sphere of influence, true. My preference is that the Archive keeps evolving. My sphere of influence should gradually disappear. I'm starting to get photos from different countries - from Germany, Denmark, Mexico, and Japan. I am working on having the Archive travel to Japan. It'd be perfect - such a distinct culture with a camera obsession equal to America's.
 
DR: The anthropological dimension of the Archive is very different than, say, the one framed in the famous 'Family of Man' exhibition. That photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955 situated the camera in service to a warm and fuzzy anthropology, recording the faces of Kenyan children, old Peruvian grandfathers, and Norwegian housewives, and showing that all the world was really a big family with the same concerns. By contrast, the anthropological dimension of the Archive is more ambiguous, edgier, tougher.
 
PD: More disturbing, yeah. The Archive presents one big, happy, slippery, boring, uncomfortable, and exciting world. It grows out of a feel-good inclusivity, maybe, but adds a tension to it.
 
DR: The emotions put into play are certainly complex. While looking through the Archive we have a sense of how ridiculous our social moments look. The photographs, gathered together, almost direct a sense of scorn toward the little humans in their little moments, and yet at the same time there's a great poignancy and great sympathy for our attempts to communicate with each other, the ingenuity of our attempts at contact: How hard we try to avoid being alone!
 
PD: A viewer can't read his or her interest in these photographs merely in terms of an end of the millenium irony. It's there, yes, but it's right alongside the poignancy, the genuinely interesting moment captured, whether it's clowning around or sincere.
 
DR: Repetition and singularity, both running full blast.
 
PD: What we find in the Archive are instances of existence, for those photographed, for the photographer, for the contributor, for the viewer.... These instances open up existential questions: Can a person's relation to the world be special, or is it just biological, learned, redundant?
 
And is it at all appropriate to talk about quality? It jumps out at you. Some people are photogenic. Others aren't. Why? A person might command a moment or be comfortable in the moment, but does that become the moment captured by the photograph. Or is the moment that's captured the one made by the most awkward person in the photo, there is the corner, off to the side.
 
That birthday scene on the roof in 1923 - can that be said to be qualitatively better than this backyard picnic gathering, of different people, in 1984?
 
DR: Whether the feelings of that group on the roof can be compared to the feelings of the group in the backyard picnic is fascinating. Emotional minutiae, embedded in time yet abandoned by the flow of time. Fixed yet gone, gone yet fixed.
 
Is the warm/ cold, poignant/ridiculous, split relation to emotion framed by the Archive your own? Or is it separate, and not necesssarily your personal expression?
 
PD: It's the ambiguity that's exciting to me. That's the personal part of it. For me, an inspirational moment, as in the idea for this Archive, will unfold gradually, building up and tearing down my notions. I feel differently about different photographs at different times. Isn't that general human nature? At one time you'll feel a particular photo may be cute, but at another you see it as pathetic.
 
DR: Actually, my reading of the photos as poignant and ridiculous is probably just a portrait of my own response. I'm anthropomorphizing the context, when actually it has as neutral a relation to judgement as any photo has. So my characterization of the collection in terms of rendering judgement - as poignant, as ridiculous -is just my response. A reflection.
 
PD: The mirror element, yes it's very strong. There are a number of reasons for that, I think. There's the fact that the photos picture fellow humans. There's the fact that these same photos exist in everybody's world. We all know them. There's the fact that even if you don't have a photo album yourself, you're in somebody else's photo collection, somewhere, and you know it. And finally, because of the subject matter, when we look at these photos we see a fixed version of the larger people-world we interact in day to day. There's a micro/macro dynamic.
 
DR: The mirror aspect is not contained within the frame of a photograph, though. It spills out of the frame, filling the space between the photos. The context - the Archive - itself becomes a kind of mirror. Because, yes, it happens that the Archive is now 600 particular photographs, but it could be 600 other particular photographs of social occasions and the Archive, as idea, would still function as it currently functions, wouldn't it?
 
PD: Yes. Each contribution has its own logic, but at the same time every contribution is equally important. That structure remains intact.
 
DR: So all the photos are completely replaceable, then?
 
PD: No. The experience of the Archive is still the particular 600 photos comprising it. They could be different, but they're not. The experience of the Archive is the experience both of the structure and the actual photos. When a viewer engages with the Archive, it has that magic of being very specific.
 
DR: The magic of that specific photo of Aunt Helen.
 
PD: And the magical specificity of someone choosing one photograph to contribute to the Archive.
 
DR: Would it be fair to say that the Archive is a repository of the positive emotional condition represented by each photo; of the positive feeling toward the events and people in the photograph, both for the photographer and the contributor?
 
PD: That description is too touchy feely for me. Don't get me wrong, I love the upbeat emotional quality of the Archive. It's a fun project. But it's a great project because something edgy - which comes from the neutrality of the presentation, and from the forced confrontation of so many different worlds - competes with the positive stuff. Each response is kept off-balance, by all the others.