The first part of this project entailed mining the Metropolitan Museum’s digital archive for images that caught my attention. An attention that was not informed by a deep, or even considered understanding of the artifacts I was looking at, but a process that was more instinctual. In the looking and the subsequent saving and printing, I found objects that ‘worked’ for my images more than others. The working, too, was not guided by any hard or fast rules, but by the simple placement of forms and colors alongside one another.

As I began constructing the paper assemblages, I would shuffle through a large pile of these scraps, fitting them on floral wire and painter’s tape like fragile bouquets. It was only then, after the final form of the piece was settled on, would I go back into the archive and learn about the objects I had chosen. 

Here, The Woman of Algiers is an onyx bust created in 1867 by Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier, was chosen for its unlikely material choices. Much of Cordier’s work I discovered was an ethnographic pursuit that came out of the abolition of slavery in France and a deep-seated belief that beauty exists in all people, everywhere. His looking and seeing beauty lent itself to the redefining of the medium and its subject matter in Europe at the time.

In In Defense of the Poor Image, a landmark essay by Hito Steyerl, the author argues for the value in the unexpected and details the expectations of such unexpected images, specifically low-resolution yet accessible images, and how they function differently in the world. She makes an argument for how to see value in such images. 

When I think about the bust of The Woman of Algiers, I am not only thinking about its formal properties or Cordier’s defense of his subjects and materials. But this unlikely attraction I have to cheap images, the need for me to save them, revisit and cherish them. I want to praise them for their impermanence; their disposability because that degradation is a sign of a life well lived. Photography is not typically praised for these qualities yet I see that implicit value. There is something noble to me in not diminishing the digital artifact. Rather, I want to see them for what they are, as an expression of a valuable referent that has led many lives and who will undoubtedly outlive me.