Album 31

Album 31 is a collaborative project that explores the contingent and mutable process of photographic production and its interpretation. In an ongoing process, we revisit decades of our own 'outbox' material to reconsider the decisions that led to each rejection. The project consists of a series of photographic works - but it also proposes a methodology; a set of practical and conceptual principles that allow us to continue our own practices and periodically re-configure them together. 
 
Album 31 began when we were invited to respond to the Library of Birmingham’s photographic archives, (specifically the albums of Victorian photographer and parliamentarian Sir Benjamin Stone). Stone gave the name ‘Album 31’ to the photographs that didn’t fit the classificatory system he used to make sense of his vast collection of imagery. The images in Stone’s original Album 31 were organised according to a different set of relations where intention and purpose are replaced by contingent and unconscious alignments. Subject matter, processes, time frames, co-exist in unexpected juxtapositions, allowing humour and the spectre of human darkness emerge.
 
Album 31 enables us to understand better the history of our own decisions, as well as imagining a different set of outcomes, possibilities, and potential legacies. We are interested in collaboration as a way of sharing ideas and providing companionship, support, conviviality, but also, one that can highlight tensions, difference and compromise.

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• https://ofksfoto.no/2015/03/29/fotografi...
• https://www.a-n.co.uk/reviews/album-31-s...