MYSTERY PHOTO

Archival book 2006-2007. Created for Nottinghamshire Libraries.

Mystery Photo, hardback book, Hucknall Library, 2007.

Mystery Photo is a set of archival books achieved after two years of research and exists as twenty five copies in the permanent collections of libraries and archives.

The contents of the archival book is a collection of ninety photographs of 'mysterious content', submitted by the general public to Nottinghamshire's libraries over three months in 2006. These were sorted into Dewey categories by the artist, aware that the subjective scrutiny of the Dewey Decimal system allowed for multiple readings of each image.

I made the decision to include more than one category for each image. With the chosen one being highlighted, to demonstrate the thought processes that went into their classification. This approach allowed me to suggest several categories that could be used to define each photograph, and seemed the best way of describing images of this nature. In much the same way as a list of synonyms in a thesaurus can describe many aspects of a given word.

Page 22, Mystery Photo archival book, 2007.

Page 31, Mystery Photo archival book, 2007.

Page 72, Mystery Photo archival book, 2007.

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All images and information on this page are property of the artist. Alexander Stevenson 2008©