Nicky Bird - Question for Seller

This exercise came at a great time, I had just been notified that Oxfam had upgraded their website and they had a large number of LPs and old photo albums for sale. I spent some time looking through the site looking at some of the victorian photo albums that they had for sale.

I could see that these albums had become displaced and dislocated from their owners and now these archives had lost some of their provenance.

Question for seller (2004-2006) by Nicky Bird is a project whereby she has obtained portrait and family photographs via ebay; where possible Bird has queried the seller regarding the photos for sale, whether the seller has a personal link and is therefore able to provide some provenance to the photos or if the photos have no information attached to them.

Bird then detailed what she knew about the images and the series was presented in a gallery exhibition.

At each gallery that the series was presented viewers were invited to look around and comment on the images, these comments then fed back into Birds text for the next gallery presentation. When the gallery presentations were complete, Bird put the photographs back up for sale on ebay and at each gallery allowing the viewing public to purchase either one or more of the photos in the exhibition.

It can be difficult to understand why someone would sell an old photo album, but as I have described above there can be a number of circumstances by why either single photos or whole collections can come up for sale, from charity shops, to online sites, people can sell images quickly and quietly disposing of old family memories and records due to space, family dispute or they lack any emotional context to the owner.

With the images gathered together, they create an archive in which the images can be read rather than lost, misplaced or never seen as they are hidden in the backs of drawers, they become a product of existence. The artist has saved them from oblivion and made them available for reinterpretation.

Bird has taken the images she obtained and gathered them together in a gallery setting so that the images can be viewed by members of the public to see if the individuals or groups recognise something within the context of the images which indicates their membership to social or cultural groups or backgrounds.

Certainly for some viewers they will view the images and get no response at all, 'Why do some images arrest attention, animating the viewer, while others fail to speak to the particular spectator" [Wells 2017:32] Perhaps in these cases the viewer has no context to place the image within and therefore has no significance to them. For the viewers who are drawn into the images they will start to view the whole gallery looking to see if other images can contain their interest.

When the images are sold, the purchaser will have invested due to a link to the image, whether it be an interest in the period of the image; the mode of dress, social standing, an interest in the portrayed pastime or an interest in something within the image, like the site or a piece of machinery 'providing evidence to its perceived indexicality' [Bull 2010:103] The images have been sold and liberated form the archive but they have increased knowledge overall.

The fact that these images are now art does not change their value as objects and it does not change their meaning; they have been turned into a work of art and now have an additional meaning which adds to the the overall provenance of the image. The sales value of the image would depend on the provenance and value of the artist within market conditions, as well as the perceived uniqueness of the image especially where there are no other copies.


References

Wells, L., 2017. Photography: a critical introduction 3rd ed., London: Routledge.

Bull, S., 2010. Photography, London: Routledge.

Nicky Bird. 2006. Question for Seller. [ONLINE] Available at: http://nickybird.com/projects/question-for-seller/. [Accessed 17 August 2017].