“So what goes on here?” [asked Fallowell]. “Good question,” [the man in charge] replied, adding, “Conflict is only how we started.” […] “How would you define this place?” “As a curiously growing animal.” “And who owns it, who pays for it?” He smiled, said “Not me,” and vanished backwards ’round a corner.
This mysterious conversation took place at the Archive of Modern Conflict (AMC), an archive whose collections are equally as enigmatic. The collection of over 4 million photographs, guided by curator Timothy Prus, will most likely frustrate single-minded scholars, but delight the visitor looking for the obscure, provocative, or kitsch. Kodachrome photo albums, books of textile samples, images of 1930s college undergrads scaling buildings, and nazis relaxing in the sun—are just some of the gems to be discovered in the unassuming brick building in Holland Park, London.
Image from The Night Climbers of Cambridge by Thomas Mailaender, 2014
The Archive of Modern Conflict was founded by wealthy media magnate David Thomson in the 1990s to house images produced out of or relating to human conflict from the 19th and 20th centuries to the present. This guiding principle has been taken to its most abstract tributaries, reflecting how the turbulent edges of conflict and war lap up into media culture and production in the most unexpected ways. Images of peace and even amusement and humour are surprisingly common, but they provide a shadow relief to their more violent counterparts; as Brian Dillon of Aperture Magazine muses, “…in the same way that peace is not the absence of war, so war does not abolish the quotidian.”
Image from The Corinthians: A Kodachrome Slideshow, edited by Ed Jones and Timothy Prus, 2008
Not surprisingly, the archive has attracted a wide range of collaborators. These collaborations have been fruitful in the way of exhibitions and a number of limited edition artists’ books, which the archive offers for sale in their online storefront, AmcBooks.com. They also occasionally produce a journal, AMC², which features material from the collections.
The AMC’s books are produced with attention to the tactile experience that makes the stuff of archives so intimate, and context driven. Some quite literally reproduce the formats of the originals, such as photo albums, or mimic the feel of the medium being reprinted, such as photographer Stephen Gill’s Archaeology in Reverse.
Archaeology in Reverse seems to mimic the feel of matte photo paper through its heavy pages. It uses photographs to document the run-up to the 2012 London Olympics, not as portrayed by mainstream media, but as experienced by the inner-city development of Hackney Wick. It is just one of a number of volumes born out of a longtime collaboration between Gill and the AMC. One of which folds out to reveal a process of tree clearing.
A tree marked for clearing, image from the artist’s website
This process of clearing, and of loss, is minutely observed. Images depict urban encroachment on nature, as well as the impact of development on urban spaces. Garbage dots the forest undergrowth or emerges from algae filmed ponds, and construction sites look like archaeological digs of a lost civilization, empty of people.
Archaeology, and archives, have a long and sometimes troubled history of salvage anthropology. That is, they reclaim evidence of societies and cultures against their inevitable decline. Photographs can serve much the same function. As the AMC’s James Welch explains, “photographs by their very nature capture moments from the past, and it’s easy to interpret this as a record of loss, but it can just as easily be seen as documenting change.” Gill’s book, then, documents loss and change, but also comments on the function of photography as evidence, a permanent reminder that can be stored in an archive.
In this vein, issue 7 of AMC² preserves evidence of a lost culture of protest. Born out of AMC’s The Great Refusal, Protesting 1948-1984, an exhibition which ran from October 2013 to January 2014 at the Hayward Gallery, it contains mostly black and white collages that layer posters, newspaper clippings, photographs, and other ephemera of the protest culture that emerged from the near-eschatological popular culture after the atom bomb. The archival materials in The Great Refusal depict the human resistance to destruction, violence and loss as much as they do the push for drastic social change.
All images are from AmcBooks.com unless otherwise noted.
Find Archive of Modern Conflict artists’ books in the library through the library catalogue.
library@ecuad.ca 
604-844-3840 520 East 1st Avenue, Vancouver, BC
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