Additional Works
During my research, I realized that people's views are shaped by the information they receive and manipulated by power. At the same time, Max's workshop on archives and power deepened my understanding of the power embedded in archives. Controlling and managing archives means controlling information. Governments, institutions, or individuals can control archives to decide which information is made public and which is hidden, thereby influencing the public's right to know and guiding public opinion. Archivists exercise power when selecting, preserving, describing, and providing access to archives. Their decisions affect which information can be utilized and which is forgotten.
This raised a question for me: Since the knowledge we receive is controlled by power, how can we determine the truth and choose which facts to believe? Can I also become an exerciser of power? These questions led me to an idea: to create a set of archives myself to tell a fictional story.
Due to the lack of time to create a systematic work, I focused on the views on streets of London. With a sense of "bias," I spent my spare time at night observing and recording the strange things in London. The streets at night seemed to be shrouded in ambiguity. Both physically and psychologically, things in the night environment appeared different from those in the daytime. I attempted to capture and organize these elements with emotional express through photography, creating a situational archive. In this narrative, London seemed to become a refuge for weird things. The streets of London became a place filled with oddities, danger, and uncertainty. In a modern life dominated by public narratives, I tried to use this situational archive narrative to emphasize the importance of diverse personal perspectives.
Although I really liked the style of this set of photos, I felt that the work did not fully convey the concept. The limited continuity was insufficient to tell a complete story. Moreover, some viewers even reported experiencing a sense of relaxation in the photos, which confused me….
Archiving London Street, Roy Jianing Cheng (2024), Digital Photographs.