Her Lover’s Shadow… Traces from the Snuff Box Archive of Desire

2003-2004; Four Photo-Snuff Box Objects composed of original SX-70 Polaroid photographs and velvet-lined cigar boxes. Installation. Dimensions variable.

Her Lover’s Shadow… Traces from the Snuff Box Archive of Desire invites viewers to touch the trace embers of photography’s shadow archive, the stuff of queer histories that has been neither officially preserved nor entirely snuffed out. The installation revisits the origin of the photograph by re-positioning photography in the history of physical objects of carnally intimate contact and use like the inhaled stimulant tobacco that would have been stored in the portable eighteenth-century portrait case. Inside the boxes, nestled on velvet linings reminiscent of the interiors of the little cases made to protect Daguerreotypes, lie four Polaroid pictures. Polaroid is that instant photographic technology that retains a flash of the transgressiveness of the kinds of photographs categorized as snuff erotica in part because the SX-70 Polaroid, introduced in the 1970s as the magic machine that would make the darkroom obsolete, provided subcultures a means of self-documentation, a way to make a quick positive print without risk of negative exposure in the surveilled commercial photo lab.

Exibited in Objects in/and Visual Culture: An Exhibition, Zoller Gallery, School of Visual Arts, Penn State University, March 2004.