Artist Web Projects Spotlight: Iñaki Bonillas, Words and Photos, 2014
Iñaki Bonillas, Words and Photos (detail), 2014– . Collection of the artist, commissioned by Dia Art Foundation for the Artist Web Projects series. © Iñaki Bonillas
By Kirsten Mairead Gill
Mellon Curatorial Fellow, Dia Art Foundation
In this series, we revisit works from Dia’s series of Artist Web Projects. Inaugurated in 1995, this series is the longest-running program of its kind in the United States, commissioning artists to create original projects for the internet. The full archive of projects is available here.
For his 2014 web project, Words and Photos, Iñaki Bonillas digitized the J. R. Plaza Archive, the vast photographic trove left to him by his grandfather. Throughout his career, this archive has formed the basis of his conceptual investigations into the nature of photography, and in particular, what it means to work with the medium in an age defined by the hyperproduction and manic circulation of images.
As unofficial archives, family photo albums are usually assembled by deeply subjective approaches to curation, categorization, and organization. They might more accurately be described as collections, a term that historically connotes personal and often idiosyncratic accumulations of material.
But in Words and Photos, the family album has been reassembled, presented as a digital archive and extended through associative text, itself an archive unto itself. The photographs are indexed with a large set of descriptive words—a photograph may be annotated as a having “cheeks,” “shoulders,” “wine,” and “mystery”—that each allow the user to navigate and search. In addition to the original set of terms, a search bar invites users to type in their own choice of words. The search words input by the user, which may or may not already be present in the text archive, appear on the site either as rejected terms (for their lack of relevance to the photographs) or entered into the official archive, adding another layer to the organization of the images. Through their interaction with the archive, the users begin to depersonalize the family album, writing a new super-text anchoring images in a linguistic, rather than social, context. On these multiple levels, the project stages a collision between photography and language.
At the moment, recurrent search words on the site include “virus” and “pandemic.” Our attempts at reading and organizing, the project shows, are always contingent, based on something present in our fleeting reality, yet external to the image. The readings multiply, casting a shifting web of language over a finite image set.
Bonillas’s ongoing work with the J.R. Plaza Archive is currently the subject of his solo exhibition “Jazz Covers from the J.R. Plaza Archive” at Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin. To see more, visit the gallery website.
