Post-postmodernism and the archive: uncertain identities and "forgotten" legacies

THE DISCOVERY

Early in 2005, a dramatic discovery was made in the attic and basement of a home in Southern California. It was the complete archive of a photographer apparently active in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. A battery of prints, negatives, logs, and equipment constituted this surprising discovery and revealed a previously unknown chapter of photographic history.

The findings were contained in numerous trunks and crates containing crumbling platinum prints and well-preserved glass negatives along with volumes of logs and journals detailing the journeys and activities of one Timothy Eugene O'Tower. From these notes it is known that O'Tower explored the West in the era of Manifest Destiny's westward expansion. The archive was transferred to Terry Towery, a distant relation of O'Tower's, who is a professor of photography at Lehman College of the City University of New York and Parsons School of Design in New York City. Towery, who teaches History of Photography as well as other courses, says that one of the most startling aspects of the discovery was the familiarity of so many of the images. In reviewing the archive, one notes images that scream photo history from images that are similar (to the extent of almost exact framing) to seminal images from the 1860s and '70s by Mathew Brady, William Henry Jackson, Timothy O'Sullivan, and the like. Many were labeled with locations but very few with dates, leaving chronological identification to the text of the logs and more often to conjecture.

O'TOWER'S STORY

The following biography is excerpted from a catalog produced by Towery and Peer Gallery where the first exhibition of O'Tower's work was held in the Fall of 2006:

  Timothy Eugene O'Tower (1829-1900) grew up in the shadow of the Tower
  of Eire. At ten years of age he was apprenticed to a gentleman scholar
  interested in optics and chemistry as well as philosophy and
  aesthetics. In his youthful apprenticeship, he spent his days making
  lenses and mixing chemicals and his evenings discussing philosophy and
  aesthetics with his master. In 1841, he attended to his master at
  Henry Fox Talbot's presentation to the Royal Society on The Pencil of
  Nature.

  Although much of his history is lost, it is known that he explored the
  American West and Far East at approximately the same time as those
  photographers in "the Canon," but his imagery went mysteriously
  undiscovered until now. In the early 1860s, he fled Ireland after
  shooting his wife for allegedly having a torrid adulterous affair. He
  went eastward in 1865 and simultaneously discovered photography as his
  chosen career path.

  After making an undetermined number of images in the East he made his
  way to America and continued in the tradition of the American
  exploration photographers. His close friends included both Edweard
  Muybrige and Timothy O'Sullivan. While Mathew Brady was away on one of
  his many extended journeys, Timothy Eugene had an affair with Mathew
  Brady's wife. Because of the affair, Brady refused to include O'Tower
  in the official exploration group. Unbeknownst to Brady, O'Sullivan
  hired O'Tower as an assistant for his expertise in both technical and
  aesthetic matters. In this manner he traveled with O'Sullivan and
  Muybridge, thus revealing the frequent similarity in imagery.

  News items and his death certificate reveal little about his demise.
  O'Tower's body was found both stabbed and shot. Never claimed by
  friend or family, he was buried anonymously in a public cemetery and
  he effectively disappeared from history. (1)

THE FICTION

O'Tower never existed. He is an identity and fiction created by the photographer Terry Towery as a vehicle for presenting a body of work that engages questions of authenticity, authorship, originality, the contemporary sublime, and the postmodern obsession with the simulacra of the past.

Culling images from the history of American landscape photography, Towery set out to reconstruct these iconic views of America's self-representational legacy. The "sets" are handcrafted from modeling materials with each sublime view no larger than a tabletop. The photographs were made in a studio using a large format 4x5 inch camera, a system that to this day is not dissimilar from early photographic methods. The photographs were then printed as platinotypes, a process that was quite popular in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and pressed further the appearance of historical "authenticity" in the work. O'Tower and his invented biography were the final step in the project that provided a framework through which the project could be presented.

Towery is a photographer for whom antiquarian picture-making practices and "alternative" (read historical) printing techniques have routinely been part of his artistic practice. Having studied at the University of Florida in the late 1980s under Jerry Uelsmann, who is best known for his masterful multi-negative darkroom composites that explode the notion of photography's mimetic function, it is perhaps not surprising that Towery is engaged in questions around what Barthes recognized as the "evidential force" of the photographic document. Towery writes: