Mechanisms of Failure

Video with sound

8.33 duration

produced by Bee Elton Photography

Archived Photographs and viewfinder

Photo P.Coss

The title of this work is partly drawn from the title of my father's thesis and the failure of memory and the specific to the strata of the familial through found photographs as part of my father's archive . Over 60 silver gelatin photographs were found inside an Ilford Box. For over sixty years, the box had never been opened until filming for this video commenced.

I am documented beginning to open the box wearing black archival gloves, removing the photographs occasionally looking closely at some of them which are placed carefully, one by one on the floor, in a grid form within the white space . The objective white space gave the sensation of floating in a white temporal void. The second part of the video is held suspended , the photos dissolving into a swarm of fine-grained minerals and sands. As the grid of photographs begins to dissolve, they take on their own agency, shifting the viewer's gaze from an objective distance to a more immersive position within the frame.

The images used in the video are based on fifty-eight aerial survey photographs from 1950, which my father captured near the area of my own recent fieldwork in the Tanami Desert. Taken from a low-flying aircraft, the images were originally used to condense and objectify the landscape for mining surveys.

These works reflect on ideas about the entanglement of memory and time, as familial archives, alongside the assemblages and de-assemblages of time , traces of which are throughout the work. By editing, revising, and deconstructing both familial and fieldwork encounters, I create space for new narratives to emerge, continuously assembling and reassembling the strata of these collected documents.

Still image from Mechanisms of Failure

Photography Bee Elton

Mechanisms of Failure stills

Photos Bee Elton Photography

Archived Photograph

photo P.Coss