Keyword: Family

Ruth_LABELED6-278x360

I am more of an archivist than an image maker. Many of my projects involve a collecting and curating of images that I purchase from both stock image sites and individual businesses. My fascination with the commodification of the image—and experience, which, I argue, is often dependent on the image—is what led me to focus my practice on researching common themes within already existing images. In my dig of stock image archives, I became intrigued with a number of the system’s structures, especially the use of keywords and the disparity between these two forms of communication (words and images). Paired with images using the keyword “labor”, for example, were images that were also defined by words such as “happy”, “proud”, “dancing while working”, etc. The theatricality of many of these staged clips—such as men dressed in tights dancing around a white room with a shop broom— were both comical and offensive. They were heavily tagged with American ideologies, in a similar way that these images labeled as family portraits portray a Western view of the family. They, too, were purchased from stock image sites.