Item Level

Five Walls
Melbourne - Australia
30 August – 21 September 2024

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The catalogue is an essential tool for any archive, in making its contents findable and accessible. But how does one create the descriptions and metadata for photographic material that has endless manifestations, formal and narrative connections?

Drawing on the evocative imagery from a recent section of her personal photographic archive, Melanie Jayne Sancho Taylor attempts to bring all these associations and inter-relationships to the surface, describing each image at ‘item level’ – the most detailed level of cataloguing hierarchy.

Photographs are playfully presented as a composite journey across the gallery space, enabling an unfolding set of experiences to be felt and considered. The inclusion of archival mechanisms for storing and display are integrated into the work, suggesting that order is not fixed, and that material is constantly in a state of being processed, organized, and sorted; meaning is always in flux.

‘Item Level’ presents a new approach to photographic archival description, discarding the traditional fixed, objective descriptions and exploring subjective, intuitive responses that embrace the transitory and layered nature of meaning and memory - thus creating a more accurate depiction of photography.