Our Days of Gold:

Introduction

In the closely cropped video, we see the torso and hands of a man wearing a T-shirt and stripy cardigan, standing in a room with bookshelves full of VHS tapes; behind him, stacks of kids’ books and sticker albums on a chair and on the floor. The video’s title informs us the man is Frank Abbott, although we don’t see his face. The Nottingham-based filmmaker and performer holds his smartphone up to the camera, scrolling down his Instagram feed.

“I first came across Our Days of Gold when it started cropping up in my stream. I’m just looking for it now. It was around the time when the visual quality of the Instagram got really good, and the images had a particular look to them. They looked a bit like film stills or analogue photographs. I’m just looking for one. Surely one will come up in a minute”, Frank says while continuing to scroll.

“One thing about them was they came up quite consistently, regularly appearing in the feed. But there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to them, beyond the fact that they all had a particular visual quality and a particular atmosphere, which was kind of not pushy but quite intriguing and quiet, which is not what you usually get on the Instagram feeds. So, I just started to look at them and they seemed to be telling some kind of story about someone called Cécile and her family. And it looked a bit like an unmade or unseen Eric Rohmer movie; a summer of sunshine on the beach. And the appearance of them was kind of consistently intriguing because they didn’t stop coming. And sometimes there was another aspect added to the story. And sometimes there was a kind of repetition of the same scene over and over and over again for quite a long time. And then another character would appear, or they would move to a room or a place like an orchard or they would be down by the beach. And I’m still looking…”

We see Frank continue to scroll down his Instagram feed: “you can see how much stuff there is on the Instagram because I’m still searching for them, and I haven’t seen one yet. But I will get to one of them eventually. And all they had was enigmatic titles like Cécile’s daughters go down to the beach, or This is a pair of flip flops. And so, I thought they were publicising a movie and I just kind of clicked on to them. And I’ve been doing it ever since.”

“Well, where is it? I’m going to search for it. Our Days of Gold… Our Days of Gold.” Frank types the Instagram account handle into the search bar: “There you are.” He flips his mobile phone so we can see the small screen more clearly, and a close up of a young woman in a car turning away appears. “There’s one of them, and then there’s another.” We see a couple of unfocused photographs scroll by, framed in white against the black screen. We can make out some colours and details, the metadata characteristic of Instagram’s interface: a red heart shape, a short caption. “And they carry on. Little moments, frozen. Moments from a film with no explanation, but seemingly a pattern of meaning which somebody was putting out week after week, month after month, year after year. Like a mysterious memory of a particular moment in a summer by the beach connected to Cécile.” Frank turns the phone around in his hand to read the caption. “This one says: ‘on an afternoon of the summer of 2005, Celine’s [sic] daughters went to the beach.’ Here it is.” Franks holds his phone horizontally to the camera: “Is it going to flip around? I’ve gone and liked it.”^[1]

The PARSE conference “Powers of Love: Enchantment to Disaffection” in November 2023 was the first public presentation of Our Days of Gold, a project that I have been working on for seven years. It is a durational piece that happens on social media. I share an image a day on Instagram from a photography archive I made with my friends and family in the early 2000s. One of the questions I have been asking myself around this project is how to convey the experience that followers of it have. There are Instagram users who have been following the project for its duration, so they may have been there for six, seven years, and most of them don’t know me. They don’t know who I am, because the Instagram accounts are anonymous. The strategy I used to try and mediate the work’s specificity for the PARSE presentation was to get in touch with some of the followers I had been in conversation with over the years, and ask them to make me a video about what their experience of the piece has been like, which is how the short video by Frank Abbott I described above originated.

The 1980s and 1990s saw the introduction of new forms of photographic archiving of daily life by artists such as Nan Goldin, Wolfgang Tillmans and others, experimenting with temporal and spatial strategies of staging the personal, and challenging expectations around content, professional technique and presentation. Today it is social media, and Instagram especially, that are seen as privileged repositories for both personal and anonymous photographic archives that confront the relationship between public and private life.^[2]

In this article I examine the temporal and virtual space of social media as a site for the public staging of a personal photographic archive through Our Days of Gold, an ongoing durational artwork, publicly accessible on Instagram via three accounts, namely @ourdaysofgold_film, @ourdaysofgold_digital and @ourdaysofgold. The project weaves together two separate temporalities that are now more than 20 years apart: the social media accounts started from April 2017 to mark the first anniversary of my mother Cécile Barbiaux’s sudden death. Since April 2017 the accounts have drawn on a photography archive recording an image-making collaboration with my family and friends that took place between 2002 and 2007.

This article engages with a series of key concepts and methods connected to art historical precedents and theories that I hope will shed light on Our Days of Gold (hereafter ODOG) and help me articulate ODOG’s position as an artistic research project that makes an interdisciplinary contribution to the fields of contemporary art, photography, social media art and moving image.^[3] I use an autobiographical, and arguably autotheoretical methodology in selecting sources that trace a personal genealogy of forms and ideas, to position myself as embodied and situated as a white European immigrant inhabiting the UK artistic and academic sphere for the past 18 years.^[4] The methods employed in ODOG are the following: archiving as art practice; converting analogue film into digital images for social media; repetition of daily tasks and procedures; using Instagram as a platform and framework for an ongoing durational artwork; and anonymity and reticence in making space for followers’ contributions. I will examine these methods in the following four sections: first, duration and movement; second, the archive; third, the grid and the labyrinth; fourth, anonymity, reticence and polyvocality. Through this personal investigation, scanning, recuperation, retrieval and transformation of the past invest ODOG as ongoing artistic work, and its analysis and discussion.

Duration and Movement

In ODOG an elusive, non-chronological, repetitive, contradictory and labyrinthine narrative allows for seriality, repetition and circularity. Rolls of film originally exposed in the period 2002–07 succeed one another, presented as three separate vertical lines dictated by Instagram’s grid-like structure. The captions accompanying the images allude to events that happened before and after the time in which the images were made. Follower @nihamel has written about the effect of repetition on his experience of ODOG:

Over the years, I have ended up disconnecting a little. The formal repetition on my phone bored me a bit. But the 6 protagonists of this story, including the photographer (you) whom we never see, have gradually taken shape in my eyes. You are no longer completely strangers to me even though nothing intimate is supposed to connect us. You are a bit like figurines arranged in a set to which I involuntarily give life through repetition. It is contradictory, by the way. You belong to me because everything I write is a sensation probably far from the truth, and at the same time you impose it. With these repeated images, these fragmented slices of life, you tell us: read this story of which you know nothing.^[5]

The durational aspect of ODOG as well as the repetitiveness of the images, which were often taken minutes or seconds apart, edge it towards the cinematic. David Campany has discussed the complexity of the relationship between still and moving image in his introduction to The Cinematic:

[…] the real potential of the photo-sequence lays as much in its difference from narrative cinema. The intrinsic gaps and ruptures between still elements allow the photo-sequence to be allusive and tangential. Indeed, telling a straightforward story with a sequence of stills is notoriously difficult, despite the popularity of cinematic spin-offs such as the photonovel.^[6]

The gaps In ODOG’s photo sequence are themselves temporal rather than spatial, such as a blank page in a photo book, or a gap between still images on the exhibition wall. In this way, the project is similar to cinematic experiments in-between photography and cinema such as Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). Gaps are made from time, from days between when an image is shared and the next one appears, moving the whole grid to a different position. The chance associations between images created horizontally across the grid are therefore always temporary and relatively unstable. Because the images shared on Instagram are available to experience not only as a unified grid on the individual account’s home page but in a variety of contexts, such as hashtag and followers’ feeds, the gaps between images and their immediate context are multifarious and uncontrollable.

Instagram users’ interactions with ODOG and reactions to different elements within the narrative, such as the news of Cécile’s death, have shaped the work, especially in the first few years. Artist @ildikobuckley reflects on the sense of shock caused by learning of Cécile’s death: “I suppose it’s after following this intimate story unfolding over this time—you managed to create quite a different relationship between subject and viewer… and like death itself it’s the last thing you ever expect when people seem so alive…”^[7] This occurred before changes to the Instagram algorithm were implemented that have made it less likely for the artwork to be seen by a vast number of users.^[8]

But even with limited interactions with users, it is the allusive and elliptical narrative of ODOG slowly unfolding at the rhythm of one image a day that makes it effective as a device to re-animate the time of Cécile’s life. Kathryn Weinstein @life_of_riley_retired observes:

Your project […] re-creates a world composed of visual fragments to construct a narrative that resists a linear progression. As a follower, I am conscious of feeling like a voyeur accessing intimate, often banal moments. The drama is the death of a loved one—which sometimes is approaching and sometimes receding—and is played over and over again—like a stone in a hand that is rubbed over and over again.^[9]

As I sought to examine ODOG’s approach to temporality, I realised I connect the imagery of the archive to photographic works that I saw as a student in the early 2000s, such as those by Goldin, Tillmans and Roni Horn’s You Are The Weather (1997). I also retrace my approach to durational art within my own biography, through the tradition of conceptualism that I was introduced to at art school at ERG, Brussels, in the early 2000s, by teachers such as Birgit Pelzer, Michel Assenmaker and Alain Geronnez, while embedded within a Francophone pedagogical space and contemporary art scene. The commitment to a procedural daily practice immediately evokes for me On Kawara’s routinised gestures and their consequences: deconstructing both artistic expertise and a sense of trajectory or development. On Kawara’s series of works, which include daily telegrams and postcards, and paintings depicting the day’s date, hand-painted in stark typography, have been framed by Jung-Ah Woo as a meditation on the nature of artistic labour and denial of artistic development and progress: “the predetermined mode of production eliminates the need or even the option for the artist’s spontaneous intervention and creative involvement. All that is required is a repetitive, almost mechanical labor…”^[10] According to Michael Ned Holte, “the longevity of Kawara’s project and its stability since 1966, with the inception of the Today series, suggests a wholesale rejection of artistic progress […] However, despite the tightly regulated labour or, rather, because of such stringent organization, Kawara’s daily activity is essentially meaningless, unlike production in a real workplace.”^[11] Mechanical labour and meaninglessness resonate with the sense of the procedural that motivates me to routinely scan and edit images from my box of negatives to publish on Instagram, without making any artistic or editorial decisions. The refusal to impose a meaningful order and to edit out repetitions and unsuccessful or clumsy images, allows for a cooling down of the emotional content of ODOG while the day’s date, part of Instagram’s metadata, is an unintentional testimony to the fact that I am still alive, and still thinking about Cécile.

ODOG has a beginning and will have an end someday, but it doesn’t have a “middle”, a central argument or position that would move it towards the photographic essay.^[12] This is another aspect that I see as connected to some of Kawara’s Date Paintings, known collectively as Today (1966–2013). What it also does not feature is a sense of intensity in duration, which characterised still/moving image hybrids such as Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985). The three parallel vertical narratives of ODOG sometimes align with unintentional accuracy, but most of the time the formal relationships between images are diluted by the insistence of the repetitive and banal.

Uriel Orlow’s text on Chris Marker’s La Jetée (“The Dialectical Image. La Jetée and Photography-As-Cinema”) is a meditation on the relationship of both still and moving image with death. According to Orlow, the work, famously containing mostly still images, goes against the grain of the notion that photography has a privileged relationship with death,^[13] “from time-fossil to death-mask whose subject is long gone and can only be narrated but not reanimated”.^[14] Discussing film critic André Bazin’s position, Orlow specifies montage as the condition for cinema’s privileged relationship with death as durational and repeatable event rather than as an eternal state witnessed by a residual image as with photography.^[15]

Bazin had already alluded to cinema’s own kinship with death based on montage, when he wrote as early as 1952 (almost pre-empting La Jetée): “Death is one of the rare events which justify the notion […] of cinematographic specificity. An art of time, cinema has the exorbitant privilege of repeating it [death].” And if the possibility for the repetition of death is in his view what marks cinema’s complicity with death, the condition of this repetition is montage.^[16]

The still images “expose the illusion of duration in cinema which is achieved through a ‘false’ movement. After all, cinematic movement is always just a very fast succession of immobile images (frames).”^[17] If photography is always already an image of death, then the moving image has an exponential relationship with death.^[18] The possibility for the repetition of death, or at least the repetition of the announcement of death through its insertion within a temporally stretched sequential montage, makes ODOG arguably a work of moving image rather than simply a collection of stills.

Orlow goes on to say that watching La Jetée is like taking part in an archaeological dig: when digging through space, a temporal dimension is excavated, which does not belong to the flow of time but rather to the labyrinthine circuits of memory.^[19] In the summer of 2006, my semiology professor Michel Assenmaker gifted me Philippe-Alain Michaud’s book Sketches, Histoire de l’Art, Cinema. The book places Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, titled after the Greek Goddess of memory, at the centre of a discussion of the relationship between art forms that historically sought to represent movement synthetically, such as sculpture and painting, and cinema as a new art of movement.^[20] Michaud argues that Warburg’s collection of images, ranging from Greek vases to Renaissance sculpture and modern advertisements, translated into the common medium of photographic reproduction, which he pinned in a loose grid, using photography as a tool for the cinematic montage of a diverse visual archive.^[21]

The durational aspects of ODOG place it firmly within photography’s “Expanded Field”, theorised by George Baker in a famous text first published at the time of the archive’s initial capture, and drawing on developments in photography and contemporary art that were novel then.^[22] Observing the closely cropped photographs of Horn’s beloved Margrét in You Are The Weather, a photographic installation of 100 portraits, which struck me unforgettably when I saw it as a student in 2003 at Galerie Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, one is confronted with the repetition of subtle variation within groups of images hung at eye level in a circular formation. Here it is the embodied movement of the viewer along the rows of images that, I would argue, creates a “moving image”. Looking absorbs the viewer in contemplation of the closely cropped portraits of a beloved’s likeness, while the image is put in motion by their body. Walking along works in an exhibition space and scrolling down the Instagram app on a mobile phone both require a certain quotient of conscious bodily movement to animate the repetitive image sequences. The viewer/follower of ODOG activates the images when they navigate through them within their Instagram feed, or on the account’s page, filling the gaps between them by drawing on their own memories and associations, producing their own cinematic montage either by chance or intentionally. ODOG’s longue durée, stretching episodes that occurred between 2002 and 2007 over the period from 2017 onwards, edges it towards a glacially paced cinematic work that moves at 1 image a day instead of 24 images a second.

The Archive

My photographic archive would not exist if I had not produced it. It is not the classic, inherited family album, often the site for maternal memory work and the creation of family narratives.^[23] Instead, it was made for art school, as documentation to paint from and later as part of a performance and collaborative image-making practice.

Rolls of negative film and digital files stored in boxes followed me in many house moves across Europe. In recent years, affordable digital negative scanning made visible what had previously remained unseen or inaccessible. In this sense, ODOG begs the question of dating the archival gesture itself: did the archiving happen at the stage of the photographic record, contemporaneously to the documented events, following Okwui Enwezor, or did ODOG constitute itself as an archive because Cécile’s death gave the cache of images a new meaning?^[24] What was the role played by the availability of Instagram’s specific affordances at that very moment, as a platform ready for the archive’s slowly unfolding publication? For Enwezor, photography and film are “preeminent forms of archival material”, because

[p]hotography is simultaneously the documentary evidence and the archival record of such transactions. Because the camera is literally an archiving machine, every photograph, every film is a priori an archival object. This is the fundamental reason why photography and film are often archival records, documents and pictorial testimonies of the existence of a recorded fact, an excess of the seen.^[25]

The form ODOG takes via social media is preposterous in the sense that Mieke Bal discusses in Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous Histories.^[26] It is as if the images had been made for a form that didn’t yet exist at the time. Could it be that it is only through its investment of Instagram’s archival format that ODOG emerged as a project?

A chronological order of events cannot be deployed when there isn’t a sense of the totality of the archive being known. ODOG’s archive contents are discovered gradually and in random order together with the viewer, through the “visualisation of randomly emerging memory images, set free of chronologic order” caught within the flows of millions of images shared on Instagram. ^[27] Ernst van Alphen’s discussion of Hanne Darboven’s work draws attention to how the sheer excess of detail contained within the archive obscures and complicates the narrative,^[28] while Cláudio Reis, quoting Jacques Derrida, highlights how there is a sense in which the archiving of material is productive in and of itself:

Jacques Derrida’s reflections on the written word and the archive remind us how “the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event.” Derrida, Archive Fever, 17 (emphasis in original).^[29]

Instagram’s archival structure, shaped by a directional, linear unspooling of punctual metadata, but also by a multiplicity of points of access and classification, plays a considerable role in stretching ODOG ’s past images over the present.

Between archive, still photography and moving image, Jef Geys’s work Day and Night and Day and… (2002) is an unlikely, but fascinating precedent to the directional unfolding of personal photographic archives on social media. This description by the artist’s estate, together with a 3 min. 40 sec. extract, documents the work on Facebook:

In 2002, Jef Geys was one of four Belgian artists chosen for Documenta 11 curated by Okwui Enwezor. There he presented his piece Dag en Nacht en Dag en… / Day and Night and Day and…, a 27-hour, 10-minute & 57-second film in black-and-white wherein an endless series of photographs made by the artist from all the black-and-white photographs up to 1998 are edited together and yield a hypnotically slow procession.^[30]

The mysterious procession of images travels horizontally rather than vertically, in a striking anticipation of the scrolling movement of images on social media platforms that now dominates our lives. At around the same time, an interest for vernacular analogue photography was introduced within the context of ethnographic artistic practices such as Tacita Dean’s, which I first experienced at the De Pont Museum in Tilburg in 2004. Dean’s project Floh (2001) is a photographic archive made up of photographs bought by the artist at flea markets all over Germany. This kind of recuperation of personal images severed from the meaningful ties to family and biographical information, exposes them to a new simultaneously aesthetic and ethnographic appraisal, which has translated very successfully on social media. This is very evident in Anonymous Project by Lee Shulman,^[31] a curated found photography archive which through its Instagram popularity has reached a new level of photographic currency, as evidenced by Deja View, a photobook that pairs mid-century amateur photographs selected by Shulman with images from Martin Parr’s archive.^[32] Instagram has provided a new space for “community” around the obsolescent medium of analogue photography, and Shulman’s project and many others appropriating vernacular photography, such as @beijing_silvermine, find their place within this context.^[33]

The Labyrinth and the Grid

This section will deepen the discussion of ODOG’s meandering, labyrinthine narrative and grid-like structure. As suggested earlier, ODOG’s non-chronological narrative resists linear progression and allows artist and viewer a circular revisiting of the period between 2002 and 2007, when the images were made. As observed by follower @sodamfancy: “though most of the scenes are between 2003 and 2006 they are not featured in a chronological sequence. Every now and then I become aware of that, and I wonder if there is any reasoning behind it or if there is a connection between the current sub-sequences.”^[34] Rolls of film succeed each other following three separate vertical lines dictated by Instagram’s grid. @konrad_guzior explains: “You used the fact that images on an Instagram profile always come in rows of three and with that you ‘rolled out’ your rolls vertically.”^[35] “When I go to your Instagram page, I see that the photographs are chosen in a very specific way, as to create three distinct narratives, which however are also at the same time intertwined” remarked @dori_albagranzotto.^[36]

It may seem counterintuitive to evoke the labyrinth as a metaphor for such an ordered and rigidly continuous virtual space, and yet, continuity is closer to a labyrinth than to a straight line.^[37] If “crafting stories of death and grief involves designing pathways through a maze”, this maze or labyrinth in the case of ODOG is one continuously unfolding through the fragmentary sequences of images and temporal leaps rather than a static puzzle which might be solved or a single truth to be found.^[38] I am reminded of Barthes’s characterisation of the photograph of his mother in the Winter Garden as a metaphorical Ariadne, unspooling the thread that steers his path amongst the totality of the world’s photographs:

All the world’s photographs formed a Labyrinth. I knew that at the center of this Labyrinth I would find nothing but this sole picture, fulfilling Nietzsche’s prophecy: “A labyrinthine man never seeks the truth, but only his Ariadne.” The Winter Garden Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography.^[39]

The Greek myth of the labyrinth illuminates my own role in ODOG in two different ways. By initiating and maintaining the daily practice of posting an image, which allows the three parallel paths within the ready-made Instagram grid to slowly but steadily grow, I play the role of Daedalus, the architect and builder; as Theseus, I try to find a way through the difficult terrain of mourning and family memory, using the rolls of film exposed by my younger self, instead of Ariadne’s ball of string. While constructing and simultaneously attempting to navigate this intricate architecture, I am faced with the inevitable incompleteness of my attempt at restoring the past from a cache of residual images, partial testimonies to events, which the camera to some extent generated, as argued by Ariella Azoulay.^[40] While engaged in this “act of extrapolation from fragmentary materials”, my path is interrupted by the end of each short roll, and I have to retrace my steps, marking the start of a new roll with the inclusion of the burned first image.^[41] Each burned-out “first of the roll” marks a new beginning after a dead end or the turn of a corner, inscribing a labyrinth within the grid.^[42]

The grid has been an obsession of mine, well before Instagram was created. As an art student in the early 2000s, a time of great technological transformation, I accessed my analogue photographs through a digitally printed contact sheet. From Bernd and Hilla Becher to Goldin, grids dominated the way photography was experienced in galleries and on the printed page: Tillmans’s experiments with exploding the grid on the magazine page and the gallery wall and a testing of boundaries rather than disruption. I have a vivid, embodied memory of leafing through a copy of Gerhard Richter’s Atlas at a friend’s house. I think it might have been the 1997 book by Friedel and Wilmes, but I am not totally sure.^[43]

Gerhard Richter’s Atlas is one of several structurally similar yet rather different projects undertaken by a number of European artists from the early to the mid 1960s whose formal procedures of accumulating found or intentionally produced photographs in more or less regular grid-form… a gradual shift toward the order of the archival and mnemonic functions of the photographic collection as the underlying episteme of a radically different aesthetics of photomontage.^[44]

One technical element that puts ODOG in formal relation to Richter’s Atlas is the application of a white box around the images, a variant of Warburg’s Mnemosyne’s black panels, which allows for the accommodation of both vertical and horizontal images, creating a pulsating rhythm around them. In “Grids”, Rosalind Krauss made the claim that the pictorial grid advances modern art’s will to silence and hostility to narrative.^[45] This is contradicted by the grids employed by Mary Kelly, Ingrid Pollard, and later Sophie Calle, as they leave the purely pictorial fields to structure relationships between images, documents and text.^[46] Works in this lineage could be seen as precedents to Instagram’s structural pairing of an image and a short text, and certainly influenced ODOG’s use of captions within the Instagram’s grid.

It is apt here to consider photographer Stephen Shore’s role in consolidating the grid as a form of presentation for colour photography, which anticipated Instagram, while he himself is happy to share his own work on the social media platform and let it be shaped by the platform today.^[47] In 1972,

“Steven Shore presented a selection of around two hundred small format Kodacolor prints with white borders—‘a kind of mass-produced image’—unframed and attached to the walls with double-sided tape, forming a regular grid three rows high spanning three walls of the exhibition room, whose structured layout conditioned the reading of each individual photograph.”^[48]

Might this piece have informed Instagram’s three column grid? Discussing Shore’s engagement with Instagram, Cláudio Reis notes that the photographer’s account “@stephen.shore provides a valuable framework to examine how the visual-centric workflow of Instagram affects the modernist emphasis on seeing photographically the ordinary.”^[49] I would therefore argue that the historical relationship between photography and the grid structures Instagram’s form as an infinitely unfolding vertical grid.

Reconfigured as an Instagram post, the digital snapshot “ends up being perfectly integrated into an information capitalism thriving on compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than contemplation.”^[50] The same could be said for the analogue snapshot or 35mm film photograph that is inserted into the flows of analogue photography shared within Instagram’s film photography communities. The interest of the younger generation of amateur and professional photographers for film photography has somehow paradoxically been nurtured by Instagram, a digital social media platform, to commercial ends.^[51] Instagram analogue photography communities emulate the analogue filter aesthetic that marked the social media platform’s own novelty when in first started in 2010.^[52] @steven.shore sits alongside many other archival approaches to Instagram, such as previously mentioned curated found vernacular photography archives: Shulman’s Anonymous Project, @beijing_silvermine , submission-based curated accounts like @f1rstoftheroll and personal artistic archives such as Alison Lloyd’s @romilly_crescent_docs.

Anonymity, Reticence and Polyvocality

According to Reis, Shore’s Instagram account becomes “an archival behemoth composed of what Robert W. Gehl characterized as ‘the products of affective processing’—not only concerning photographs but also the virtual totality of each user’s digital traces—collected and stored by the social media network for unforeseen purposes.”^[53] The record of interactions of other users with Shore’s images becomes part and parcel of the archive and of the work itself.

Similarly, in the first few years of ODOG, many posts were inscribed with user interactions, from questions to comments, protestations of love to hypotheses about what was possibly going on in the images, elicited by its structural characteristics of repetition and reticence. Due to the anonymity of the accounts, there were many questions around who the person behind them was, which I mostly left unanswered.^[54] Photographer @mariano_doronzo, for example, thought of Cécile as very much alive, and that she must be the person uploading the daily Instagram posts, until we met by chance in real life:

When I firstly encountered Cécile’s IG page @ourdaysofgold I thought it was about her personal archival photography work. Intimate pictures about her family, about her husband and her kids, more over about herself […] Only later on, when I met Assunta, Cécile’s daughter, I realised what the project was about.^[55]

This mix up, brought about by my decision to only name Cécile within ODOG, and to connect all other characters and places to her within the captions, connects ODOG with the tradition of “autobiographies” written by others, such as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein,^[56] and Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid,^[57] as well as with the renewed interest in “life writing” attested by the contemporary literary genre of autofiction. According to Zach Pearl, “the performative gesture of the author-character figure readily employed in autofiction is also playing out in the quotidian activities of networked communication, particularly on social media, which encourage a highly curatorial ethos of self-representation.”^[58] Photography itself is a literary motif within this genre, as discussed by Laura Marcus.^[59] Examining the work of Annie Ernaux, and the descriptions of photographs that open the chapters of The Years,^[60] Marcus reminds us of John Berger’s invitation to situate photography “in a way that is faithful to the multiplicity of associations and contexts ‘attached to any given memory: The aim must be to construct a context for a photograph, to construct it with words, to construct it with other photographs, to construct it by its place in an ongoing text of photographs and images’.”^[61] In my matrilinear narrative centred on Cécile, however, I, daughter, disappear, and this creates an opportunity to enlist ODOG’s followers as ghostwriters of Cécile’s story.

Some users did read the work as a literary exercise to which they felt compelled to add. While describing the pleasures afforded by ODOG’s elusiveness, for example, @nihamel in the screen capture in Fig. 6, sees in the “mise en route” (activation) of his imagination the beginning of literature itself. In a subsequent comment, @nihamel clarifies that they consider ODOG a literary work, while simultaneously filling the gaps in the narrative with their own “speculative fabulation”^[62]:

I know nothing about Cécile! But since I am in a literary space when I look at your photos, I thought of Marguerite Duras, and at first Cécile made me think of Anne Desbarède or Lol V. Stein: overwhelmed by her depression. However, Cécile does not resemble them. She is at the centre of the family setup, reigning by her assertive and “not easy” character. I find her rather unsympathetic. Her presence invades the space since everyone seems to revolve around her. Her depression inhabits the space, the household. I feel like she has devoured her husband, he doesn’t count for much in this feminine universe. The son also seems to try to get closer to the father and escape from this feminine trilogy/quadrilogy. The photographer’s sister exists in the scenes without really managing to exist herself. It is the photographer who makes everyone exist, with Cécile standing out as a less maternal than unhappy, dark soul. She exudes something deathly.^[63]

I would say ODOG is not so much autofiction because of the combination of “real and invented elements”.^[64] Rather it is the withholding of information that leaves room for fictions to emerge in the reader/follower’s mind. Through anonymity and reticence, “withdrawnness” as Niclas Östlind has defined it,^[65] the work makes space for a wealth of different ways in which users interact and contribute to the ODOG corpus, developing a sense of attachment and familiarity with the piece, and projecting their own memories and associations, positive or negative, encouraged by the scarcity of information accompanying the unedited sharing of thousands of images of the same group of people. Artist @genmaynard says of her encounters with a new ODOG post:

It’s almost a feeling of relief, apart from the aesthetic enjoyment, that it hasn’t ended. There’s a sense of threat, or impending doom in the story, like thunderclouds on a summer’s afternoon. In that sense I place the series in my adolescent memories, although I was an 80’s teenager. It feels to me like Rumer Godden’s book The Greengage Summer, where the main character is of a similar age group to Cécile’s daughters. I’m also not sure who is taking the photographs, and what relation they bear to the subjects, and I like that aspect. And I’m never certain of the narrative. The series is intriguing, especially as the images seem so personal. What could be of value here to me, the viewer. I don’t know, and yet I keep looking. I always read the post as well, and I love that there’s only ever a vague hint of information.^[66]

Beyond the virtual narratives unfolding in followers’ minds, @genmaynard, @nihamel and many others have contributed comments, questions and interpretations to ODOG over the years. This layer of literary polyvocality,^[67] where ODOG becomes a palimpsest overwritten, annotated and enriched by followers’ interpretations, and furthermore by conversations between users (see for example Fig. 7), could also be understood more critically as my exploitation of “free” digital labour,^[68] and absorption of “prosumerism”, if I am seen as entrepreneurial artist capitalising on these interactions.^[69] I could also be considered as an exploited user myself, willingly feeding the social media behemoth with my unpaid contribution, providing free entertainment and advertising revenue to Instagram. “Prosumerism”, the act of simultaneously consuming and producing online culture, is described by Isobel Harbison “as an activity that might be exploitative and liberating at different parts of its process, depending on treatment, form, and on the prosumer’s sense of or relation to power” contains an ambivalence that ODOG productively engages by using Instagram parasitically and against the grain of its intended uses.^[70] @twelvety summarises his long-term experience of following ODOG:

I don’t remember how I came across @ourdaysofgold_film on Instagram. It surfaced for me a few years ago, probably as a result of following a pile of other film photographers. Right away I became hooked. It’s unlike any other account I’ve seen with its deliberate cadence, each frame in its share of the triptych almost imperceptibly different from the one that came before. But each one is also vital to the story […] What adds to the mystery is that we know the photos are from the early- to mid-2000s, and we’ve gotten to know Cécile and her children, but we don’t know how much of it is made up and how much is real. Are they documentary shots, a performance art essay shot during long weekends over many years, or some combination of all that? It doesn’t matter, because as long as you keep following the account, you can count on a new image, a new clue, about once per day on average. You’ll feel yourself stepping into the images, wanting to lie in the shade or shadows or the sun along with the children. I think Cécile has long since passed on, but again, is that the character or the real woman? What do her kids look like now? Are they still close? Do they communicate through telepathy, as they seem to in these images? And what did we—the doomscrollers of 2024 social media—do to deserve such a gift, one that can make us revert for a moment back to the pace of the deep human breath? I’m just thankful we get to see it unfold.^[71]

Conclusion

I will conclude with one last quote from an intervention by Frank Abbott, which makes me hopeful about the future of ODOG:

Whereas social media platforms, particularly Instagram, tend to generate a build-up of anxiety around the processes that take place within the screen. This [work] seems to diffuse anxiety. I don’t know how it does it! but that’s one of the pleasures of it, and the strengths of it. Not leading to this kind of build-up of tension that seems to happen inside social media, but a sort of dispersing of tension, and I hope that, as more pressures come onto the piece in terms of its development, […] you’ll be able to maintain sufficient cool around it, to keep its dispersal task in hand.^[72]

In this article, I have not attended to the content of the images within the archive, and to the practices of “fictioning” present within the corpus of images that me and my family constructed many years ago.^[73] That is a task for another time and context. I have been more interested in beginning to interrogate the structure and modes of functioning that characterise the work’s unfolding on social media, and their relationship with a series of art historical and theoretical precedents and methods. By revisiting several artworks and ideas I encountered as a student at the time of making the archive, I have traced their resonances onto ODOG’s contemporary digital form and structure. I have addressed ODOG’s testing of the disciplinary boundaries of moving image, its activation of the photographic archive, the deployment of the pictorial grid within Instagram’s virtual space and its relationship with literature, positioning it as interdisciplinary artistic research project.

What is ODOG now, seven years on, in relation to when I started it? I would argue that it is not only the images that I post daily on Instagram, it is also the conversations I have been having about it, both in and outside Instagram. The process of presenting and writing about the work and analysing its functioning has also contributed to transforming my own perception of the project and its reach, allowing me to integrate followers’ contributions within different modes of presentation in unexpected ways, which I hope is reflected in the polyvocality of this text.

ODOG provides a space online for conversations and interactions, but also for silent, private accumulation of memories, familiarity and attachment, creating a possibility of resistance to the alienating conditions of contemporary digital “prosumption”. There is a sense of multi-layered polyvocality within the long duration of the work, where the layers of meaning and the building of the feed over time create something that, while originating from the past, is constantly on the move. The potential for the work to continue to surprise me, and for follower interactions to generate stories more interesting than anything I might know or remember, is the motivation that keeps me invested in uploading an image a day, until the exhaustion of the archive or the end of Instagram bring its conclusion.