2006
a library to scale - Part 2
"Sometimes it is easy to track the forces that form and change us. From the very beginning, Ann Shelton collected in scrapbooks, every press photo she had taken, detaching them from their original context (their place in the structure of the newspaper), and thereby providing them with new meaning. What might these anxious recordings become, once they have been stripped of their by-lines, their "stories", their places in history? How might new narratives take shape and then continually collapse and reform through the slow building-up of the scrapbook? Such are the first tiny, empathetic threads that will eventually weave their way to Fredrick B. Butler, to his own daily practice of snipping and pasting items from newspapers, his collecting of a range of ephemera into his extraordinary archive. These shared processes that map a quite different reality to the one envisaged by their original producers (the editors, the advertisers), are quiet acts of rebellion that shatter the smooth flow of information."
Bryant, Jan,
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Acknowledgements: Ann Shelton would like to specially thank Sereena and Frances Burton for helping make this exhibition possible.