In December 1948, Life magazine sent French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, a founding member of Magnum Photos, to China to document the turbulent transition from Kuomintang to Communist rule. 

In the photograph above he captures the pandemonium incited by the currency crash of that month, when the value of paper money plummeted and the Kuomintang decided to distribute forty grams of gold per person.

Thousands waited in line for hours as the police made only a token gesture toward maintaining order, resulting in ten deaths by suffocation. Cartier-Bresson deftly captured the desperation and claustrophobia of the scene by compressing the mass of people within a tight frame as they propelled themselves toward the bank building just beyond the right edge of the picture. 

Above: Shanghai, 1948. Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908–2004). Gelatin silver print. © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bio.

The importance of archives to artists has never been more evident than in contemporary art practices. Above, a film still from a video by Dutch artist Aernout Mik, currently on view in The Bank Show: Vive le Capital, in Shanghai. Information.

Archive Fever

The title of this regular DART feature is derived from French deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida’s seminal 1964 lecture entitled “The Concept of the Archive.” In this piece, published in English in 1998, Derrida explores Sigmund Freud’s efforts, in the 1890s, to identify the separation—and interaction—between body and mind.

Derrida notes that the impulse to preserve something to be remembered while leaving out something to be forgotten—with contradictory purposes—is found in individual and collective minds, historically and fictionally. This means that authenticity is as much at risk as origin. So history and fiction, it seems, may blur in the minds of those who suffer from what he labeled "archive fever."

With a nod to ICP, which presented the 2008 exhibition Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, curated by Okwui Enwezor, the first image in this series [here] was included in that show. 

I located the Cartier-Bresson photograph above through the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, which presents the Met’s collection via a chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of global art history. Targeted at students and scholars of art history, it is an invaluable reference, research, and teaching tool. Authored by the Met’s experts—predominantly made up of curators but also of conservators, scientists, and educators—the Timeline comprises 300 timelines, 930 essays, close to 7,000 objects, and a robust index, and is regularly updated and enriched to provide new scholarship and insights on the collection.