Introduction
Fixed is a series of photographs made by Phillips' alter-ego Madge Cameron:
Madge Cameron, b. 1935
Until this project, Cameron had always seen photography as a separate venture from her work as Founding Archivist at the Pacific Library Privé and Special Collections. But here, Cameron’s photography and archive work intersect, resulting in pieces that don’t quite fit either category.
While working to digitize the Collection’s extensive photographic holdings, Cameron discovered accidentally that by moving the photograph while the image was being recorded, she could separate the image into its color channels, resulting in a strange 3D effect. At first irritated with what she saw as failed work, Cameron eventually came to embrace the “process of interruption,” as she puts it. “I came to see the process as a metaphor for what I do as an archivist; each piece becomes a visual cross-reference of itself.”
About Cameron:
Raised by her grandmother after her father mysteriously disappeared during the Depression (leaving only a rudimentary camera behind), Cameron grew-up in the library and stayed there, earning a PhD from the Librarians Anonymous Correspondence College Program which she completed while…in the library. “My grandmother would get tired of having my brother and me running around the house and would say, ‘Go to the library and hush.’ And we did, it was just down the street from our house... all these years later, here I still am.”
