"The Camera Made Me Do It": Female Identity and Troubling Archives

This essay reads the photographs and compositions of Montreal artist Nicole Jolicoeur, examining her use of famous nineteenth-century archival collections. It argues that Jolicoeur's reconstructions of old images of women open aesthetic and ethical issues for viewers as well as for herself, culminating in a series of self-portraits. ********** Archive has become an enormously flexible term in thinking about the place to which we turn when seeking materials for our scholarly or creative works. In itself, has become the model of repositories, not just of documents but of any fragmentary hoardings, like memory, for example. This essay considers the extended archive that a contemporary Montreal artist uses and abuses in her recreation of the photographic image of female subjectivity. Nicole Jolicoeur incorporates questions about the material and materiality of images in her reconstructions of nineteenth-century photographs and in her series of self-portraits. The relation of the referent (the photographed) first to the image then to Jolicoeur's transformations becomes a central aesthetic and ethical/political issue for her viewers, as it is for herself. Her processes and her creations offer an opportunity to reconsider the cultural weight of an archive and the complexities of intervening in those formidable sites. As an artist and a feminist, Jolicoeur exerts a will to power in her reshaping of photographic images that invites further attention to female identity and the blurred boundaries of artist and object. We will trace the movement of Jolicoeur's work as she spirals closer to the self-portraits of her most recent activity. Picture the artist at work in her studio. Taking delight in the found materials, old and new books with troubling images, she delves into these ghostly remains, claiming the photographs for her varied appropriations. The studio is large and bright and one can feel the energy of ideas here as well as see the material results of Jolicoeur's encounters with others' photographs. It is in this place that Jolicoeur turns the investigative documents of the medical clinics and the private collections of religious orders into new work--her work. Jolicoeur's interventions require processing, repossessing, and finally, a strategic redeployment of archival photographs in order to make them into something else--not a souvenir, but an image that defies the petrifying effects of the camera. The camera's productions repose in archives, material, and the metaphoric. Two of the archives Jolicoeur takes on consist of collections of nineteenth-century photographs. One is the famous archive of photographs of (mostly) women held in the asylum at Salpetriere, taken under the direction of the radical reformer Dr. Jean Martin Charcot. Great numbers of these photographs have been reproduced, and they are familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in psychoanalysis. The other archive is a collection of photographs of a young woman, Therese Martin, taken by her sister when both were Carmelite nuns at Lisieux in France. Therese was marked early by her deep religious devotion. After her death she was beatified and canonized, her painted (not photographed) image ubiquitous in Roman Catholic worlds. Recently, the photographs of Therese and life in the convent were published, the photographic image displacing the dated sentimental portrait. For Jolicoeur, these photographs come into her hands as reproductions in books. The copies have no status or value as objects beyond what the bookstore determines for them. While often denotes a repository in a specific physical location to which a scholar must travel, these archives come to us. These resources are archives not only of objects (the photographs), but of memory and meaning attached to the moment of creation and the subsequent patina of history and meaning that the objects have accrued. Metaphorically, we may also think of the inferred source of Nicole Jolicoeur's creations, which is Jolicoeur herself, as an archive; in examining that archive, we try to articulate the story Jolicoeur is telling us about herself and about ourselves as women. …

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