Shaving Soap Death, Mar.55
This project focused on the negative archive of photographer and Brampton resident, Russell Cooper. Cooper was a news photographer who worked for local newspapers as well as the Toronto Telegram primarily from the 1940s to 1960s. The Peel Archives has his negative collection housed in identical brown manila envelopes. Each envelope has a description of the image's contents and some have later penciled-in annotations added by Cooper years after he took the images. The artwork was titled after one of the descriptions on Cooper's envelopes of a brutal murder in which victims' mouths were found filled with shaving cream. Cooper's negative archive reflects a violent undercurrent that ran through the life of the small Ontario town he photographed in for many years.
I created an 8-hour long video that features the text from every one of his hundreds of negative envelopes in chronological order and, whenever one is annotated, that text is read aloud and the whole envelope is shown on screen. Only a small selection of his envelopes is shown here. The video work is now in the collection of the Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives, Brampton
In this sense, the project reprised all of Cooper's working life and, at the same, due to the length of the video, emphasizes the difficulty of ever grasping the full extent of any archive.
