ABSTRACT
Many of the lost photographs, it turned out, were remarkably persistent; the failed archive had already been dispersed into new contexts. In fact, looking back to the origins of the medium, as well as to the first decades of photography's use, impermanence arguably was not just an occasional condition of photography, but a foundational condition, despite persistent and well-coordinated efforts to eradicate it. It is worth noting that this observation also can speak well to the digital age of screen-based images. More fundamentally, though, the series challenges the notion that a photograph's value is equivalent to that of the image it presents. Importantly, Chang’s images have two primary modes of existence: first, in the period of their visibility, and second in their “monochrome period.” More akin to spoken words than to novels, essays, or newspapers of record, ephemeral photography is an underdeveloped mode of a broader photographic language that can occupy registers from aesthetic to vernacular.
