For this exercise, we were asked to write 500 words about a contemporary artist/photographer who uses archival imagery for their work.

I choose to step aside from the usual artists/photographers and look at the work of Ransom Riggs. You have probably heard of the name, he is the creator of “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” which has just been released at the cinema and has also spawned a series of novels (the second entitled “Hollow City” and the third entitled “Library of Souls”). However, it began from various images Riggs had collected at flea markets and second-hand stores. Riggs had started collecting vintage snapshots a few years before but he started to notice that the most intriguing and strange were of children. This got him thinking about their back stories, however as they were so old and anonymous, there was no way to find these out so instead he created his own stories. Even while writing the original story, he continued to collect images and would alter the story if a suitable image came to light. This is what really intrigued me about the novel; the story and the images work side by side, you cannot have one without the other. The majority of the images used within his books have been left completely unaltered.

Ransom Riggs is an American photographer, film-maker and writer. He describes his vintage snapshot collecting as a hobby however it has also inspired him to create another book “Talking Pictures”, in this book he includes numerous sourced images from flea markets and collectors. Within the book, he includes a variety of images and an image of the accompanying captions on the back. As perfectly described on Riggs’ website “each successive inscription shines like a flashbulb illuminating a photograph’s particular context and lighting up our connection to the past”. I have read the first two novels and have the “Talking Pictures”, from these 3 books I have been inspired to look through photos at second-hand shops and eBay and collect some that have been of interest to me; this was long before I looked at completing this module.

The following links provide more detail on Ransom Riggs, his images and his books. I found the “book trailer” for “Talking Images” particularly informative.

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