Archives in the visual arts Case study Coastline Archives

Engaging socio-political connotations, commenting on the one-to-many relationship in the age of consumerism, as well as documenting everyday life and the natural or urban landscape, artistic archives are today establishing a new type of (active, engaged) gaze and opening up lines of flight in the field of photography. From a historical perspective, the first projects appeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as part of large-scale government initiatives such as that of the French Commission of Historical Monuments to record the state of the national architectural heritage on the basis of an archive created by photographers(Mission Héliographique, 1851) or that of the Roosevelt regime to document the lives of American farmers in the Depression through the Farm Security Administration program (1935-1943). Paradoxically, these complex, socially-sensitive programs have been more likely to retain their collaborative artistic components in history, with the nam