“Every two minutes people take as many photos as were taken throughout the whole 19th century.”

Rachel is one of the Queensberry album design team, and she’s been collecting old photographs since she was at university.

"My interest was sparked by reading Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980)”, she says. “The book was written after his mother’s death, and is as much about death as it is about photography. It was the idea that photographers are “agents of death” that really struck me.”

“Any photo, no matter how recent, depicts a moment that is dead. Even in the time it takes to press the shutter a moment has passed that will never come back. This is something I think about when I create my own work. When you look at old photos it becomes more evident. The people and the places are often gone, or completely different."

Rachel's love of photography comes from her grandmother. “She compulsively documents everything with photos. She has built an amazing archive over the years. It’s significant to our family, but her photos of New Zealand, especially old Auckland, are interesting to everyone. And luckily she lets me use them in my work.”

Rachel says that photos her Nanna took were “always around, but my interest in other peoples archival photographs was sparked, and I've been a collector ever since."

Rachel always thinks about the people in the photographs, giving them names and then using the names as the titles of her work. “Photos where you can clearly see people’s faces are interesting. What I like is thinking about the context, why the photographer chose to document this moment, and what it meant to them.

“There was always a certain cost to producing prints, so any photo I find must have been important to someone at some point. That’s part of why I like to buy them; they shouldn’t be left in a shop with no one looking at them.

“There’s a physicality to prints that is very different to a digital image. Every two minutes people take as many photos as were taken throughout the whole 19th century. We are lucky in that way’ every moment can be documented. But I believe people should make prints.” 

What really interests Rachel in is the idea of memory, and of myth. “I document the area I’ve grown up in, and the places I spend a lot of time, because I know these places won’t exist in the future. What I’m working on at the moment is a project about urban legends in my area, and I’ve been retracing other people’s steps.

“A lot of the work I make uses archival images, but I usually contextualise them by including my own work from the same neighbourhood, or showing the works themselves in the locations they were shot.

“I like objects that have memories attached to them. Those are the sorts of things I like to find and collect, and eventually incorporate in my work. With my family photos I alter the images, but I don’t feel right having any sort of dialogue with the images that aren’t mine. I let them speak for themselves.”

If you'd like to see more of Rachel's work click here. 

Alexandria x