Dark Archives, 1-41
Dark Archives, 1-41 is Andre Bradley's fragmentary autobiography, weaving his own photographs and writing together with pictures pulled from his family's archive to build a portrait of memory that resists a single, linear narrative.
The work takes the form of three saddle-stitched booklets and two single-page inserts, housed in a foil-stamped, die-cut folder designed by Elana Schlenker, published in an edition of 300 by Image Text Ithaca Press. Bradley combines appropriated family snapshots with his own images and text in a structure that deliberately upsets the linguistic and visual constrictions placed on Black men, treating the family archive itself as a contested, unstable form.
Bradley (b. 1987) is a Philadelphia-based photographer and a graduate of Hampshire College and the Rhode Island School of Design. Dark Archives, his first photobook, was shortlisted for both the Rencontres d'Arles Image-Texte Book Award and the Aperture-Paris Photo First PhotoBook Award in 2016, and copies are held in the special collections of the Morgan Library, RISD's Fleet Library, and UW-Madison Libraries.
