Fixed

The Imaginary Madge Cameron—Reclusive Archivist
Madge Cameron is an alter ego—an aging librarian at a private archive in San Francisco. Born in 1935 and raised by her grandmother after her father mysteriously disappeared during the Depression (leaving only a rudimentary camera behind), Cameron grew-up in the library and stayed there, earning a PhD from the Librarians Anonymous Correspondence College Program which she completed while…in the library.

Working for decades with physical objects before struggling with the digital revolution, Madge is a sometimes disgruntled but also intrigued observer of the flux between analog and digital technology as it relates to photographic truth, time, preservation, chance and change.

About Fixed
Begun in 2014, Fixed is a series of photographs made by Madge Cameron at a time when digital innovations were either revolutionizing or killing photography—depending on whom you asked. This evolving series of glitch-scanned photographs embraces what is both gained and lost in the translation of analog objects into digital files—and back to physical objects again.

The project started accidentally as Madge began working to digitize her collection’s extensive photographic holdings with a flatbed scanner in 2014. A poor technician in a new digital era, Cameron discovered accidentally that by moving the photograph while the scan was happening, she could separate the image into its color channels, resulting in images that seemed to be both breaking apart and compounding. At first irritated with what she saw as failed work, Cameron eventually came to embrace the “process of interruption,” as she puts it. “I came to see these imperfect digital rendering as a metaphor for what I do as an archivist; each piece becomes a visual cross-reference of itself.”

New Work

A new iteration of Fixed began in 2022, when Cameron found herself equally alarmed and intrigued by the discovery that original analog photographs in the archive that had never been digitized by Cameron had apparently begun altering of their own accord, or via the hand of an unknown ghost librarian in the digital ether.

Original Square Panels

Above: works are presented as pigment prints with encaustic wax on birch panels, 12x12 inches, edition of 8

The Cameron Library