Discard 9 (The National Archives, College Park, MD), 2009,

pigment ink jet print, 42"x36"

The Archive’s Shadow is a collection of recent pigment ink jet prints from Discard (2001 – present), an ongoing body of work consisting of several discrete series of images featuring movie films discarded by public institutions (libraries, schools, archives). Harking back to the 19th century practice of postmortem photography, each print serves as a kind of memento mori to the recently obsolete medium of film. Each print in Discard is named for the provenance of the film, that is, for the institution that has discarded it. The three institutions involved in this exhibition are The National Archives in College Park, MD, The University of New Hampshire Library System, and the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, MD. In its totality, Discard is a kind of shadow archive, reflecting that which has been omitted from institutional archives.

See more about Lynn Cazabon at http://lynncazabon.com/