Boxes of old unlabeled photographs are commonly featured at flea markets worldwide. Some enterprising vendors dub them “instant ancestors,” hawking the prospect of acquiring fictive kin and ersatz genealogies to new publics. These traders peddle style over substance and invite their customers to conjure up backstories for signifiers that have lost their indexicality. In essence they stoke peoples’ penchant for nostalgia. As objects that are commonly imbued with strong sentiments (Barthes 1981), photos enable individuals to fabricate memories and to project their contemporary needs and concerns onto depreciated material.
This inquiry is based upon an unexpected archive: unclaimed material from a frame and photo developing shop in Johannesburg, South Africa. It expands upon numerous investigations into the visual economies and biographies of photographs. For example, Cohen (2014) and Feyder (2015) worked with caches of negatives that were found by chance or stored away for decades. In the first...