A reflection on how archives shape the long-term fate of photographic oeuvres. 

Lighting the Archive, which went online in 2020, is an open-ended series of conversations with artists like Annette Kelm, Elfie Semotan, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Ulrich Wüst about photographic techniques, structures of order, and materialities. The conversations are invariably framed by questions about where the photographers see their life’s works and legacies over the long term—what, in other words, is to become of their oeuvres one day. In Objects in Time, Lighting the Archive engages the writer and curator Mike Sperlinger in dialogue. Sperlinger studies the careers of the photographers Marianne Wex and Chauncey Hare through the lens of the art market’s economy of attention and interweaves biographical facts with the external circumstances shaping their paths, including their withdrawals from the art system and their eventual rediscovery as “forgotten artists.” A republished essay by Sperlinger relates how the latter was possible; Lighting the Archive’s Maren Lübbke-Tidow and Rebecca Wilton speak to the author to discuss the central role that the question of the archive played in his efforts.