Collections Assistant
35 mm photography and scanned ephemera
2022-2024
Made while working on a small team responsible for moving more than half a million objects in the MIT Museum’s collection, Collections Assistant documents the temporary environments and informal archives produced in the process.
Photographs, handwritten instructions, packing remnants, jokes, and other scraps record the labor and relationships surrounding the collection as it moved. While the job at hand involved handling objects of recognized historical value, I became interested in the material that would ordinarily disappear: the temporary systems, accumulated cardboard, personal exchanges, and traces left by the people caring for the collection and each other.
During this period, I was also learning black-and-white photography and film development through the MIT Arts Studios while helping pack and move photographic works, including material by Berenice Abbott. Handling photographs and learning to make them became parallel forms of education—one institutional and one personal.
