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A collection and its many relations
and contexts
Constructing an object biography of the police
historical/archival investigative files
Kathy Carbone
Department of Information Studies, University of California Los Angeles,
Los Angeles, California, USA
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to report the results of an ethnographic study that used object
biography with an archival collection of police surveillance files, the Police Historical/Archival Investigative
Files, housed at the City of Portland Archives & Records Center in Portland, Oregon.
Design/methodology/approach –Document analysis, participant observation, semistructured interviews,
and object biography were conducted over four years, from 2013 to 2017.
Findings –Using object biography with the Police Historical/Archival Investigative Files uncovered
numerous personal and public relationships that developed between people and this collection over several
decades as well as how these records acquired, constructed, and changed meanings over time and space.
Originality/value –This paper argues that the biography of objects is a useful way for studying the
relationships records form, the values people assign to them, and how people and records mutually inform and
transform one another in shifting contexts of social lives. Recognizing records as having social histories
and applying object biography to them contributes to and grows the greater biography and genealogy of the
record and the archive—a genealogy important not only for discovering something about the lives of those
who create, encounter, steward, and use records and archives but about our shared human experience.
Keywords Art, Archives, Ethnography, Records, Object biography, Police surveillance
Paper type Research paper
[W]e have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses,
their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human
transactions and calculations that enliven things...it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their
human and social context (Appadurai, 1986, p. 5).
Introduction
A record is a trace of living behavior left behind that someone deems important to save in a
manner that stabilizes its structure and content so that the record remains reliable, authentic,
and accessible over time and across space, “whether that be for a nanosecond or millennia”
(McKemmish, 2001, p. 336). Records bear witness to, serve as evidence and memory of, and
reflect in some fashion the original activity and contexts that gave rise to them. And
although archival processes and systems preserve or “fix”the structure and content of
records, by being put to new uses in new contexts and subject to different interpretations,
records are continually shifting—they are always “in a process of becoming”writes
McKemmish (2001, p. 335), a notion Brothman echoes, stating that over time, a “record is an
object that occurs as something that is the same as and different from itself”(2006,p.260,
italics in original). Both of these perspectives highlight the dynamic qualities of records and
Police archival
investigative
files
The author would like to thank the peer reviewers for their time and generous and constructive
feedback.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 7 June 2019
Revised 13 December 2019
Accepted 13 December 2019
Journal of Documentation
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-06-2019-0111
resonate with Ketelaar’s seminal view about the “activation”of records. He states: “every
interaction, intervention, interrogation, and interpretation by creator, user, and archivist is
an activation of the record”(2001, p. 137). These activations, then, become part of what he
terms the “semantic genealogy”of the archive—the accumulations of meanings and values
ascribed to records that in turn affect future perceptions, understandings, and uses of
records:
Every activation of the archive not only adds a branch to what I propose to call the semantic
genealogy of the record and the archive. Every activation also changes the significance of earlier
activations...Current use of these records affects retrospectively all earlier meanings or to put it
differently: we can no longer read the record as our predecessors have read that record (2001, p. 138).
Archivists have long been interested in the activations and itineraries of records in order to
understand the contexts—social, cultural, political, technological, institutional, and
ideological—in which people create, interact with, and find and make meaning with
records. Ketelaar urges archivists to reconstruct the paths records take from their origins to
the archive, recovering and recording the voices of “the authors of documents, the
bureaucrats, the archivists, and the researchers who all used and managed the files”to
discover the manifold meanings that become connected to records through their use and
reuse (2001, p. 141). Relatedly, “[u]nderstanding the human experience of information seems
vital,”writes Gorichanaz (2016, p. 4), and within the discipline of document studies and the
neodocumentation movement over the past few years, scholars have been calling for more
research into human motivations, involvements, and experiences with as well as relations to
documents (Buckland, 2015;Latham, 2014;Gorichanaz and Latham, 2016;Gorichanaz, 2016).
Moreover, Gorichanaz and Latham argue that considering documents from diverse and
multiple perspectives—from their physical, mental, and social aspects, for instance—can
produce better understandings of them and stress the need for renewed consideration of these
aspects to further documental knowledge (2016, p. 1115).
“Object biography,”[1] from the field of anthropology, is one method for uncovering the
activations of records as well as how people experience, interact with, and ascribe meaning to
records, and for contemplating the physical, mental, and social aspects of records and their
effects on human endeavors and lives across contexts and tem poralities. Anthropologist Igor
Kopytoff introduced object biography in 1986, which centers on the idea that an object
cannot be fully understood if regarded from only one point or stage in its existence and offers
a way to study the production, use, exchange, and disposal of an object as well as the
connections that occur between people and an object over its lifespan. Moreover, object
biography explicitly focuses on unearthing what kinds of relations, understandings, and
significances evolve between people and objects through social interactions in shared
contexts.
This paper is an object biography of the Police Historical/Archival Investigative Files,a
collection of police surveillance records that reside at the City of Portland Archives &
Records Center (PARC) in Portland, Oregon, USA. From 1965 to 1985, the Portland Police
Bureau, as part of its surveillance of 576 activists and civic groups as well as individuals who
were simply “practicing everyday democracy such as writing letters, signing petitions,
joining organizations and attending lectures or school board meetings”(Jacklet, 2002a),
amassed thousands of photographs, notes, intelligence reports, news clippings, and materials
generated by political and civic activists. Under surveillance were groups and organizations
such as the Black Panthers, the United Farm Workers, the Women’s International League for
Peace and Freedom, Greenpeace, the Chicano Student Movement, and Amnesty
International. In 1981, after Oregon law made it illegal to conduct surveillance on
organizations not linked to a criminal investigation, the records were slated for destruction.
However, a lead detective in the surveillance program removed the records from the Bureau
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and after his death in 1989, the records ended up in a barn. In 2002, the Portland Tribune
newspaper attained the files and subsequently ran a series of articles that caught
the attention of Portland City Archivist, Diana Banning. Banning laid the legal groundwork
to acquire the files on behalf of the city of Portland, and in 2004, the records were transferred
to PARC where PARC archivists processed and named the collection, the Police Historical/
Archival Investigative Files (henceforth, the “Files”).
I used object biography with the Files as part of my methodological toolkit while
conducting an ethnographic study (UCLA IRB#13000010)[2] of the inaugural artist-in-
residence program at PARC (2012-2015), during which resident artists, investigative poet
Kaia Sand and interdisciplinary artist Garrick Imatani, mobilized the Files to create poetry
objects, spoken-word performance, sculpture, and photography in collaboration with
activists whose lives they encountered in the records. They entitled their residency project,
the Watcher Files Project[3]. For Sand and Imatani, investigating and revealing the origins,
contents, forms, contexts, uses, and management of the Files as well as how people have
encountered and experienced them was important to their art practices and productions. In
order to comprehend the artists’work with so many aspects of these records, I needed to
follow suit with a method that would provide me the opportunity to also examine and
understand the origins, forms, contexts, and contents of the Files and their relevancies in and
to peoples’lives—all of which object biography afforded.
In this paper, I provide a brief introduction to object biography for the information studies
field and the archival studies field as both lack deep consideration of the relevance and
applicability of object biography as a mechanism to explore and understand how records
acquire, construct, and change meaning; gain personal and public significances; and share
linkages with people across time and space and the relevance of this interconnectedness to
the stories records can be used to tell. This study builds upon and extends the growing body
of archival scholarship focused on the affective dimensions of records (Carbone, 2017;Cifor,
2015;Gilliland, 2014) and neodocumentation scholarship within information studies
contemplating what documents do and how they affect, mediate, and engender situations
and human activity (Frohmann, 2007,2008;Irvine-Smith, 2016).
Object biography
Object biography is primarily used within anthropology, such as MacKenzie’s often-cited
study of looped string bags in Papua New Guinea (1991) and Hoskins’s work in Eastern
Indonesia that focused on six objects in relation to the life stories of those who own the objects
(1998). It has also gained much traction over the past several decades in archaeology, where
scholars have gainfully applied it to objects such as sailcloth and fishing net samples, Irish
gravestones, and Chilean rock art (Fowler et al., 2016;Gallardo et al., 1999;Mytum, 2003).
It has also been used in museum studies to recover forgotten histories (Poulter, 2013) and
trace curatorial histories of archaeological collections (Friberg and Huvila, 2019).
Although the key impulse behind object biography is uncovering the relationships and
histories between objects and people, and the meanings that become associated with objects
during their involvements with human activities and lives, it further aims to understand
how both objects and people inform and transform each other. Gosden and Marshall explain
that at the center of the idea of object biography “are questions about the links between
people and things; about the ways meanings and values are accumulated and transformed”
(1999, p. 172), and “as people and objects gather time, movement and change, they are
constantly transformed, and these transformations of person and object are tied up with
each other”(1999, p. 169). From this perspective, then, investigating the biography of an
object entails not only paying attention to the object’s social aspects, such as how it signifies
or how people understand it over time, but also the ways in which the object and the people
Police archival
investigative
files
who interact with it both shape and transform—and are shaped and transformed by—one
another.
Object biography draws from the literary genre of biography, which is an interpretive and
inherently subjective account—a“narrative discourse”(Nadel, 1984,p.8)—organized by
symbolic, representative, and descriptive language. Through this language, a biographer
composes the life of their subject by bringing together distinct facts of their subject’s life with
“modes of plot structure”(Nadel, 1984, p. 8) so as to form the facts into “a new whole”(Nadel,
1984, p. 8),—expressly a story about a person, or in this case, an object. Conducting a
biography of an object is like conducting a biography of a person in that one asks questions of
an object similar to those one would ask about the life of a person, such as: Where did the
object come from, who created it? What has been its career/path so far? How does the object’s
use change with its age? According to Kopytoff, asking such questions of objects can make
noticeable or significant what might under other circumstances remain obscure (1986, p. 67).
Just as individuals can have different kinds of biographies such as professional or familial,
an object can have diverse (and often overlapping) biographies. For instance, one can
construct an object biography around foci such as an object’s technological, social, physical,
or economic histories (Kopytoff, 1986, p. 68). Whatever the focus, however, Joy notes that
object biography is inherently “relational”(2009, p. 544). Echoing Gell’s belief that as social
individuals we are the sum of our relations with other people (Gell, 1998, p. 222), Joy writes
that as the biography of a person can be thought of as “the sum of the social relationships that
constitute that person,”an object’s biography can be thought to comprise “the sum of the
social relationships that constitute the object”(2009, p. 544).
Although constructing an object biography generally includes asking questions about
and creating a sequential narrative interpretation of all the important phases of an object’s
life, a biography can also be written in a nonlinear fashion according to Joy, because an object
can undergo many reinterpretations and reincarnations throughout its life trajectory. An
object, Joy explains, can “die a number of times as it becomes part of and leaves different
spheres of relationships”and as well can have different “simultaneous lives which can run
concurrently as it acts in different relationship webs”(2009, p. 543). Further, an object may
extend over many human lifetimes, and prior understandings about the object may influence
how people understand it in its present-day setting (Joy, 2009, p. 543). As such, Joy argues that
an object biography can comprise
a series of connected jumps as the object becomes alive within certain clusters of social relationships
and is inactive at other points in time and space, undergoing a series of different lives and deaths.
Conceiving of an object biography in this way has the advantage of allowing us to pick up on the
biography of an object at specific points and contexts where the archaeological evidence will allow us
to and not feel that the biography is lacking because we are unable to construct a neat linear life story
for it (2009, p. 544).
Joy goes on to describe that what makes this process biographical rather than merely
relational is the persistence and endurance of the object’s physical form—its identity—across
time and contexts and the researcher structuring the object’s relationships as biography
(2009, p. 544). In essence, an object biographer can tell a story about the object’s vitality in
particular circumstances and various temporalities, as opposed to having to give a
chronological historical account.
Methodology
As introduced, during my ethnographic research at PARC, which comprised participant
observation, in-depth individual and group interviews, and document analysis of all
materials generated by and about the artists, archivists, activists, and a public art manager
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involved in PARC’s residency program, I employed object biography with the Files. This
entailed asking questions from points along the records continuum (the activities and
contexts related to the creation, capture, organization, and pluralization of records across
time and space), including: what is the provenance of the records, who authored them and for
what purposes? What were the social, political, and cultural contexts that brought them into
existence? Who has had control over the records? How have the records been organized,
managed, and used over time, in what contexts, and to what effects? At each of these points,
I also asked: What kinds of interactions occurred, relationships formed, and significances
materialized between people and these surveillance records?
I applied object biography to the Files in an iterative, nonlinear fashion across different
settings and activities throughout my years in the field. For example, during interview and
participant observation sessions with people who I knew had some type of connection to the
Files, I asked about their involvements with or what they knew about the records. I also
obtained answers to some of my questions during several of Sand, Imatani, and PARC
archivists’public presentations about the residency program. In addition, I asked questions
about the records while studying the records themselves in the reading room at PARC (and
often while Sand and Iamtani were also working with the records), and finally, I analyzed
newspaper articles, journal articles, and books about the Files and the Portland Police
Bureau’s surveillance program, all of which provided answers to many of my questions.
Important to note is that I did not speak with anyone at the Portland Police Bureau about the
Files as Sand and Imatani shared with me that they had: (1) contacted the Bureau and were
told that none of its current employees had created or worked with the surveillance files and
that the Bureau itself had no information about the Files, and, (2) spoken with a former Bureau
member who said he did not wish to speak with them about the Files. Given these two seeming
roadblocks in combination with my uncertainty as to whether it was absolutely necessary to
interview someone from the Bureau vis-
a-vis the needs of my research as I was finding much
information elsewhere, I dropped this line of inquiry.
Before turning to the object biography of the Files in the following sections, it must be
noted that the “object”of this biography is the entirety of the surveillance records as a whole.
However, as this “object”comprises many smaller objects (records), there are times when
I narrow the biographical perspective to particular records within the collection.
An object biography of the police historical/archival investigative files
The provenance of the surveillance records
During the early 1920s to the mid-1980s, the Portland Police Bureau, like many other urban
police departments across the United States including the Los Angeles, New York, and
Chicago departments, kept a secretive police unit: a “Red Squad.”Donner explains that police
departments established Red Squad units after 1900 during a time of growing labor strife, in
order to keep watch over and repress radicals and groups such as the Socialist Party and the
IWW [the Industrial Workers of the World] as well as the “yearly floods of hundreds of
thousands of suspect aliens entering American cities from abroad”(1990, p. 30). By the 1930s,
fear of communism became a justification for these units to continue, and by the 1960s, the
core activity of Red Squad units was to identify anyone involved in protest activities (Donner,
1990, p. 66). Throughout their existence, Red Squads engaged in physical surveillance
activities such as observation, wiretapping, and photography as well as compiling records
and dossiers on political and social activists and groups—information that Squads used to
disrupt and undermine these groups (Donner, 1990,p.1–3). In response to a fear of
Bolshevism, the Portland Police Bureau formed their Red Squad unit in the 1920s with both
private and public funds (Jacklet, 2002a;Munk, 2011, p. 203; Serbulo and Gibson, 2013, p. 12).
By the 1930s, Portland’s Red Squad served as an “outspoken right-wing political gang”writes
Police archival
investigative
files
Munk, which spent its money spying on and infiltrating “labor and political organizations,
organizing raids and provocations, and engaging in violent strike suppression”(2011, p. 204).
Red Squads were at their peak in the United States during the 1960s, with over 300,000
police engaging in political repression, which Donner defines within this milieu as “police
behavior motivated or influenced in whole or in part by hostility to protest, dissent, and
related activities perceived as a threat to the status quo”(1990, p. 1). Munk correspondingly
notes an enlargement of the Portland Police Bureau’s Red Squad at this time, stating that the
“revival of activism in the 1960s caused an expansion of the Red Squad, whose files were
quickly filled with informer reports and photo surveillance of Portlanders exercising their
political rights”(2011, p. 157). The increased monitoring of activists—especially civil rights
activists—during this period was also heightened in part by the federal government’s efforts
to disrupt the civil rights movement in the late 1960s. The expansion of the FBI’s domestic
counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO), led by Director J. Edgar Hoover, for example,
sent FBI agents to several states, including Oregon, to interrupt and discredit the Black
Nationalist movement (in Portland, the Black Panther Party in particular) (Serbulo and
Gibson, 2013, p. 14; Munk, 2011, p. 167; Medsger, 2014). Although the Portland police had
already been disrupting political organizations and watching over political activists for
decades, COINTELPRO afforded additional backing and legitimacy for such undertakings
(Serbulo and Gibson, 2013,p.14–15).
It was during the mid-1960s when Portland Police Bureau Red Squad member, terrorism
expert, and member of the radical right John Birch Society, Winfield Falk, along with more
than 20 officers who were part of the Bureau’s Criminal Intelligence Unit, whose mission was
“to prepare for and prevent acts of political violence and terrorism”(Jacklet, 2002b), started
focusing their surveillance activities on mainly left-leaning political and civic activist
organizations. This included surveilling both law-abiding groups (e.g. the police kept watch
over those who supported the civil rights movement or were against the Vietnam War) and
those involved in criminal actions. The police monitored rallies, marches, lectures, school
board meetings and kept watch over the homes of political activists (Jacklet, 2002a). Although
the police monitored groups and not individuals, the names of at least 3,000 individuals do
show up in the Files, in documents such as intelligence reports as well as in posters and
newspaper clippings in which their names are highlighted or underlined (Jacklet, 2002a).
During their surveillance activities, the police created numerous intelligence reports, took
surveillance photographs, and collected a wide range and a substantial number of materials
produced by activist groups, such as posters, flyers, event announcements, brochures,
magazines, and tabloid newspapers.
Although the bulk of the files date primarily from 1965 to 1985, the oldest document in the
files is a Communist Party membership card from 1924 and the most recent item a flier
promoting a rally for corporate responsibility in Central America and South Africa that was
scheduled for October of 1986 (Jacklet, 2002b). As mentioned, the police kept watch over
576 activist and civic groups, including the Black Panthers, Students Against the Draft,
Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Women’s Rights Coalition, American Indian Movement,
Foundation for Middle East Peace, and the Portland Town Council, to name just a few. The
police kept file folders for each organization arranged in a quasi-alphabetical order, such as
“A is for America—as in American Indian Movement, American Civil Liberties Union,
American Friends Service Committee. B is for Black: Black Panthers, Black United Front,
Black Muslims. C is for Communists”(Jacklet, 2002a). Besides the aforementioned items, the
files also contain documents such as job applications, property records, reports about
people’s sexual preferences (Jacklet, 2002c), signed petitions, bookstore mailing lists, the
license plate numbers of individuals who attended demonstrations (Jacklet, 2004), and lists of
campaign contributors, such as the names and addresses of people who contributed to a 1976
ballot measure supported by Oregonians for Nuclear Safeguards (Jacklet and Skinner, 2002).
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There are also letters in the files, including one found within the Rape Relief Hotline file
penned by two women discussing Oregon rape laws, which they sent to the Oregonian
newspaper in March 1978. A note in the file states that the police ran a background check on
the two letter writers (Jacklet and Skinner, 2002). The police also kept index card files
containing thousands of index cards naming and linking individuals to various groups; cards
that the police organized “by name, by group, by the first three numbers of the subject’s
phone number, and by the last three numbers of the individual’s license plate number”
(Jacklet, 2002b).
In 1981, the Oregon State Legislature passed a law prohibiting law enforcement
agencies from collecting and maintaining information about “the political, religious or
social views, associations or activities of any individual, group, association, organization,
corporation, business or partnership unless such information directly relates to an
investigation of criminal activities”(Oregon State Legislature, 1981, Pub. L. No. 181A.250,
Chapter 181A 2017 ORS). However, Falk broke this law (as well as Portland Police Bureau
policy that prohibited police from collecting and keeping information not related to
criminal activity) and continued to amass information on organizations such as the
Hispanic Political Action Committee, Mackenzie River Gathering Foundation (a social
justice organization), and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Coalition of Greater Portland
(Williams, 2004,p.190;Redden, 2006). Although it is unknown whether Falk was carrying
out these surveillance activities with his superior’s approval or on his own accord, post-
1981 intelligence reports that Falk directed to superior officers suggest that some officers
within the bureau knew what he was doing[4]. Further, not only did Falk continue to gather
information after 1981, he also took the files (which, per state law, were to be destroyed)
from police headquarters. Although it is uncertain as to when he removed the files and took
them home (Jacklet, 2002a),[5] and whether he was ordered to take the files or simply took
them without anyone knowing, Falk’s removal of the files from the bureau to his garage
and later to a barn in Washington was never reported (Redden, 2006). Falk died of a heart
attack in 1987 before the public would learn about his surveillance activities and how after
1981, he conducted them beyond the walls (and perhaps, oversight) of the Portland Police
Bureau.
Files uncovered
In the summer of 2002, writer and Portland Tribune columnist Phil Stanford was on the
search for the Portland Police Bureau vice squad’s files that dealt with gambling, prostitution,
and drug cases during the 1950s and 1960s after someone told him of their existence:
An old cop, who told me that the vice files had been spirited away some years earlier after the
department was ordered to destroy them, said he thought Win Falk might have taken them. Win
Falk was dead, of course, so I started calling around. One of the people I checked with was his ex [sic]
Susan Hauser. She told me she didn’t know if the files still existed, but I’m sure she was one of those
who suggested I track down Win’s brother, Dennis[6].
Stanford was working on his first book, Portland Confidential: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in
the Rose City, and finding these vice files he told me, “was going to be the big breakthrough.”
He did indeed track the files down to Falk’s brother, Dennis, who told him the files were in a
barn in eastern Washington and who subsequently delivered the files to Stanford. Stanford
put the files in his basement and spent several weeks going through them. “I was very
excited,”he explained:
I started looking through them...and, I didn’t find anything I wanted.. .I was looking for the vice
files, and this was all political surveillance, so it was a huge disappointment. I gave them to the
Tribune and let them do what they wanted with them...I was devastated[7].
Police archival
investigative
files
Although devastated that the files did not turn out to be what he was looking for, Stanford
knew they were worth pursuing; however, he was not interested in writing about them as he
was “hot on the trail of something else,”and instead gave the files to the Tribune[8]. The
Tribune’snews editor at the time, Lora Cuykendall, was interested in the files and similarly
thought them worthy of attention and assigned Tribune journalist Ben Jacklet as the lead
reporter on a special investigative project on the files. The Tribune, which at that time was
located on the fourth floor of a building on SW 5
th
Street in downtown Portland, kept the
boxes of surveillance files in a small office space on the sixth floor of the building. Jacklet
described that for approximately two months he would come in to the Tribune, go to his
regular desk, and then “disappear up to this solitary room with the files”for prolonged
stretches of time—reading, taking longhand notes, and marking pages for photocopy—an
experience he described as exciting, yet “daunting,”as there were so many files and boxes[9].
During this time, Jacklet would also brainstorm with the project team to decide what the
stories, illustrations, and headlines were going to be—essentially, “trying to turn the files into
a story somehow”[10]. He also contacted and interviewed former city and police bureau
employees as well as people whose lives he came across in the records to learn what they had
to say and how they felt about the police surveillance program and its records—thoughts and
emotions he incorporated into his articles.
Jacklet broke the story about the surveillance program and its files (dubbing the files,
“the Watcher Files”) on September 13, 2002. The Tribune purposely timed the series of
articles entitled “The Secret Watchers”to come out close to September 11 because one of
the big debates in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in the United States on September
11, 2001, was over civil liberties, including how much surveillance should there be (if any)
in a free society. After the publishing of the series, over 800 people contacted the Tribune
to find out whether they or the organizations to which they belonged had been under
watch, and the newspaper provided thousands of pages of photocopies of the surveillance
files to those represented in them. The Tribune’sarticles also caught the attention of
Portland City Archivist Diana Banning, who was at once interested in moving the files
into the city’s archives. After laying the legal groundwork to do so, Banning worked with
the editor of the Tribune to transfer the files to PARC in 2004. PARC named the files the
Police Historical/Archival Investigative Files and joined them with the Red Squad Files,an
earlier collection of Portland Police Bureau surveillance files that document how the
police kept tabs on suspected communists from the 1930s through the 1960s (see earlier
discussion).
At PARC, a few responses to the files
Curious to know about some of the ways in which people have responded to the surveillance
records since their transfer to PARC in 2004 and leading up to artists’experiences with them, I
asked archivists Banning, Mary Hansen, and Brian Johnson if they had any memorable
“response stories”they might share with me. Johnson recalled that Kent Ford, founder of the
Portland Black Panther Party, was one of the first persons to come in and look at the Files.
Ford examined the Black Panther Party (BPP) file, which according to Johnson, is “pretty
much his [Ford’s] personal file”[11] because as the leader of the BPP, the police kept close
watch over Ford—as they did with anyone who was heavily involved in a group or
organization under police surveillance. Johnson also remembers Ford chuckling as he looked
at some of the accounts the police had recorded about aspects of his life, many of which
contrasted with his own personal memories. For example, in one of the documents, an
informant details the layout of Ford’s house and notes the existence and location of a gun
closet; however, as Ford explained to Johnson, a gun closet did not exist in that location. In
fact, Ford never had a gun closet—the object in that spot was Ford’s refrigerator. Johnson
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recalled how Ford found the misinformation about him in the official record entertaining
and went on to describe that this was not the only incidence of people finding errors in the
Files—over the years he and other PARC archivists have witnessed numerous people
discover inaccuracies about past events or their livelihoods in this collection[12].
Johnson also related a humorous anecdote about a man who came to the archives to see if
he and his wife—both of whom were politically active during the surveillance era—were
named in the index card files. Johnson remembers the man being “ecstatic”and “tickled”upon
finding his but not his wife’s name in the Files, as the man believed that his presence and his
wife’s absence in the Files verified that he was more “radical”than she was[13]. Relatedly,
Hansen also had experiences she found curious and amusing working with people who did
not find themselves in the Files:
People expect to find themselves in there [in the Files] and when they don’t, they seem disappointed,
which I find very interesting...sometimes people are really disappointed and they will say to me:
“I know I am in those files”and I say to them, “well, you can come in and take a look and we’ll pull
the card [index cards with individual names] and see”...some people are very disappointed, which
I find pretty humorous...because they just want to be present there[14].
Collaborating with and transforming the files
In 2013, social justice and disarmament advocate Joanne Oleksiak sought out Imatani and
Sand after reading an article about their artistic engagements with the Files in the newspaper
Street Roots. She contacted the artists to share her stories about the records as she was very
familiar with them: when the Tribune broke the story about the Files, which included a list of
all of the activist and civic groups who had been under surveillance, Oleksiak requested and
obtained from the Tribune copies of files pertaining to the activist groups with whom she had
an affiliation. Within the reproductions, Oleksiak found among other things some of her
Plate 1.
Red Rose School
brochure by Oleksiak,
1984.The Police
Historical/Archival
Investigative Files,
PARC. Photo courtesy
of Sand and
Imatani, 2017
Police archival
investigative
files
artwork—hand-drawn flyers and brochures she had created for various social action events
and activist newsletters in the 1980s[15] (see Plate 1).
Oleksiak arranged a meeting with Imatani and Sand at PARC, and besides
looking through the records together, she shared with them her personal archives of
activist materials she had created and collected from the 1970s and 1980s. About this
meeting, Sand recalled:
She came to see us in the conference room at PARC, and she pulled out her documents she
wanted to show us. I recognized her handwriting and her drawings, and I said to her: “I’ve been
seeing your drawings all along in the surveillance files, and I love this artwork”(Imatani and
Sand, 2015).
Sand and Oleksiak decided to collaborate on something together. One of the things that
influenced their art-making process was Sand’s perception of the surveillance records as an
artist portfolio for Oleksiak. Sand explains:
Well, I always thought of these archives –the surveillance records –as being this kind of bizarre
artist portfolio for Joanne, because there were these drawings that she doesn’t even own
anymore, they’re in these surveillance files, and I just thought that was so interesting...so I was
thinking what if we made an artist portfolio based on the surveillance files in the archives, and
Joanne was interested in that, but she wanted it to not be limited to that (Imatani and
Sand, 2015).
Oleksiak and Sand ended up creating exceedingly small books, which they call inch-by-inch
books. The books have a zine aesthetic and are collections of Oleksiak’s pen and ink line
drawings from her archives in combination with several of her drawings Imatani and Sand
encountered in the Files before they met her. Imatani, Sand, and Oleksiak made a large
number of these books, and Imatani and Sand gave them away at several of their exhibitions
and performances (see Plate 2).
Discussion
The “exchange of objects between people are turning points”writes Dant (2001,p.12),
whether in the life of an object or in the lives of those who engage with the object.
Plate 2.
Drawing Dissent
inch-by-inch books by
Joanne Oleksiak and
Kaia Sand. Photograph
courtesy of Kaia
Sand, 2015
JD
Further, these turning points are places of connection and tension—places of affect or
“moments of intensity”(O’Sullivan, 2013, p. 11), as different people interact with and
experience objects in distinctive ways. Tracing the turning points of the Files—beginning
with their removal from the Police Bureau to Falk’s garage, then to a barn in Washington,
to Stanford’s basement, to the Tribune, to PARC, and lastly to their transformations into
artwork—affords a view of some of the associations, frictions, and affects the Files have
engendered through time and space and how records can influence and negotiate human
actions and relationships.
For instance, Stanford was “excited,”and then “devastated”by the records, or more
accurately, devastated by what he found absent from them—calling to mind the power of
what Gilliland and Caswell term “imagined-but-unavailable records,”which they state can
“serve as fertile sources of personal and public affect that is not only a significant human and
ethical consideration in itself but also can be activated and manipulated for a variety of
political and social ends”(2015, p. 55). Stanford’s“imagined-but-unavailable records”did
indeed trigger a response with political and social intents: he gave the records to the Tribune
(which was not a given, he could have kept them, given them to someone else or destroyed
them), knowing the newspaper would think “they were worth pursuing”[16] and making
known to the public. Then, when the records moved to the Tribune, they evoked new
relationships between people—between Cuykendall and Jacklet, for instance, as well as
between two other journalists who worked on the news story, Jim Redden and Anna Skinner.
The content and contexts of the records captured the interests of Jacklet, Skinner, and
Redden, motivating them to interview and interact with a wide array of community members
including police officers, activists, and city officials whose lives in some way intersected with
the records, all of which transformed social connections between the records and people and
entities within the Portland community. The Tribune’s publication of the news stories then
moved Banning, prompting her to acquire and preserve the surveillance records because of
their value to the community of Portland (and beyond), widening access to these records and
possibilities for further meaning-making and personal and social relations with them, which
subsequently opened the door for Sand and Imatani almost a decade later to collaboratively
activate and transform the Files into art, telling new stories and creating new social relations
with the records.
Returning to Ketelaar’s idea that “we can no longer read the record as our predecessors
have read that record,”the connections and frictions associated with recontextualizations of a
record add meaning to the record that in turn change prior understandings about the record.
For example, not only can we read Oleksiak’s pen and ink line drawings from the Files as
documents that the Portland Police Bureau collected in their efforts to keep track of activist
activity and what they thought were dangerous ideologies and activities and that are
currently part of an archival collection, but through the inch-by-inch books, we can also read
them as artistic mediums, aesthetic objects, a means to make a personal, social, or political
statement or as a component of an artist’s and activist’s oeuvre. This illustrates how records
are persistent potentialities that can be put to use, evince and support interpretations, and
enter into relationships and environments in ways their creator(s) never intended—and most
likely never imagined.
Employing object biography with the Files threw into sharp relief how records play
integral roles as activators, mediators, and transformers of human actions and relations,
instead of merely providing a “stage setting”for human doings and relationships (Gosden
and Marshall, 1999, p. 169)—such as how records brought Sand and Oleksiak together and
were intrinsic to their collaborative art-making process and resultant inch-by-inch books. A
majority of the records comprising the Files has been in existence for almost 50 years, and
undoubtedly there are more and other kinds of trajectories and relations beyond what I detail
in my work here. As each writer brings to a biography an idea of what is to be its focus,
Police archival
investigative
files
biographies are partial and subjective, as is my biographical account of these records: it is
but one—although polyvocal—view. Nonetheless, applying a biographical approach
provided the opportunity to ask particular questions about the Files and a framework
from which to analyze the answers and weave together a tapestry of stories not only about the
records and people’s experiences with them, but also about how people and records influence
one another.
Conclusion
This paper has shown that object biography provides a way to trace how the meanings of
records change and are renegotiated in different settings and temporalities. As a record is
“unique to each individual beholder and moment”(Gorichanaz and Latham, 2016, p. 1115),
tracking such moments or “documental transactions”in Latham’sframing(2014)(how
people experience documents) not only reveals a record’s various singularities but also
how it accumulates different valuations—personal, mnemonic, social, cultural, aesthetic,
and political values—over time and space. Object biography offers theoretical and
methodological tools to broaden our analyses and understandings of records and to discover
something about the lives of those who create, encounter, and use them and the particular
settings and wider social contexts of which they are part. Obtaining stories about the
origins, trajectories, uses, and significances of records is important not only for archival
description purposes but also for growing our knowledge about our attachments to and
relations in the world. Knowing why someone creates and keeps a record tells us something
about human motivation and intention as well as what kinds of things we connect to and
value (enough to document and save for the future). Knowing how people use records, which
links people to other people, places to other places, events to other events, and time periods
to other time periods, reveals relationships and significances between—and paves the way
to more complex and sophisticated understandings of—people, geographies, events, epochs,
and of course, records.
Within the fields of archival studies and information studies, there is much more work that
needs to be done using object biography. More theoretical and applied work in particular is
needed to investigate experiences of records from diverse perspectives to deepen knowledge
of what records are, how people activate them and for what purposes, and the kinds of
personal and social affects and effects they engender—knowledge useful not only for theory
building but also for people involved in building systems and designing technologies that
preserve and make accessible records, for instance. Object biography can also serve specific
functions within archival endeavors. For example, object biography can be a tool for archival
collection management, supplying collections additional context and helping to (re)
contextualize and remedy information gaps in underdocumented collections. In addition,
because of their accessible narrative form, object biographies can be put to use in archival
outreach endeavors to promote and spread awareness about collections in publications and
exhibitions or on websites and social media. These are but a few examples and this paper is
but a first step in exploring the potential of the use of object biography within the archival
studies field and the information studies field, with hope for more applications in research and
practice.
Notes
1. The term “object biography”covers both the method for conducting research and the result or
product of that research.
2. This study stemmed from my interests and doctoral research in examining and understanding
through firsthand experience why, how, and to what effects artists use and transform
JD
archival records and why, how, and to what effects archival institutions host artist-in-residence
programs.
3. For more on the work of Imatani and Sand during their residency at PARC, see: Carbone
(2015, 2017).
4. Ben Jacklet, in conversation with the author, July 27, 2015.
5. It must be noted that there are varying opinions as to when Falk took the files: Jacklet and his
sources did not know; however, Williams states Falk took the files in 1983, see: Williams, Our
Enemies in Blue, 190.
6. Phil Stanford, email message to the author, February 5, 2017.
7. Phil Stanford, in conversation with the author, July 25, 2015.
8. Phil Stanford, email message to the author, February 6, 2017.
9. Ben Jacklet, in conversation with the author, July 27, 2015.
10. Ben Jacklet, in conversation with the author, July 27, 2015.
11. Brian Johnson, in conversation with the author, February 25, 2015.
12. Brian Johnson, in conversation with the author, February 25, 2015.
13. Brian Johnson, in conversation with the author, September 5, 2015
14. Mary Hansen, in conversation with the author, February 25, 2015.
15. Joanne Oleksiak, in conversation with the author, February 26, 2015.
16. Phil Stanford, email message to the author, February 6, 2017.
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Corresponding author
Kathy Carbone can be contacted at: kcarbone@g.ucla.edu
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Police archival
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