essay 001 — archive
01 june 2026
Archive. A word I'm becoming increasingly tired of hearing. Ironically, it's also one that has informed my eye, my taste, and much of my work over the past decade.
Over time, I've cultivated something meaningful through the lens of culture — an extension of self, revealed through image, reference and intuition; a kind of vulnerability rarely recognised for what it is. In many ways, taste has always felt autobiographical.
Archiving has also shaped far more than my work. It has informed how I navigate culture and what I return to. In many ways, it has become part of my identity.
In today’s landscape, “nostalgia” and “archive” have become overloaded words, reduced to the language of the algorithm. But for me, visuals have always been a form of communication and what we’re now seeing is repetition without intimacy or lived context, which in turn creates aesthetic sameness.
My resistance isn’t to archive culture itself; it’s been my home for a long time. My concern is what gets lost when taste is reduced to aesthetic, and this new wave feels different. It’s cloaked in the language of “let’s make it archive”, drawing from reference culture while bypassing the curation.
Taste as autobiography exists within a category of its own and it’s something I not only cherish but fiercely protect. The references we gather, the images we return to, the sounds we carry with us — they reveal more than we often realise.
What was once a way back to ourselves, particularly within the context of Black culture, through retrospective imagery now feels increasingly saturated. And saturation has a way of flattening context.
Maybe it's the speed at which we now consume imagery. Maybe it's the commercialisation of it all. Maybe it's a combination of factors. Whatever the cause, the search becomes less about connection and more about consumption.
People referencing references of references.
The encounter feels altered and, in the process, the desire to sit with an image is replaced by the desire to immediately find the next one.
My concern isn’t that more people have found their way to archive culture. It’s that care is increasingly being replaced by volume. Somewhere along the way, quantity began to eclipse quality. The art isn’t simply in the finding, it’s in the context, the sequencing, the emotional response behind what is being shown and why.
For me, archiving, or taste-gathering isn’t just about fragments of the past. It’s about the blueprint that has informed the trends you see today.
The references we choose shape the work we make. The most interesting work emerges when people cultivate their own sensibilities; when the references are rooted in lived experience, points of view and genuine curiosity. Distinctive work emerges from distinctive sensibilities.
Given enough time, taste becomes recognisable. Its fingerprints begin to reveal themselves. What once felt instinctive becomes legible to others. In many ways, that recognition is a form of authorship.
And that deserves protection. Why? Taste has never been arbitrary.
Increasingly, what once felt like a place of solace is now leveraged as content. Although the imagery remains, the meaning becomes harder to hold onto and the distance between the image and the life that made it becomes harder to ignore.
