Indecipherable

Hoping to evoke in readers memories of their own encounters with the missing or illegible, this visual essay highlights materials from across the Archives that represent mysteries. There are texts that have stumped the Archives’ crowdsourced attempts to transcribe them, photographs of unidentified people, and manuscripts that have been damaged, destroyed, or lost, such as torn out pages from an artist’s diary or a letter consisting of only the postscript. One could regard these objects with melancholy, as representing gaps in knowledge that may never be bridged. They raise questions about the limits of any archive, and the necessary incompleteness of the work we do as scholars. However, by being irreducible to facts—by, we might say, not doing their job—I argue that indecipherable or incomprehensible archival materials may assert a hold on the researcher that legible materials do not.