I recently catalogued a series by Oliver Sieber titled Imaginary Club as part of my placement at the V&A within the programme Museum Curators for Photography of the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach Foundation, Essen, Germany.
Imaginary Club consists of 432 photographs that are mounted on 349 boards in three formats. It features half-length colour portraits of individuals from various countries as well as black-and-white-photographs in connection with the places where the portraits were taken. Having been interested in subcultural movements like Rockabilly, Goth or Visual Key for years, Sieber started Imaginary Club at a moment, where he observed how Japanese subculture expanded into Europe and the US. He then visited concerts or conventions and approached visitors to photograph them.
The series was acquired by the V&A in 2024 through the Photography Acquisitions Group. It aligns with the other photographs in the collection that show subcultures, as seen in exhibitions such as Club to Catwalk. London Fashion in the 1980s at the V&A South Kensington in 2013, and reflects the museum’s ongoing commitment to contemporary photography. Cataloguing the series involved assigning museum numbers and collecting information on the images, including details such as title, dimensions, or a brief description. Cataloguing not only makes the work accessible to a wider public on Explore the Collections, but it also ensures that people within the museum can find it – both in terms of its physical location and its image content. Additionally, part of the work involves collections care tasks, like transferring the images into archival boxes and placing them in sleeves, which are ideal for preserving photographs.
The French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault wrote extensively about power, which is often understood as suppressive. However, Foucault argues that it can also be productive: by doing something a certain way, talking about it in a particular manner, or presenting certain things, we exercise power and shape discourses (another term discussed by Foucault). What, then, is the power cataloguing holds?
By cataloguing any work, I make decisions about which information to include. Oliver Sieber worked on Imaginary Club between 2005 and 2012. One year into the project, the social media platform Twitter launched, popularizing the hashtag format. Sieber joined Twitter and shared his impressions and thoughts while working on the series. In 2013, Imaginary Club was produced as a book under the same title by publishers GwinZegal and BöhmKobayashi. The book features Sieber’s Twitter Encyclopedia, as well as an image index with information on the person’s name, year, place and relevant hashtags. Since twitter and the hashtags are an important part of the project, I included this information in the cataloguing process.
I consider these tweets and hashtags to form a key framework for the series. From this, I was able to compile a list of venues, bands, conventions, films and books that are referenced. Cataloguers are often the first ones to deeply engage with a work, and such a list can help facilitate the future engagement with that series. This includes key topics like the ones that you can read more about here.
