A first year Master of Information student at the iSchool has managed to fuse his passions of photography and archives into a new project, and now has been published in a prestigious journal.
Marcos Armstrong consulted on photography archiving and collections management at the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA) Photography Archives in Guatemala. He then curated, with Anaís García Salazar, the digital exhibition of photographs from the archive’s collection.
“Photographs from the CIRMA Photography Archives (1940s-1990s)” shows the everyday uses of the camera to capture aspects of life in Guatemala during the Cold War. This included political and public events, to cultural and daily activities. The main focus of the digital exhibition was on events of the revolutionary decade after WWII (1944-54), the internal conflicts that followed, and the period leading up to the peace accords signed in 1996.
Subsequently, Marcos wrote an article about the photography archive, and that was recently made available online by the journal, Photography and Culture.
Marcos’s educational background and experience was pivotal in his success.
By profession, he is a photography archivist and digital imaging specialist with an MA in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University. His research interests include: photography and digital image preservation, information
systems and design, and the history of photographic processes. Furthermore, he has also published an article about historic photography processes, “The California Gold Rush: Approaches to Producing Daguerreotype Views” in The Daguerreian Annual 2014.
His own photography work is also a passion. In an interview with the Toronto-based design company, ROLLOUT, he described his interests in photographing “interiors, exteriors and objects, with an attention to the aesthetic and functional elements of space.”
Engaging, thought-provoking and with fresh insight, Marcos continues to inspire as both a photographer and an archivist.
If you would like to see more of Marcos’s work, please follow University of Toronto Libraries.
