ABOUT

Auntie Penny’s Tapes is a curated collection of videotape home movies named after my Auntie Penny who documented some of our Massachusetts-based family memories on VHS-C from the mid-1990s to around the time of my grandmother's passing in 2005. As an audiovisual archivist born into the generation whose childhood's are captured on this medium, learning about the instability and impending technological obscurity of videotape compelled me to urgently begin gathering these materials.

 

Debuting in commercial markets during the 1980s, videotape stands as the the first affordable consumer-grade recording medium widely available to marginalized communities. It represents one of the earliest mediums through which many families could intimately preserve their memories. For communities historically excluded from self-reflective recording, these tapes are significant. to both personal and cultural histories.  

 

As a scholar of Black visuality it was important to ensure that the public encounters these tapes without fully having access to the private lives of those within them. To achieve this balance I developed a "seen-through" editing technique, curating and layering the footage so that the memories could be sensed and experienced without compromising the intimate details. 

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