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Alexandra Juhasz

Alex Juhasz with VHS Camcorder in 1987

The VHS Activism Archive holds records of all my VHS tapes, 192 or so. They all used to sit on my office shelves, commencing in the 1980s in NYC, moving to Philadelphia in the 1990s, then to Pitzer College in Claremont CA from 1995-2016, and then back to NYC to my office at Brooklyn College, growing in number and interests over the years until work stopped being made or shared with VHS. In that final return to NYC, I wondered what to do with all those tapes, now a format that was nearly impossible to use, as well as becoming every more fragile (we were told VHS had a shelf life of 25 years; many of mine are much older, and as of this writing in 2024 almost all are still going strong!) For twenty or more years, I had used these workhorses to teach and for my research in queer feminist media praxis, with core attention to AIDS, feminism, experimental and activist media, anti-racism, queer, lesbian, gay and trans media, and documentary.

The collection (and this archive holding it) look like me, and my attachments to these areas of activism and culture over those years, as well as those of my extended community of fellow teachers, scholars, artists, and activists from around 1980-2000 when VHS stopped being a well-supported medium for production, collection, or exhibition. Many of my tapes were given to me for my teaching and research by their makers, member of small, tight, and committed media communities.

But in fact, all scholars, activists, researchers, and artists of a certain age and inclination are burdened with just such a soon-to-be-obsolete but always-beloved, carefully tended but recently quieted collection which most likely sits on your own office shelf gaining dust: your VHS Archive. Not a personal collection but a professional one of continuing or even growing value if not usability, each distinct VHS archive has been lovingly built and used, probably over decades, for teaching and research and in support of the movements and issues that have mattered most to its collector. I think of these collections as related to but not really personal holdings. They don't document family or private life; these are professional collections that served our disciplines, communities, students, and research well.

In 2016, I decided to use my small collection as a test-case for these many others. The VHS Archives Research Group met to think about research and care for these and other analogue materials, and as much so the people in them, and those who will want and use them (see "Queer Histories, Videotape, and the Ethics of Reuse" by VHS Archive Research Group member and archivist, Rachel Mattson). The VHS Archives Research Group (2017-2020) at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY, generated ample writing and research by students, scholars, writers, archivists, and activists about analogue archives of vulnerable people, particularly those interested in health and sexuality from a queer, trans, or BIPOC perspective.

This group was also developing an archiving tool, Analogue Archives that quieted in its development because of the COVID pandemic. Several projects were made with this "open source tool for the thoughtful, engaged, and community-based use of analogue materials" (see the Sister Sites pull-down menu). My project, built in the tool, Womxn of Vision, holds an annotated 4+hour VHS tape that documented my research meeting of feminist media practitioners and supporters from 1994. As is true for the project as a whole, the digitized tape led to public programming where younger feminists engaged with tapes and people from earlier moments in movements.

The graduate course, PIMA Artistic Process in Contemporary Community/Special Topics in Film History, co-taught at Brooklyn College twice by Professor Jenn McCoy, used selected tapes from the collection as inspiration, research and re-activation. Two scholarly articles were written about the class, "Re-energizing VHS Collections and Expanding Knowledge," with McCoy, and "VHS Archives, Committed Media Praxis, and ‘Queer Cinema.’" The course work from these classes, as well as a different iteration, Socially Engaged Archives: In Theory/In Practice, co-taught by Chloe Bass to CUNY graduates students in a range of fields and practices from Brooklyn and Queens College and the Graduate Center, is also archived here. The students make the tapes held here speak again, through a range of artistic and research practices. The tapes' thoughtful re-use is the core commitment of the archive.

In comparison to the massive archives and collections of video and other analogue detritus made available by digital technology, my collection is small, under-supported, and useful to limited and select groups of researchers and searchers. Keeping the tapes loved and useful for those who need them has been the project's primary goal. To allow this to happen, many people put their hands on these materials, as well as the lists, tools, ideas, and people generated therein. They are thanked in the credits for their invaluable work and generosity. I think it's imperative to note here that while a collection of about 200 is microscopic in relation to YouTube and other digital archives, everything seen here has been first digitized, researched, and then also built into the back end of this archive, field by field, by hand, and this took uncountable hours of tedious but caring labor: be me, by students, and by several project assistants who I will thank now.

Brianna Jones (media archivist), Corey O'Hara (archival assistant), and Krystal Valentin (digitizing and archival assistant) are the project collaborators who devoted their skills and hearts in such sizable and serious ways that we were able to get this project, at last, to some finish line: the usable state it in which it now presents. They are three of the queer, of color, and/or feminist researchers to whom this collection is directed and from which more will come.

--Alexandra Juhasz, Project Director