PROOF OF ENTRY
Archiving the Ephemeral: Ticket Stubs and the Aesthetics of Witnessing
This body of work examines the relationship between personal memory and mass-produced ephemera through the photographic cataloging of vintage ticket stubs. Collected over five decades by my father, these modest slips of paper—creased, perforated, faded—function as physical indices of presence, each one a quiet proof of attendance at something once live, fleeting, and now inaccessible.
By isolating these objects within a uniform taxonomical framework, the series elevates their materiality while preserving their inherent fragility. The stubs, originally intended for brief transactional use, are recast here as relics of leisure and cultural participation. Their shifting typographies, serial systems, and evolving visual designs constitute a subtle archaeology of time—where aesthetics, economics, and printing technologies intersect.
There is no visual record of the performances, games, trips, or films these stubs once granted access to. What remains is the residue of entry: a gesture toward experience, captured not in image but in artifact. As such, the work explores how memory is mediated through the tactile, the disposable, and the nearly forgotten—inviting viewers to consider the quiet dignity of the mundane and the overlooked.
