Ed’s Ford Archive

In the 1970s, Ed Emery was involved in the political activist group Big Flame, and was one of the early organisers of the UK-based Ford Workers’ Group. In 1976, he founded radical publisher Red Notes and he has translated key works by Italian playwright Dario Fo and political theorist Antonio Negri. Though out the Seventies and Eighties Ed meticulously archived the actions at Ford, particularly at the Dagenham site, but also more widely. Held in storage until recently, he decided it was time to share this archive through digitisation at the Mayday Rooms and so I found myself photographing this fascinating collection and in doing so become in some sense entangled with the archive myself.

Ed’s Ford archive is comprised of press clippings, original writing, photographs and an array of ephemera bound chronologically in distinctive red binders. These were bought from a specific shop in Rome which I presume to be a purveyor of fine Marxist stationary, and a material manifestation of Ed’s long concern with Operaismo. Although the collection extends to the end of the 20th century, the most comprehensive chronology is from 1971 to ’79, encompassing the first years of my own life (I was born in 1973). Dismantling these folders and laboriously photographing each item contained within may, for many people, be an incredibly tedious undertaking. However, having grown up in a working class area, dominated by the manufacturing industry at the time, the process for me has become one imbued with what I have come to understand as what Deleuze and Guattari would describe as affect..