The placard everyone pictures is lettered by hand. A marker, a piece of card, an evening at a kitchen table, and the wobble in the last line where the writer ran out of room. This archive has plenty of those. It also has a great many sheets of A4, printed in colour at a shop, several of them slipped into the punched plastic file sleeve that is sold for school projects.
Look at what is on those sheets and the same move keeps happening. Almost none of them is an original composition. Each one is somebody else's layout with the contents changed.
Nothing in that advertisement has been redrawn. The product shot is in its corner, the logo is where the logo goes, and the manufacturer's own strapline is left at the foot of the page: When you want to be sure. Two faces and one line of Hindi are the whole intervention.
That is the point of borrowing a format. A hand-lettered card asks to be believed. A borrowed one arrives already believed, because the reader recognises the shape of it before reading a word, and has to supply the rest of the joke themselves. The person holding it has not asked for attention. They have taken some that was already paid for.
The nappy packet is the same operation on a supermarket shelf. The red roundel is where that brand puts its own claim, so the claim is simply rewritten inside it. The bubble promising ten hours is left alone, because it is funnier untouched.
The plastic sleeve is worth noticing too. It is a ring-binder pocket, the thing a school assignment is handed in inside, and here it is waterproofing. Album 002 of this Lighthouse is about rain at Jantar Mantar. The sheet was made to be carried for several hours in weather that was going to arrive.
There is a practical difference underneath the rhetorical one. A hand-lettered card costs an evening and exists once. A printed sheet costs roughly a bus fare, and it is a file before it is an object, which means it can be sent to somebody four hundred kilometres away and printed again there. That is why a joke shows up twice in this archive in two cities. Album 015 has one of them improvised in Delhi with a roll of tape and printed in Hyderabad with a coalition's name along the bottom edge.
Then there is the shirt, which is the purest case in the archive because nothing at all has been altered.
It is a screenshot of the government's own account. The profile photograph is there, the handle is there, the blue tick is there, and so, deliberately, is the timestamp: 18/04/18, 11:57 PM. The sentence welcomes criticism. The person wearing it has added no comment of any kind. They have added a date and a body to carry it, and walked into a protest about a leaked examination paper.
On the back of the shirt, in quotation marks and attributed to nobody: I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.
A screenshot is the one object here whose meaning sits outside the photograph. It works while the original is still where it says it is, and the moment that changes the object stops being a quotation and becomes an assertion, which is a much weaker thing to be holding. No archive can prevent that. What an archive can do is record that the object existed, what it showed, and the date somebody carried it through a street, which is the half of the problem that is ours.
And then, at night, three of them in a row at the same height.
On the left the plainest object in the archive, hand-lettered in black capitals, arguing that the resignation is no longer the point. In the middle a printed board with two cat photographs on it. On the right, hand-lettered and decorated along one edge with small printed stickers, a card that is about none of this and all of it: Speaking Out against GOVERNMENT CORRUPTION won't ruin your Aesthetic btw.
Someone wrote that by hand, about the look of the thing, on a card they had taken trouble to make look good. It is the most self-aware object in the frame and it is not the printed one.
The archive collects photographs of things made to be photographed. That is not a complaint, and it is not new: a placard has always been an object made to be looked at, which is why it is held above the head. What is new is the step in between. Before the object there is a file, and the file can be a shop's job, a friend's job, or a stranger's in another state. Of the five things on this page, four will survive as long as the photographs do. The fifth depends on a tweet from 2018 staying where it is.