There is a new link in the menu at the top of this site. It says The Archive, and behind it is every photograph of David Stahl’s work that I have, going back to 2013, in one place, in order, and searchable.

Fourteen years. Type a year, or a word, and it finds it.

I want to explain why this exists, because it is easy to mistake it for a bigger gallery page, and it is not that.

Work does not usually disappear dramatically

When an artist loses their early work, it is almost never a fire or a flood. It is drift.

Here is how it actually happens. Someone photographs a show in 2015 and the pictures go in a folder on whatever service they were using that year. In 2017 they switch services. In 2019 the phone changes. Someone helpfully makes a folder called “new stuff” and eleven months later nobody alive knows what was new about it. None of it is lost, exactly. It is all still sitting there. It has just become unfindable, one small reasonable decision at a time, until the earliest work is the hardest work to reach.

That was true here, and it was true because of me. Dave’s work was spread across three different services of mine plus this website, in folders named by a version of me who was certain he would remember.

So this summer I pulled all of it into one place.

What that turned up

Consolidating an archive sounds like filing. It is not. It is closer to going through the studio.

Duplicates came out, the same photograph saved four times across four years. Files that had drifted into the wrong year went back where they belonged, and where a photograph carried the date it was taken inside it, that date was used rather than my memory of it.

Two things came back that I did not expect.

The first is an early layer from 2013 that had come loose from everything else and was sitting where nobody would ever have looked for it. It is now back at the front of the sequence, where it should have been the whole time. It is the beginning of the record.

The second is smaller and I like it more. There was a set of pieces with no date on them at all, no folder, no clue. It turned out this website had been quietly keeping the receipt. Every image ever uploaded here carries the day it went up, so those works could be matched against the site’s own history and placed back in time. I checked each match against the actual pixels before trusting it, because a filename will lie to you and a photograph will not. Twenty two of them got their dates back that way.

Dave’s website, it turns out, had been keeping better records than I had.

What it is now

The archive holds just over a thousand images, covering roughly a thousand distinct works, from 2013 to this year. It is laid out year by year. There is a search box. Multiple shots of the same piece are grouped so you see the work rather than the same sculpture six times, and the toggle to see every frame is right there if you want it.

It is not curated and it is not trying to be. A gallery page is an argument about which pieces matter most. This is the opposite of that. It is the whole record, including the odd angles and the things shot in a hurry, because in twenty years the odd angle is often the only picture of a piece that no longer exists.

That is the actual point of it. Not display. Continuity.

Dave has been making this work by hand for fourteen years, out of bolts and caps and gears and wire, out of the small metal leftovers other people had already finished with. The least it deserves is to be findable.

Go and wander through it. Start at 2013 and scroll forward, and watch what happens to the work between then and now.