About

Cas Brown, archivist

I got into this work because of a box. Someone I loved kept one — photographs, a few letters, two reels of film nobody could play — and when they were gone the box was all that said who they had been. Nobody knew what was in it. I decided to find out, and I have been finding out for other people ever since.

Brouillette Archival is my private practice. Every collection that comes through it is handled, described, and returned by me. There is no team behind the name, and I would rather you know that than assume otherwise.

Draft opening — the personal reason is Cas's to tell. Replace with his own three or four sentences.

Training

Trained twice: once in film, once in archives.

The film degree came first and it is not a detour. Ten years in projection booths taught me how film behaves in the hand — how it shrinks, where it breaks, what it smells like when it is in trouble. The archives degree taught me what to do about it, and how to describe what I found so someone else can find it again.

Where the work has been

The full CV

Archival work for nonprofits, mutual aid organizations, and private family collections — oral history, photographs, film, and papers — and a decade in projection booths handling other people’s irreplaceable prints. The curated exhibit “At Home” at The Front Gallery: 100+ hours of found footage of New Orleans inspected, mended, digitized, and researched.

Standards and tools

The same standards an institution would hold me to.

You do not need to know what these are. A grant officer, a university archive, or the next archivist to touch your collection will recognize every one, and that is who they are for. It means what I hand back can go straight into a repository without being redone.

Why “Brouillette”

The name on the sign is not mine, and that is the point.

Brouillette was my grandmother's maiden name. Her family came from Marksville, in Avoyelles Parish — the kind of name that, in most families, survives as a signature on the back of a photograph and not much else. I put it on the practice so it would be said out loud a few more times, and because it is a reminder of what the work is for.

Marksville, Louisiana · Avoyelles Parish