Framing photographs, denying archives: the difficulty of focusing on archival photographs

Abstract

This article pursues the varying understandings of the photograph in archival literature. An in-depth review of the scholarship uncovers several possible reasons why archivists and those writing about photographic archives apparently continue to struggle with the photograph, including: the sheer difficulty that photographs as an elusive medium present; past debates about photography in art history, history, and archival literature; and the challenges that the photograph as an evasive document presents to the contradictory nature of archives themselves and to conceptions of archival science. Having evolved from an understanding of photographs that conflated content with meaning to postmodernist notions of contingent and plural meanings in which photographs participate, archival writings on the photograph hold promise as they begin to tread the waters that Schwartz charted in the last 15 years. This paper follows that historical progression in order to trace the discourse on photographic archives that has emerged over the past three decades.

The Use of Personal Value Estimations to Select Images for Preservation in Public Library Digital Community Collections

“…Most information organizational systems are based on textual classifications and within the bibliographic tradition. Institutional archives have long struggled with how to classify photographs, focusing on factual significance rather than the contextual meanings or the functional origins of the photographed subject [40,41]. This study has the potential to provide insights into the role of contextual descriptors for photographs.…”

The body in the box: archiving the Egyptian mummy

“…Given this shared legacy, it is striking that archival theory in the Derridean vein has not explicitly addressed the overlaps, disjunctures, and complementarities between the museum and the archive as institutions, an oversight this article confronts in hopes of bridging the realms of theory and practice. Since a simplistic separation between documents/archives (on the one hand) and objects/museums (on the other) cannot hold (Belovari 2013;Reed 2004;Schlak 2008), then the ways in which different organizational principles suited different institutional and disciplinary priorities still require further scrutiny. I suggest that historical practices of selecting, storing, and manipulating information, whether through paper-based or other material objects, developed in tandem as such practices filtered into and across museums, archives, and similar institutionalized and professionalized formations, such as the library and the public record office.…”

Photographs and manuscripts: working in the archive

“…As an archival 'find' the photo had for me a kind of intensity, although I recognise that 'photographs are very difficult objects to talk about, let alone classify, describe, and essentially "own" as archival evidence'. 8 Indeed, it is important to acknowledge how 'the archive constitutes photographs in particular ways'. 9 I had been pursuing Langley's attachment to the materiality of writing and here was Langley apparently documenting the precious piled-up 'stuff' of writing.…”