“Working Objects in Their Own Time”

Abstract

This chapter addresses the ways in which photographs have been, and continue to be, encountered in archives. It highlights how archival institutions and archival discourse configure the photographic encounter and lays out key concerns that hover over photographic archives and shape the nature and extent of research that scholars do in them. It aims, broadly, to alert scholars of photography and users of archives to the place of photographs in archival history, theory, and practice and to the slippage between popular, metaphorical, and professional/institutional notions of “the archive”/“archives”. It outlines the archival principles that structure preservation of and access to photographs in archives, framing archives as dynamic spaces of photographic encounter and photographs as working objects in their own time. Armed with a fuller, contextual understanding of photographs in archives, scholars will be better equipped to research and write photography's histories in new and innovative ways.

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