Archives: Photographs in the Archives

In their article “Fields of Vision” Paul Conway and Ricardo Punzalan developed a theory of visual literacy specifically concerning digitized photographs. The authors categorized the ways that people approach archival photographs as landscaping, storytelling, and discovering by surveying a diverse user group. Having more of a background in art than history, I was excited to read about archivists grappling with the issue of visual literacy. I believe that Conway and Punzalan’s methods provide a more useful theory of visual literacy for historic pictures than an art historian could. Nevertheless the article also brought to light key differences between history and art.

Opposed to photography collections in art museums, the photographs in archives are predominately there because of subject matter rather than the photographer. This difference leads to differences in the ways that people interpret photographs that can lead to divergent results. Opposed to looking at content first, if the researcher thinks about the person behind the camera they begin to see the deliberate decisions that a person makes to construct a photograph. Likewise, attention to the print can divulge darkroom manipulations that were, and still are, common despite photography’s reputation for being a direct window into another era. Thinking about the photography process also forces the realization that most photographers, whether art, survey, or commercial, work in series.

Conway and Punzalan do not look at these aspects of photography, likely because they were not important to the users surveyed. Archivists emphasis original order and provenance for most of their collections, yet the individualized, content-oriented uses of photographs sometimes obscures original order and provenance. Many digitized photographs are displayed via subject, like the National Archives exhibits (for example Photographs of the American West: 1861-1912), or via place, like Philly History. Few archival photography collections (at least that I have found – still searching) emphasize the work of the photographer, or the commercial studio, in the same way that manuscripts or institutional archives emphasize an individual or institution. Visual literacy is a great stepping stone to make digitized, archived photographs accessible to users, but I believe the next step is for archivists to think about the people who produce photographs and the photographs themselves with the same critical awareness that they give documents.

Reading:

Conway, Paul and Ricardo Punzalan. "Fields of Vision: Toward a New Theory of Visual Literacy for Digitized Archival Photographs." Archivaria 71 (Spring 2011).