The awareness of historical accumulations over photographic archives has widened dramatically since the invention of digital photography and the internet. An archive is usually known to be a collection of historical documents or records that provide information about a place, institution or group of people. However there is variation between the meanings of archives because I think that there can be both public and private archives. Public archives are usually in the form of museums, photographic archives, or digital online websites which anyone can access allowing them to research their own future or different places. I also think that archives can be private and an individual store of memories. Many people keep photo albums storing old images but in the new age where technology is constantly developing the awareness of different methods of private archives is ever growing. For example people may store personal images on their phone in their albums or they may have them transferred onto the computer for later use. However in my opinion the most modern form of archival is social media. Snapchat now has a feature called memories where you can save only photographs or 10 second video clips which have been created on snapchat. This creates a very specific and individual type of archive which you are able to access easily on your mobile phone and always have with you.

However one question which is commonly asked and usually found as a challenge to answer by people is ‘why do we have private archives?’. Public archives generally have to purpose of historical content and giving information of places and people from the past, whereas people are less certain on why they keep personal and private archives and an even more difficult question is why they prefer either a physical photo album or a digital archive on either a phone or laptop. I asked a group of people including family, friends and teachers on why they keep a private archive. One response from a yr. 12 student was “I look to look back through the memories I’ve had and be reminded of the fun and exciting things I have endured over the last year”. This was a widely acknowledged response given by many that questioned the topic on. For the vast majority of our generation phones can be seen as historical archives which provides with our own personal resource which allows us to answer the question “what happened?”.

Although we have this easy access to our own person archives, public archives are still extremely necessary to give us understanding of our background and past events.  Societe Jersiaise is Jerseys local photographic archive where there is up to 80,000 which date all the way back from the mid 1840’s to the present day. Jersey has rich history of photographic practice as it is located in a geographical position between Britain and France which are two nations which were essential in the development of photography. The archive holds examples of work by important nineteenth century photographers such as William Collie, Charles Hugo, Thomas Sutton and Henry Mullins. The collection incorporates late nineteenth century studio collections of negatives by Jersey based photographers such as Ernest Baudoux, Albert Smith and Clarence Ouless. All these photographers are key to understanding jerseys historical context and allow members of the public as well as historians to investigate further into the history of jersey.

Archives can be seen as inherited items and photographs and when you think about the heritage of archives they are historical information which is passed through family members over decades. These inherited artefacts can be seen as story tellers as they tell us a lot history and defiantly in terms of inherited archives they tell us stories of our past family members and give us an insight into the lives that they lived. The well-known quote “a picture tells a thousand words” is relevant to inherited archives as they really are visual storytelling, from archival images of family members from the 1950’s that we may never have known with one photo we have a detailed description of maybe what they looked like and where they lived and what they used to do for a living. When you put together a selection of these inherited images and make maybe an album the visual story grows to create a story which gives great detail about your family or jerseys past and I think that’s what makes archives so special, they can be very personal to you and in this context the archives belong to us. The archives belong to who is in position of the artefacts.

Archival photographs can have many purposes such as for advertising, news, documentary, fine art, identity and anthropology.  In this text called ‘Archives, Networks and Narratives’ and discusses photographs in terms of its purpose within museums and how photographs can function as both a collected artefact that might be put on display and as a way to collect museums and artefacts, since the photograph is a form of archive in its own right. However it can also be argued that archives can be seen as ‘the return of meaning’. In ‘Camera Lucida’, Roland bathes last book on photography. He focuses on the meaning of archives and photographs being about its social messages via cultural codes as well as images portraying a highly personal which is private and purely individual which relates back to what i previously said about new technology and photographs now being able to be kept private and completely personal and individual.

This arguments links back to the question of ‘Whose archive is it anyway?’, do the public have a choice of what goes into public archives or is there someone in charge of museums and archives who then become in charge of these historical and meaningful artefacts which may in fact be very personal and not wanted to be shared. There is also the question to be asked of is everything piece of photographic evidence shown in the archives is some rejected, could we be missing important piece of history which 50 years ago weren’t considered important by the owners of the archive and were ignored and thrown away. Therefore are they really everyone’s archives if specific content is shown or do the archives really belong to the owners.

In conclusion I think that archives have many different purposes such as to look back on historical artefacts and to gather information from the past which is more a public and educational purpose but then they also have more personal purposes like memories. In the age of ever enhancing technology we are becoming more reliant on our digital dives as personal and public archives but I think it is important to remember the photographic archives and museums as they contain rich information on our history and should be considered as highly valuable resources. I am going to use the jersey archives to enrich my personal study as I am interested in looking into the coast line of jersey and looking at how it has change over the past decade. I am also inspired by the archives to investigate during my personal study my family history and personal background linking photos I might found with private archives such as family albums.