“With collections recognised by UNESCO, the Jersey Archive is the Island’s national repository holding records on all aspects of Jersey’s history” – Source
The Jersey Archive is a huge collection of photographs and records that document every aspect of the island life, some date pieces date all the way back to 1378. Over these years, the Jersey Archive has amounted over 300,000 photographic records that are open to the public. The archive includes things such as documentation of laws, documentary photography of buildings and areas, public records of houses, churches and other services and films and footage of the wars.
The Jersey Archive works digitally too, users can search the online archive to find the pictures they’re looking for:
We attended multiple sessions at the Société Jersiaise (a place founded in 1873 for the study of Jersey archaeology, history, the ancient language and the conservation of the environment) that works closely with the Jersey Archives. During those sessions, we were taught about the importance and impact of Photo Archives and given access to use archival photographs in our personal projects.
Photo Archives and the future
“Photo archives—collections of photographs held by libraries or museums—have long been essential tools for research in the humanities. As digital technology evolves, will these archives become obsolete, evolve, or take new forms altogether?” – Source
“That is our heritage, whether it be digital or analog. However, both formats have their own issues that need to be addressed if we want future generations to see what we have seen and visually documented.“ –Source
Photo archiving has become very important in the last years, preserving our past and documenting it in a way that future generations can understand and learn from is the driving force behind countless archival projects all over the globe. Since technology is developing at such a fast pace, many present day photo Archives function digitally; photographs are stored as digital copies on huge servers that can be viewed by the public while the actual photographs are locked away and preserved.
For this photo shoot my main focus was on the construction of the allocated area I was in. This is because it helps to demonstrate the future of St Helier because these building sites will become buildings and businesses that will stand in the future. I found that photographing building sites was less centered around community but more around making life better for the future. The development is important because it creates jobs for people and living space for the future. Clearly, my photos focus on the job aspect of construction with a clear intent to focus in on the migrants that are taking up these kind of jobs.
As displayed in my last post, the area of focus for my photo shoot is the top end of town which contains the modern millennium park and some very interesting back alleys which are fairly run down. I plan to show the contrast of the modern vs the old as it will help to show the potential for development and the future of St Helier. I will do this by capturing the dereliction of buildings as well as the construction/modernised buildings. I plan to do three shoots which will all focus on different themes.
My first shoot will focus on the actual development of St Helier and I plan to photograph builders at work. Often the builders in Jersey are migrants that have come over with intent to work so it will be interesting to document this and show these kinds of people helping the future of Jersey. Also a sense of community will be demonstrated through this as often the migrants in Jersey have a close community with strong relationships and so I will try to portray this through my photographs of them at work.
My second photo shoot will involve capturing the destruction of the area i am allocated. I will do this by shooting derelict buildings which have a sense of usage and are clearly left abandoned. I want to bring an awareness to the community of St Helier that there are buildings that are wasting space and could be used for something that would benefit our island. I also intend on bringing a strong contrast between the old vs new of St Helier which would truly show how wasteful the abandoned buildings are.
For my third photo shoot, I want to capture the modernization of St Helier and show the development which is occurring and has occurred to improve the area and trying to build a stronger community.
With all of my images I made a selection of my strongest images, I narrowed down my selection by comparing lighting, composition etc. With this image image I decided to go with the one on the left as there was a few composition and lighting things that i preferred about it, for example I compared to the image on the right the flag that is being waved is more clear on the left photo whereas you cannot clearly see that it is a flag on the left photo, also I prefer the lighting of the man on the left photo, even though in the right you can more clearly see the man the left photo creates more mystery with the man being barely visible in a dark pub seemingly watching the football.
The area assigned for me to research and later photograph is the zone in yellow. This area consists of millennium park which is a very modern aspect to the area as well as the old jersey brewery which contrasts nicely as this is an old derict building. There are various landmarks and people which will be of interest to photograph. The different landmarks such as the old cinema will help to give a sense of the old vs new within St. Helier and the people will give a sense of the lifestyle and community within the area.
My intentions for the photo shoot is to not only explore and portray the area in the way I percieve it to be but to also capture a sense of what the area once was and could be in the future. I intend to focus on three main elements. This will be the community, the history of the area and the modernization/future of it.
I used InDesign to create a variation of draft page spreads, my intention was to experiment with some different placement and layout ideas and also to experiment with having either all colour photos in my layout or all black and white. In the end I decided that although I did like the colour concept i found that having all the images in black and white helps the layout to link together better and creates a better narrative. Although I decided to go with the black and white layouts I still like the placement of the images on the other coloured pages, I felt that having a variety of page layouts is what would look best for my images as some images looked better by themselves or full bleed on the page or some smaller, I also experimented with having the single photos spread onto a second page slightly to create a break from symmetry, for example I decided to place the bottom right picture on the left of the page because the door handle is on the left of the door, but I still wanted to have something on the right page as when you are looking through a book you tend to look at the right page first so I placed the image slightly off from the left so that it would go over onto the right page.
For my second shoot I revisited the area and explored some new places to get some more photographs, I tried to get a mixture of images of people and buildings so that I would have a good selection to pick from. These are a few of my favourite images from the shoot.
For these montages I decided to experiment with a variation of black and white and colour, I experimented with a variation of compositions and pairings of photographs to create different narratives.
I decided to experiment with some of the photos from my first shoot, I took inspiration from the artists I researches, Nick Miners and Garry Winogrand, I experimented with things such as cropping and colour adjustments to manipulate the context of the images.
