Daily Archives: June 20, 2019

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Whose Archive is it Anyway?

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An archive is an accumulation of historical records or the physical place they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization’s lifetime, and are kept to show the function of that person or organization. An archive is a place where people can go to gather firsthand facts, data, and evidence from letters, reports, notes, memos, photographs, and other primary sources. Archives are records that have been naturally and necessarily generated as a product of regular legal, commercial, administrative, or social activities. They provide evidence of activities and tell us more about individuals and institutions. They tell stories. They also increase our sense of identity and understanding of cultures. They can even ensure justice. Archives are vital concentrators of knowledge because of their role in centralizing access to records. Records are essential extensions of human memory that can be used to help bind society together and serve as tools of social justice and reconciliation.

Archives are repositories of memory, providing reliable evidence for examining the past. Archives therefore serve an important role in identifying and preserving the documentation that forms one’s historical memory. Archival memory is a social construct reflecting power relationships in society.

Photography can form a double role with archives by showcasing a person or an organisation. Photography can be used for fields of science, manufacturing (e.g., photo lithography), and business, as well as its more direct uses for art, film and video production, recreational purposes, hobby, and mass communication. Photography can also show a link between past and present events, therefore creating an image of what places/things used to be like.

David Bate’s text explains that museums often used archived and artifacts to present a particular cultural and or historical moment in time. A museum acts as a repository of cultural memory for future generations. It can act as a focus for community events, and as a great ‘attractant’ for incoming tourism for the country. He also says museums aim to create a story and states that items are “often chosen from a vast repository aiming to construct a particular story”. Next, he discusses the British Museum and how it’s first official photographer was employed in 1854 to document it’s artifacts. One photographer (Fenton) took photographs of the museums interior, the aim was to create an impression of how it was to see these items in the Victorian era. The photographs were said to ‘evoke a “pastness” which was also to create an ‘atmospheric space’ and a ‘kind of silence’. This conveys that the photos are creating a presence and being around them, showing attributes of the past and present 

One artist mentioned in Bate’s text was Louis Lawler. Her photographs feature artworks in private homes, public museums or auction houses. Her art is there to show how art is contextualized or de-contextualized by their environments. Her work is showing the behind the scenes of the artifacts, which gives it a different feel and changes the minds of people looking at the work displayed, making them look at it differently.

Another artist from Bate’s text is Susan Hiller. Bate’s touches upon her collection “Dedicated to the unknown artists 1972-6”. It is a collection of three hundred post cards from all around the coast of Britain. Each postcard shows an image, variously hand-tinted and black-and-white and several of these postcards are paintings. Hiller’s work conveys a very powerful yet simple feel and shows the culture stored in archives.

Researching and exploring the ideas of archives has really helped me with my personal studies of archives. It also guides me with the project of Occupation in Jersey by further expanding my knowledge on the occupation and how life was like. Going to Société Jersiaise archives really helped with research as well as the images and artifacts I was able to view really sparked a interest and gave me a better understanding of Jersey’s struggles and living condition in the time of the occupation. It also helped my personal studies as it helped me make a decision on whether I would do landscape or portraits for this project, and if I would stick with just one particular subject matter.

Archives have developed and changed at the same time the world has. People around the world now have access to the internet and can save and document their memories and events that happen in their lives on their phones or computers. Archives have developed to preserve historical facts, times of places, societies, mass institutions and personal archives of people and families. This is a great thing as people around the world can see and experience different cultures by looking at these archives. Even though the world is mostly technology based, there is hope that these archives will still be around to educate people on the past and inspire others to make memories and archives of their own.

In my archive of adulthood I wish that there are photos of my travels, jobs, kids, family and loved ones. I wish to document my children growing up through photos to then later on show them to grandchildren. I think that having photos and home videos of you as a child creates a nostalgic feeling, which is a lovely experience. Also, I hope to take home videos to watch with my family as I feel it is something personal we can all watch and relate to, and also watch ourselves being with the people we love. I believe archives are a great way for me to document my life.

I have learned that archives lay a huge role on protecting and preserving vital parts oh history and if we didn’t have them we would not be able to know what happened in the past of the world. It also gives insight on multiple different societies, cultures and backgrounds. I believe that archives are amazing for saving personal memories and stories through photographs, letters and so on.

In conclusion, archives play a big role in a photographers work and in preserving parts of cultures and places. Archives provide a connection to the past and help us to comprehend things that happened before us and give us a better understanding of how things were like in the past. Archival material helps to create a narrative to show changes in time, for example: the Occupation of Jersey show the bunkers, diaries and letters of the past, which helps us to create the story of what it was like in the Occupation.

AO2 Explore Ideas

Battery Lothringen

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Batterie Lothringen was a World War II coastal artillery battery in Saint Brelade, Jersey, named after the SMA Lothringen and constructed by Organisation Todt for the Wehrmacht during the Occupation of the Channel Islands. The first installations were completed in 1941, around the same time as the completion of the nearby Battery Moltke in St Ouen.

The batterie site is located at the end of Noirmont Point, a rock headland which overlooks St. Aubin’s Bay, Elizabeth Castle, and the harbours of Saint Helier. Its was a part of The Atlantic Wall system of the coastal fortifications, and most of the concrete structures remain today. The 3rd Battery of Naval Artillery Battalion 604 were stationed here.

In 1950 the states of Jersey purchased the headland at Noirmont as a memorial to all the people of Jersey who lost their lives during the occupation. A memorial stone was unveiled at Noirmont on 9th May 1970 to mark the 25th anniversary of liberation.

Our Visit:

On our visit to Battery Lothringen we were lucky enough to meet with Tony Pike, who took us round some of the bunkers and Gun Points and discussed with us the history surrounding Battery Lothringen. We were lucky enough to be able to have one of the bunkers opened for us and to be able to go inside and explore the bunkers. It was a very informative and useful visit, I was able to produce lots of photographs of not only the bunkers themselves but also the landscapes surrounding them.

Photographs Produced:

  • A selection of my taken photographs at Noirmount

Black and White Experiments:

Using Lightroom I began to experiment with Lightroom and turning the images I produced on the visit into black and white to see the different effects that this has on the photographs and how it changes the way the images are seen and perceived. I went through and Flagged in Lightroom the images I wanted to use and I thought were my most successful and then I selected a small number of them to produced into black and whit, I chose 6 images and selected them all and then went into the ‘Quick Development’ part of Lightroom and chose to go for the high contrast of black and white as I feel these sorts of images look good and work well in black and white and the high contrast gives them a dramatic effect.

Final Outcomes Black and White

These are my outcomes from the black and white experiments that I have produced in the black and white experiment, I feel they have worked and turned out well and that it has had a good effect on the photographs. I feel it creates more atmosphere and emotion in the photographs and gives them a dramatic effect that I feel works well with these types of photographs. I feel by having them in ‘high contrast’ black and white it has created a large tonal range and this creates more drama in the photograph and works really well with the really deep darks and very light whites.

Cropping Experiments:

For the cropping experiments I took some of the images that I had previously turned into black and white and trialled out some of the different ways I could crop them. Some being more extreme cropping and some less, for the example below showing my process there was a slight blur in the image in the top left corner, I experimented with just cropping this out and also cropping even further down to just having the gun in the frame.

Final Outcomes Cropping:

These are my outcomes for the cropping experiments, I feel that some of them have worked and turned out well to give a different perspective on the photographs compared to how they originally started out, whether that be just by cropping out blemishes but keeping the rest of the photograph all in frame, or by completely cropping down to just one part of the photograph to focus on, for example the gun point or the tower. I feel that these cropping experiments will work well and become useful to trial out further in the project when looking at people as I feel that would create a larger impact, however I do feel these images have worked well and it has added nice effects to the photographs and gives different perspectives.

AO1 Develop Ideas

Paul Virilio

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Paul Virilio was a French cultural theorist, urbanist and aesthetic philosopher, who was born 1932 in France. According to two geographers, Virilio was a ‘historian of warfare, technology and photography, a philosopher of architecture, military strategy and cinema, and a politically engaged provocative commentator on history, terrorism, mass-media and human-machine relations .

Paul Virilio was born and raised on the Northern coast of France. The Second World War created a big impact of his city, and his own life. His city was bombed and held captive by the German Navy. In 1958, Virilio conducted a phenomenological (he science of phenomena as distinct from that of the nature of being.) where he looked at military space and bunkers built by the Nazi’s during the Second World War.

In ‘Bunker Archaeology‘ the urban philosopher and cultural theorist turns his attention- and camera- to the ominous, yet strangely compelling German bunkers from WW II that lie abandoned on the coast of France. These ghostly reminders of destruction and oppression prompt Virilio to consider the nature of existence and war, in relation to both the Second World War and contemporary times.

  • Paul Virilio

  • Paul Virilio

  • Paul Virilio

I find Paul Virilio’s work quite interesting due to the almost silent feel that the photographs have and the stillness involved with them. I find them to be quite haunting and I feel that them also being in black and white with little to no human figures in them plays a big part in creating this sense about the photographs.

Below the photographs shows a bunker left and half buried in the sand with little to nothing left, it’s not right in the foreground on the photograph I feel this is good as it creates a distance between the viewer and the bunker by having it in the middle of the image, it is also sitting towards the right third of the photograph and this works well for moving the eye while looking at the photograph. This I feel works well as it creates an almost physical distance but also we know there is a time distance between the onlooker and these structures. In the background we can see the remains of another bunker and I feel it is effective to have it in shot to show that this bunker was not the only one that the Germans built, but there were many in one place. The use of a black and white tones is effective as it creates a different feel compared to if the photograph was black and white. For me I personally like the way that Virilio has photographed this bunker as it is half in the sand, for me personally it is saying something about how these structures will disappear from sight, this one for example will eventually be covered by sand or sea, however they are still there and what happened and what is left isn’t so simple to just get rid of.

I would hope to bring some of what Paul Virilio has done with his work into my own with the ideas of having a still image and the black and whites contrast as I feel this is an effective feature when generating these types of photographs.


  • Paul Virilio
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Whose archive is it?

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Archives can mean many things to many people. They can give insight into the past; help document the present and aid prediction into the future. They can be public or private and contain different images ranging from family portraits to images of sporting events of national monuments. They can be seen as an incredibly useful tool by modern photographers, who wish to study and potentially recreate past images in the modern day or document change over time to places, people or objects. 

         One of the defining aspects of achieves is if they are publicly accessible or if they are private. For example, places such as Societe Jersiaise are public archives where anyone with an interest is able to visit the achieve either online or in person and view the images it has to offer. This is useful as it not only allows for the archives studied to become more widely publicised and popular, but it also allows for the local community to gain a broader understanding of the local area and history, potentially engaging more peoples interest and encouraging further investigation which benefits the archive. 

However, not all archives are public and private archives encompass the archives of non-public organisations including businesses, charities, religious bodies and private individuals. A vast array of societies and associations also use private archives such as political parties, pressure groups, sport and recreational clubs, and businesses. Private archives can be very useful politically, due to restricting public access to images that could dampen reputations of government officials or to restrict information given to the public about certain events and stories that may be perceived or found to be inaccurate after reviewing the whole picture.

         Another talking point relating to the question directly could be posing the question of who’s achieve actually is it? This question could be interpreted as a way of looking into the relationship between public and private archives and discussing as to who really benefits from the archives and why. For example, as mentioned briefly it could be the contrast between public perception of people or events due to images being placed in public or private archives based on what the archive or organisation would like the public to perceive.

         Overall archives can be viewed to have many uses to many different groups of people. Ranging from the photographers who captured the images, to the organisations the images benefit or disbenefit, to the people who study and review the images and who also recreate them. Therefore, making it uncertain as to who’s achieve it ever is.