Archives are where memories are stored and history is made. An archive can be a collection of historical records or the place they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have been collected over the course of an individual or organization’s lifetime. They are kept to show past events and can help to show whether these were successful or not. Archivists identify and preserve these documents because of their enduring cultural and historical value. Archives can come in a wide range of formats including written, photographic, moving images, sound, digital and analogue. Archival records are normally unpublished and almost always unique. This means that archives are different from libraries with regards to their functions since books have many identical copies. Archives are important because they can take us much deeper into an event rather than reading a book based on a secondary account of what happened.

The photographic archive of the Société Jersiaise contains over 100,000 images from the mid 1840s to the present day. It is the principal Jersey collection of nineteenth and early twentieth century photography. As Jersey is located between Britain and France (two nations who pioneered photography) the Island has a rich history of photographic practice. The collection has a detailed visual record of developments in Jersey’s landscape and history throughout the photographic era.

The text ‘Archives, Networks and Narratives’ explains how museums aim to serve particular interests, whether it be personal or cultural. Museums are repositories of cultural memories of the past and organize historical narratives of culture. Photography performs a double role within museums because photographs can function as both an artefact on display and as a way to collect the museum and its artefacts, since the photograph is a form of archive. The photographer Roger Fenton was employed to document the British Museum’s artefacts. His photographs create an impression of how it was to see these objects in the Victorian era. With time, his photographs have become famous and feature in museum exhibitions as artefacts. 

Contemporary artists and photographers bring new types of imagery to the archives of museums. They contribute different types of images, narratives and aspects of culture, which can be seen in Hiller’s work. After historical events, archives can become a resource so people can rethink what happened. While we tend to think of museums as orientated towards collecting the past, they are also focused towards the present and future.

‘Dedicated to the Unknown Artists’ by Susan Hiller is a collection of around 300 postcards of the coast around Britain. Each postcard presents an image of waves crashing over different parts of the coastline. The images are displayed in grids and have become part of an archival display of how culture sees itself. Together the postcards create an image of Britain being repeatedly attacked by the sea which could metaphorically stand for an invasive force or power. It may also represent an emotional threat by a person or idea where one must create defenses. Hiller celebrates the authors of the postcards which raises the question of their status within culture and social memory. Hiller’s work seems to question whether the postcard images tell us anything important about our popular concept of the British Isles.

Tracey Moffatt’s series ‘Something More’ presents a fictionalised biographical story of a young Aboriginal woman’s desire to leave her rural life for the city. The background is clearly painted and has a theatrical scene of a rough cabin inhabited by rugged figures, with others in the background. They all stare at a woman in the foreground, who seems indifferent to them. Her urban elegance and dress sets her apart, and she appears to be pondering her future. The following pictures show that this is a disturbing story which ends in violation and death. Moffatt’s early work often takes the form of fictionalised reenactments of personal memories. The National Gallery of Australia now owns this work and has found its way into a national archive. This Aboriginal story of desire and social violence creates an understanding of the past within the present.

The role of Archives has also changed because of new technology. The speed and quantity of visual recording is better today with the internet and the wide availability of camera phones. Nowadays it is easy to send pictures and have access to archives. Anyone can send pictures and texts to others online relating to their social or personal experience. Photography lets anyone collect anything as part of a personal online collection. The internet has not only given more access to archives but has also changed what we think an archive is. However, technology has caused problems with people losing their images by changing their storage systems, losing pen drives etc. 

In 1995 the French philosopher Jacques Derrida described ‘archive fever’ as a conflict with the idea of conservation. Conservation is driven by the possibility of forgetting. Since human memory is limited and not everlasting, photographs are associated with the idea of remembering and the desire to return. William Henry Fox Talbot anticipated the purpose of photography as an archival practice, but now photography is clearly a highly popular way to record moments. The human memory is complex and can fuse or compress separate moments together. Turning memories into documents, texts, images and objects, relieves the human brain of the difficulty of recording or remembering things accurately.

Overall archives have a variety of purposes. An educational purpose would be to admire historical artefacts and to gather information from the past. A personal purpose would include storing memories, such as important family events to be kept as a momento. I have learnt the importance of questioning the archival material such as the accuracy of the information, if it might have been influenced by someone’s personal viewpoint, as well as considering what has been left out. Although we are reliant on technology for our personal and public archives, it is important to view photographic archives and museums as an important source of historical material. During my visit to Société Jersiaise, I learnt about the importance of archival photographs. They open a window into the past and give a glimpse of what people’s lives were like during the occupation, as well as showing temporal changes. I am going to use the Jersey archives to enrich my personal study as I am interested in focusing my investigation upon the coastline of Jersey and how it has changed since the Occupation. 

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.

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.