We visited the Société Jersiaise as an introduction into our new project on the German Occupation of Jersey. In groups we looked through photo archives by several photographers whose images had been stored in folders, each in an individual plastic file. The images were fragile and could only be removed from the plastic file if they were to be handled with gloves to ensure they don’t get damaged. 

The Société Jersiaise was founded in January 1873 by a small number of well known Islanders who were interested in the study of the history, the language and the antiquities of Jersey. The photographic archives of the Société Jersiaise contains over 100,000 images dating from the mid 1840s to the present day and is the main Jersey collection of nineteenth and early twentieth century photography.

Photography arrived in Jersey on the 9th of May 1840 just nine months after it had been first introduced in the urban centers of England and France. Able to practice in the Channel Islands without concern for the restriction of the medium in the 1840s, amateur and professional photographers arrived from both sides of the English Channel. The archive has examples of work by important nineteenth century photographers such as William Collie, Charles Hugo, Thomas Sutton and Henry Mullins. The collection also has late nineteenth century studio collections of negatives by Jersey based photographers such as Ernest Baudoux, Albert Smith and Clarence Ouless. Important twentieth century photos include of over one thousand negatives by Percival Dunham (Jersey’s first photo journalist) and an archive of one thousand three hundred German Occupation images.

There are several different subjects represented in the collection as well as a diverse multitude of processes and techniques with which they were made. The archive has over 15,000 portraits of identified people and views of every bay and landscape. The collection has detailed visual representations of technical and aesthetic developments through the photographic era.