‘Who’s Archive is it anyways?’
Archives are used as a source to help preserve things which people want for later in life and they are partly the product of this human desire not to forget the past. Archival organisations collect and preserve materials for the use of the public. They keep records of many forms including correspondence, diaries , financial and legal documents, photographs and film. Most state governments, schools, businesses, libraries, and historical societies maintain archives for different reasons. Individuals and organisations are constantly storing information about their personal and business activities and archives identify and preserve these documents so that they last many years. Photographs are very valuable for providing a vision to past lives and events and they are representing the truth. Therefore photographic archives are also helping to build knowledge and not just decide the truth on past events.
The local Societe Jersaise was formed in 1887 and is a photo archive which contains over 100,000 images dating from the mid 1840s to the present day. It is the principal Jersey collection of nineteenth and early twentieth century photography. This particular Archive explores the archaeology of jersey, history, ancient language and the conservation of the environment and is one of the only in jersey which holds images which go as far back as the 1840s, making this a very important part of Jersey’s history. The collection offers a detailed visual record of developments in Jersey landscape and social history throughout the photographic era leading up to the present day.
Archival photographs help to provide history, knowledge and power as well as being resources for news, documentary, advertising and anthropology. They are also very valuable for contemporary photographers as they can use photographic archives as the main subject of their work and then can work and re-examine and interpret the histories which they convey, overall making archives becoming the foundation to rethink what happened.
The Societe Jersaise provide information presentations about collections helping to broaden knowledge of the public and show how images are preserved. The archive images are shown to be kept in boxes, sealed in a carefully watched temperature room which they keep very cold of avoid fingerprinting on the photographs. When being shown images the presenters wore cotton gloves for extra protection and the images were kept in plastic seals showing how precious and how well handled they have to be.
David Bates text explains how museums use archives in order to display a particular cultural or historical moment in time.
A photographer who i took interest to was Ernest Baudoux, originally from France, Baudoux worked in Jersey from 1869. He and his son had a business in Jersey which he sold to a young photographer John Stroad from London. Some of the business he sold ( many of his glass-plate negatives) were attributed incorrectly to the youngster and the Photographic Archive ‘ Societe Jersiase’ now have a plan to identify the 3000 images in their collection. The Societe Jersiase Photographic Archive contains a collections of 1385 negatives by Baudoux and 12 of these negatives are exhibited here. His first trace of photographic practice in Jersey was in 1869, the trade directory in Jersey Almanacs. Not much is known about his photographic career in France before Jersey, however we know that he took many landscapes, studio portraiture and architecture while in Jersey. His first project in Jersey which he produced was a panorama of St. Helier which seemed to indicate a desire to survey the town. The photos he produced do not join up precisely but the image he produced was the quality of the full plate size (20.3 x 25.3 cm). The panorama shows the architecture of St. Helier in lots of detail.
His panorama
This landscape image is a representation of the type of work Baudoux produced while in Jersey. The image represents Jersey as being a very small society due to everything being very close together, there is no destruction in this image, representing Jersey as being a safe place with wealthy houses. This panorama allows us to compare in this day in age what St.Helier looked like then and what it looks like now. This is an image which is stored in the Societe Jersaise Photographic Archive.
When photographs were first coming out they were stored in archives, however this has changed due to new technology. In this day the internet and availability of a camera is a lot easier and has encouraged the speed and quality of images to rise. Now people store images on their phones and laptops instead of in a photo archive and they publish their images on social media platforms. Although new technology has improved photography, it has also caused problems along the line. Due to storing images on phones, they are easily lost due to people not properly backing up their phones, hard drives and laptops. Not many people tend to print their images in this day and age. However, photo albums are still kept by a percentage of the population to ensure they do not loose important family images which is similar to the role of a photographic archive.
Jacques Derrida is a French Phiosopher who described ‘archive fever’ as a contradiction at the heart of the idea of conservation. Conservation is a possibility of forgetting. Because the human memory is limited, photographs have become a different idea of remembering with the desire to return to something beyond the capacity of conscious memory. Human memory is a complex matter which is not easily reducible to simple binary opposites like past , present and future. Documents, texts, images ad objects are reliving the human brain of forgetting and remembering things accurately.
Overall, Archives have proven to have different purposes and they help to value contemporary artists that can be used for public reasons. It is said that the memories can still belong to the photographer/ author in a way due to it being their work and it reflecting a personal side of their lives. Using archives has helped to develop my personal study due to me having an interest in comparing the past to the present, which archives allow us to do. This discovery is going to push me to look more into archives.