An archive is a collection of documents usually consisting of very different types of documents such as photographs, paintings and other written documents. There are different types of archives that people keep publicly and privately. Private archives are usually used to show family history and keep a record of a specific family. Whereas public archives tend to show a broader history of where the archive was made. These are used to allow newer generations of people get a greater understanding of the events that may have happened to their families or to the place they live. They function through collections of items such as legal documents and photographs from a period in history to give a broad insight of what it was like to live back then as well as more personal things such as diaries to show what a specific persons life was like. New items can be handed in to a lot of archives if they are specifically items from history, and historical areas that are covered in that archive.

Archives act as repositories of memory as they provide reliable evidence of past events and allow us to deeply examine peoples personal and collective view of how an area was like in a past time. Archives also split off different parts of history into different sections and sub-sections so that if you want to see a specific part of history, you can narrow down your search to only photography from then or different types of documents from them. They normally have cultural connections to the place the archive is from and can show how our culture has been shaped and changed since then.

Photography can perform a double role within archives. Not only can they display someone’s life or how the world was, through the informative use of documentary photography, this being the main reason for a lot of the photography in war archives. This type of photography will usually be very clear and understandable as this is the reason it was created. The other way photography can be used is through the artistic side of it, with people creating photography specifically tailored towards showing something they want to show which may not have a link to what was happening at the time and could just be separate. Though, a lot of the time photography links to things happening at the time such as war, creating a double role by showing it in either in an explicit or implicit way by creating an obvious or distant link to an event happening, and producing it in their own artistic way.

David Bate’s text allows us to see how he thinks about archives will be used with museums as they have a collection of documents and old artifacts which will allow museums to create displays of particular historical events and how culture has changed, with very accurate information on them. In his text he refers to museums use of archives as a “vast repository aiming to construct a particular story.”  This is him saying that he believes museums should be creating either a never-ending story of an area or showing the story of a particular area through a certain event. In Bate’s text he also talks about Fenton, hired in 1854 to document the artifacts within the British Museum through photography and to show what it would have been like to see the items within the Museum in the Victorian era. The images are said to “evoke a ‘pastness’”. This shows that they have been taken in a way to make the people look at them and see the past through a barrier rather than just see a place within the photos.

For my own personal study. I am going to look at the Occupation of Jersey and how it has really changed and developed the island into something completely different than what it could be. Through the landscape of the island changing due to the bunkers and historical monuments left behind from the war and the people who lived on the island through the war and how they lived during the war. The most obvious and easy part of this to see is the bunkers and war tunnels left behind from the war, and how parts of them have been rebuilt such as the guns and the bunkers have been uncovered since they were filled in after the war. The archived material from the time will also help me out to see how people lived and what people had to sacrifice throughout the war, through the use of different peoples personal diary entries or documentation such as photographs from the time, I should be able to get a bigger feel of what it would be like to live back then and may help me stage some photographs a lot more easily. The use of the archive will also give me an in-depth insight to the other things that happened in the war such as the use of slaves to build bunkers and other fortifications, and how bunkers have been eroding and falling apart over time due to the length of time they’ve been around.

Looking at the photographs and some other documents from the archive has given me a much wider view of what everything looked like in the days of the occupation of Jersey. Not only how the bunkers used to look, before being uncovered and rebuilt, but how different parts of St. Helier looked before the war, which I can use to compare to how it is now. This will allow me to get a bigger understanding of how some things have changed within the island over the past seventy-five years.  

In conclusion, archives serve a purpose to allow people to see how things have changed over time in an area, and to display history accurately to newer generations of people. They can preserve peoples artistic work, different types of photography and documents through the use of newer methods such as digitalisation and placing plastic covers over the documents. I have learnt about the importance of archives and from seeing images from the archive I have seen that these images show a glimpse into people’s lives and how things were in the occupation.