On the 4th of June we attended the photographic archive of the Société Jersiaise, where we were introduced to our new A2 project that we will be concentrating on for the rest of the present term and a large majority of Year 13. The topic tile being ‘The Occupation’.

The the photographic archive of the Société Jersiaise which consists of around 80,000 photos/images dating all the way back to the mid-1840s. This includes many different collection from different times periods, different parts of history, different parishes etc. Providing a true representation and understanding of what Jersey used to be like in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The photographic archive of the Société Jersiaise was founded all the way back in 1873, including the founding objectives; the creation of a museum and library. The Société Jersiais opened its museum in 1877, with the practice and collecting of photographs already identified as priorities, these activities were continued as significant parts of the society’s museum and library. Some of the first photo to be produced arrived in Jersey on the 9th of May 1840 after just nine months in which the Société Jersiaise first publicized it in the urban centres of England and France.

The archive holds examples of work by important nineteenth century photographers such as William Collie, Charles Hugo, Thomas Sutton and Henry Mullins. The collection incorporates late nineteenth century studio collections of negatives by Jersey based photographers such as Ernest Baudoux, Albert Smith and Clarence Ouless. Important twentieth century holdings include a major archive of over one thousand negatives by Percival Dunham Jersey’s first photo-journalist and an archive of one thousand three hundred German Occupation images compiled by Emile F Guiton (1879-1972) Honorary Curator of the Société Jersiaise Museum and founder of the Photographic Archive.  The archive from this current day presents over 15,000 portraits of identified people and views of the parishes, bays and valleys, alongside the collection contains details of visual records of the Jersey Channel islands history and a full representation of technical and aesthetic developments throughout the photographic era. Public access to the photographic archive was accepted in 1992, and now contains online catalog with over 36,000 images that can simply be searched via a link, as well as the images, negatives and original prints are also available. When we arrived at the archive we were presented with a series of different tasks, our first task was to look through some of the original photos and write down which ones stood out to us and why, having discussions on our tables about each of the images. To me this helped initial ideas flow and give me an overall better understanding of where I wanted to start with this new topic. Another one of the tasks that I found extremely relevant and helpful was the last one, where as a table we were given a large selection of images and had to place them in an order to tell a story, to me this really provided an understanding of how powerful images can be and lead me to want to investigate further in to the new topic.

Images from the photographic archive of the Société Jersiaise