Founded in 1873, by only a small group of Islanders, the Société Jersiaise holds around 35,000 historical images. Although it started with a small number of people interested in the study of history, language and antiques of Jersey, it soon grew a larger membership and the historical documents were published. In 1893 the museum became permanent and moved to 9 Pier Road. Now looked after and owned by Jersey Heritage, the collection is still growing. Their main mission is to make the Islands history available for people to see and admire, researching its history.
We visited the Société Jersiaise and got introduced to the people that look after all the archives. We got to see archival history of Elizabeth Castle, which was really interesting. It also inspired me to possibly use images from the archive, as well as letters, in our film. By learning about Jersey’s past, and seeing physical prints of the castle, we got to understand its history more in depth than just visiting a website. Over the years, images have become digitalised and we have become acclimated to online and digital presentations of photos. Learning about this emphasised how today’s society has no appreciation of the history of image making. This gave me the opportunity to understand the importance of archives, and how much care goes into keeping them safe. I wasn’t aware of this before, and it has made me want to create a more historic film, and edit my images and videos to replicate archives.
Archived Images:
Images from our visit:
