What is a Photo Archive
Foundation
Between 1964 and 1969 the Paul Mellon Foundation began to collate an internationally important collection of reference photographs of paintings, sculpture, architecture, and the decorative arts, as well as images of sketchbooks and exhibitions. At this point in history, “British art” arguably lacked a serious body of scholarship, especially in comparison to the art histories of its neighbours on the Continent, and dedicated research resources were scant. A photographic archive was established to address this gap, providing access to art that was often locked behind the closed doors of Britain’s private country houses and collections. This practice was continued when the Foundation was re-established as the Paul Mellon Centre (PMC) in 1970, and maintained until 2013, at which point the collection contained more than 100,000 reference images. It is this collection that has been digitised and published online here.
This reference collection has been crucially important to the development of research in the field, providing the images and information that scholarly publications rely upon. It continues to be regularly consulted by art historians, curators, conservators, picture researchers, and students. In making it accessible beyond the confines of our London base, we sought to increase the discoverability of the resource, promote exchange and dialogue with our community, and provide a platform within which to present the role of the archive within the PMC’s own institutional history.
What is a Photographic Archive?
Photographic archives can be described as image banks, indexes, catalogues of creative endeavour, reference libraries, treasure chests, and more. Most straightforwardly, the PMC’s Photographic Archive contains photographs of works of art and architecture printed on paper, which have been glued to brown card mounts. Many of these mounts contain information, both handwritten and typed, about the images in the photographs. Photographic archives are living documents, records of the trends and habits of the cultural sector, notations of the changing hands of objects, and the shifting identities of the people and organisations who create and manage them. Although many research institutions have collected and housed such image repositories, and there are essential characteristics that many of them share, each photographic archive is particular to the place in which it was created.
Our own photographic archive tells a particular story about British art and architecture from around 1500 to 1920, or at least that story as it was seen by certain art historians in the late twentieth century. The printed and mounted photographs in this collection document a wide range of work by canonical and obscure figures. Its biases and omissions are reflective of the history of taste, scholarship, and the market.
Digital Photographic Archives
The digital facsimiles of the Photographic Archive records contained within this catalogue are not just an image bank like Google: they have been looked after for decades by dedicated librarians and researchers. Over time they have been updated, annotated, rearranged, and reclassified as new discoveries are made. A fleet of staff librarians routinely scoured the sale rooms for news of the re-emergence of works, eager to spot and acquire images of works previously unphotographed. Each mount fastidiously documents the sale, exhibition, and publication history of works of art. The tens of thousands of glossy black-and-white photographs that are glued to buff index cards were individually printed by hand in darkrooms, carefully crafted to heighten the light and contrast to create a true indexical likeness of the original. Even as colour printing became more readily accessible, monochromatic prints were favoured, owing to their ability to convey detail about the work of art and reproduce it faithfully.
At their zenith in the mid-twentieth century, archives like this one were of crucial importance to a scholar’s understanding of artistic practice: the PMC would negotiate access to private households, securing permission for photography and reproduction of the imagery on behalf of researchers. Similar resources were collated internationally by individuals who have shaped the discipline of art history: Aby Warburg in 1880s Germany, Helen Clay Frick in 1920s New York, Robert Witt in 1930s London, and Bernard Berenson in 1940s Florence. It is no coincidence that the libraries of each of those individuals went on to provide a basis for art historical research centres that are crucial to the field. Photographic archives were essential to the activities of dealers, curators, and students of the discipline.
Why Digitise?
Converting these analogue materials into digital resources is something that PHAROS, an international consortium of photographic archive repositories, has been aspiring to do since 2013. This collaborative initiative, founded by fourteen photographic archives in North America and Europe, was established to create a freely available common digital platform for research through comprehensive consolidated access to the millions of images in their collections. The possibility to compare and contrast images of works taken at various points in their lifetimes, and to amalgamate the differing descriptive metadata records, is something that will affirm the relevance and vibrancy of these collections. This digitisation project is also a major addition to the PMC’s open access research resources and publications and is part of our wider and ongoing mission to open up our work and collections to existing and new audiences.
Digitisation offers not only remote access, but also the possibility to examine the resource at both a micro- and macro- perspective. The close study of images is supported by high resolution scans and side-by-side viewing panels, and we offer both the data and images in formats that can be retrieved and inspected by those familiar with data processing methodologies and tooling. When the full collection is processed by machine vision, what trends, similarities, and congruences might a computer be able to identify that could otherwise be missed by a human? How might text processing allow us to identify and assert knowledge at scale? These are some of the questions that might be investigated through digital access to the PMC’s Photographic Archive and the broader pool of PHAROS materials. The release of this catalogue will, we hope, offer a springboard for new research to take place. We also anticipate that it might be used creatively, to inspire new narratives to be written and even new art to be made.
Understanding how Photographic Archives are Used, Then and Now
In November 2018 we held an open call for participation in a workshop designed to engage stakeholders with the project and to solicit their feedback on some of our initial plans. As the physical collections had been off-site for an extended period due to building renovation, the bringing together of key stakeholder groups was useful in a number of ways. It allowed us to test assumptions about the value of the resource, to generate user profiles and use cases to help determine the form of our resulting publication, and to discuss how the physical discovery process may differ—and be augmented by—the digital platform.
The results of the workshop were distilled into a report and list of recommendations. Most significantly, feedback indicated that time should be invested in making the scholarship already compiled on the mounts available to search. This led us to change our cataloguing methodology, and to undertake full transcription of the written content on the mounts rather than relying on automated computer processing of that information, which had been our first instinct. Another key requirement identified during the course of the workshop was to make the most of the material that is unique to the PMC collection, and to add contextual framing. This has resulted in the commissioning of the Feature texts and films, which explain the purpose of the collection and its relationship to our history.
Another key source of feedback has been from a group of advanced users of this resource. By monitoring their use of the site over the course of a year and asking for their feedback, we have identified areas for improvement and adjustment. We continue to seek feedback from users Enquiries can be emailed to: photoarchive@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk.
How to Use this Digital Catalogue
This catalogue seeks to replicate and build upon the experience of consulting the Photographic Archive in person. We have reproduced the box and folder structure of the printed archive, but have also taken the opportunity to add lateral connections to the data, so as to allow the resource to be browsed in ways never before possible. It can now be browsed across collection series, and by a number of filterable terms. Every object has been scanned on both sides, ensuring that every notation, stamp, and identifier is recorded in its facsimile version. We have also created new ways to compare and juxtapose image selections, mimicking the comparative placement foundational to art history.
Finally, we have published our data and images in interchangeable formats that conform to established standards in the sector. This will allow us to make the collection available to aggregate services, and available for exploration by researchers using computational analysis.
Digital Futures
The PMC Photographic Archive is now open and available to all. We are delighted to re-open the Archive to those core audiences who have grown familiar with the resource over the course of its development; and hope that it will yield new information and ideas for their research. Additionally, we look forward to bringing our Photographic Archive to the attention of broader audiences, and will encourage this by sharing our data and images with cross-collection aggregators such as the Archives Hub and PHAROS. The digital future of this archive is one that we will track with keen interest.
