Who Used The Photographic Archive?
A Scholarly Resource
From its inception, the Photographic Archive was intended as a scholarly resource. Initially, it was open to advanced students and established academics, but even in the early years interested members of the public were not turned away. By the mid-1970s, the resource had developed sufficiently for it to be recognised as a useful teaching aid for undergraduate students. As such, it became integral to the Centre’s newly inaugurated Yale-in-London programme.
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the Photographic Archive was located on the ground floor of the Centre’s premises at Bloomsbury Square and, being readily accessible, was consulted by a steady stream of individuals working, or interested, in the field. Although Centre staff were usually present, access was largely unsupervised: individuals were free to take the boxes off the shelves and browse the images at will. In addition, in order to help keep the resource up to date, established scholars were also permitted—within limits—to rearrange material and annotate the image mounts with new information or opinion.
Fig. 1
Students and staff working with the Photographic Archive at the Paul Mellon Centre's previous site on Bloomsbury Square.
When the Centre moved to new premises in Bedford Square in 1996, the Photographic Archive was housed in office space on the top floor. Out of sight of visitors and as yet uncatalogued, it was consulted less regularly. In order to try and address this issue, an initiative to catalogue the collection was begun in 2010. Basic data about the resource—artist names and file titles—were added to the Centre’s Library catalogue rendering the material “visible” to anyone searching this system. Although the Photographic Archive was no longer open for browsing, access remained entirely in-person: individuals identifying material via the Library catalogue were able to request to view images in the Centre’s Public Study Room. Reader records maintained at this time reveal that, alongside academics and students, the Photographic Archive was now being consulted by auction houses, curators, conservators, museum and heritage professionals, and picture researchers.
Following an extensive review of the Photographic Archive, which looked at various factors including audience reach, a decision was taken to digitise the resource with a view to making it available online. In 2018 the entire collection was sent off-site for this purpose and since this date it has been unavailable to researchers in analogue format. The images themselves are now in deep storage, but the new digital resource, launched in 2021, renders the Photographic Archive accessible to anyone with access to the internet.
