Archival Science Commons^™

Framing Photographs, Denying Archives: The Difficulty Of Focusing On Archival Photographs, Tim Schlak

Tim Schlak

This article pursues the varying understandings of the photograph in archival literature. An in-depth review of the scholarship uncovers several possible reasons why archivists and those writing about photographic archives apparently continue to struggle with the photograph, including: the sheer difficulty that photographs as an elusive medium present; past debates about photography in art history, history, and archival literature; and the challenges that the photograph as an evasive document presents to the contradictory nature of archives themselves and to conceptions of archival science. Having evolved from an understanding of photographs that conflated content with meaning to postmodernist notions of contingent …