Access to and extraction from the archives
The archive is a broad term that includes publicand private records and can include almost any subject matter mentionable, the materials found in public archives are useful to many different researchers formultiple reasons and purposes. Photographic archives are of interest for no lesser reasons, however, there is a juncture at which the official archive has nopurpose for certain images in their possession. My project is about the notionof creating a meta-archive of the unknown and unwanted in terms of public and private archives, by obtaining more photographic archive material through requests to archives for unwanted material, build a database of archives across the old Lancashire political boundaries, visit, and obtain catalogue materialof the archives that have direct named individuals and places. Attempt to find small local archives that might have belonged to photographers no longer around but who’s material is relevant to the study of working-class imagery. Having just begun to scan through the Salford University archive, I came to find many of the images are of the great and the good and their relationship to the institution, however one image that did strike me, is of the gardener of Lord Ellmsmere, one W.B. Upjohn. Probably this man would not have been recorded in this way had it not been for his relationship to one of the important people of that day. Other images exist from art history that display working people as being named, however it isusually a commission by someone of wealth to commemorate their worker, or as a means of displaying the ownership of such people.
