1.4m
Frames on file
Everything shot since 1998, contact sheets included.
The archive · 1.4 million frames
Everythingwe ever shot,including themisses.
No frames are deleted to tidy a story up. The sheets are kept, which is the only way an agency can honestly say what it did not find.
Ask the archivistAn archive is a record of what was there, not of what we chose.
Most picture archives are edits: the frames somebody once thought were good. Ours keeps the sheets, so a researcher can see what surrounded the picture and what was left out of it.
That includes the assignments that came back with nothing. An archive that only holds the successes is a record of the agency's expectations rather than of places.
Research is done by a person, takes about a week, and costs nothing.
The archive in numbers
3
Long projects
Shot a few weeks at a time, for years, and published here with their sheets.
14
Years, longest
One project, the same coastline, photographed every spring since 2012.
The long projects
All projects2016– · Ongoing · Factories, kitchens, depots and offices in six countries
Work
What people do for money, in rooms most photographers are not let into. The slowest of the projects to arrange and the one clients come back to most.
Open the project2012– · Ongoing · Eleven stretches of the Atlantic and Channel coast
Coast
The same eleven stretches of shoreline, rephotographed every spring since 2012. Nothing is composed to match the previous year; the repetition is in the date and the place.
Open the project2019–2023 · Closed · Both banks of the Oder, Poland and Germany
Borders
Not crossings in the news sense. What a border does to the places twenty kilometres either side of it, photographed over four years along the Oder.
Open the projectHow a frame is kept
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Shot
Frames come in on cards or film at the end of an assignment, never during it. Both are stored in the building rather than in a rented cloud.
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Catalogued
By hand, by a person who reads the captions: place, date, subject, and who consented to what. It takes about a week per assignment and there is no automatic tagging.
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Kept whole
The contact sheets stay with the edit, including for assignments that produced nothing publishable. That is how we can say what we did not photograph.
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Searched
Research is done by the archivist, not by a keyword box, and it is free whether or not you licence anything at the end of it.
Ask for a frame. Get a folder.
The archivist answers with the sheets around the picture, not just the picture. Free, about a week.
See the standards