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.
An edit is an argument. The sheets behind it are the evidence, and keeping them is what stops a photographer's own memory of an assignment from replacing what the camera actually saw.
So the catalogue is boring on purpose: place, date, subject, consent. No moods, no themes, no adjectives — those change with the decade, and a frame filed under a mood is a frame nobody will find in twenty years.
Three of the nine long projects have run for more than a decade. They are the reason the archive is worth more than the pictures in it.
The archive in numbers
9
Long projects
Coast, work, and borders — shot a few weeks at a time, for years.
14
Years, longest
One project, the same coastline, photographed every spring since 2012.
The three long projects
- Coast
- The same eleven stretches of coastline, revisited every spring since 2012. Nothing is composed to match the previous year; the repetition is in the date and the place, not in the frame.
- Work
- What people do for money, in rooms most photographers are not let into. The slowest of the three to arrange and the one clients come back to most.
- Borders
- Not crossings in the news sense. What a border does to the places twenty kilometres either side of it, photographed over four years.
How a frame is kept
Card to catalogue
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Research is free. Ask for anything.
The captioning rules and the consent record are published in full.
Read them before you decide whether to trust a caption.