Photographs, Mounts, and the Tactile Archive

Abstract

This short article considers the humble photographic mount as a site of tactile engagement. In particular, it will explore photographs that were deposited in the visual collections of public libraries as sources of local history and instruments of local identities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mounts were specifically designed to present information to the eye in certain ways, and enable that information to be held in the hand and manipulated. But they also served to protect photographs against the ravages of touch in the public space. I shall consider how we might understand the enormous amount of energy expended on the consideration of photographic mounts. I consider staged materialities of the institutions that constitute these objects and their haptic requirements. These were changing radically at this period as open-access libraries organized the body of the reader in new ways. I argue that photographic mounts, their storage, access, and the arrangement of information upon them constituted part of this revolution.

Keywords

• archives, libraries, materialty
• Photographs