The archive and its territories

Abstract

The place or territory in which an archive is housed shapes our understanding of the material discovered there and informs the subsequent direction of research. Derived from Allan Sekula’s discussion of the image territory of photograph archives, this paper develops Sekula’s concept in relation to researching an overlooked archive of censored and captioned bomb damage press photographs taken in London during the Second World War. Beginning in The Imperial War Museum’s photograph archive reading room which was situated until 2020 in the city whose wartime ruination the bomb damage photographs record, this paper describes their territories, showing how the archive is not solely defined by its taxonomic and institutional context. Instead, from the mediative space of the reading room, new interconnecting temporal, historical and locational territories are traced, revealing other histories in both the archive and the city.

Keywords

• photograph
• territories
• reading room
• bomb damage
• London