ment of individual works of art, usually are unable
to accommodate entire photographers’ archives
except very selectively. And often these archives are
accessioned along with a gift of a body of the photo-
grapher’s work suitable for collecting and exhibition,
as was the case of a 1997 donation to the Art Insti-
tute of Chicago by Irving Penn.
Some museums build collections around an
important archive, such as the August Sander
Archive in Cologne, which presents exhibitions of
other photographers along with holding the seminal
German figure’s work, or the Berlinische Galerie’s
acquisition in 1979 of the Hannah Ho ̈ch Archive of
paintings, collages, graphics, and photographs.
At the end of the twentieth century, however,
photographers’ archives constituted a looming prob-
lem; many photographers or their heirs were unable
to locate permanent homes for a sudden influx of
thousands of negatives, prints, and papers, even on a
gift basis, and large aggregations of significant
photographs, whether considered works of art or
historical documents, went begging for institutional
protection, risking eventual dispersal or destruction.
A fairly new solution is to set up an independent
foundation (often with tax benefits to the estate) to
house the archive; a model is the Foundation Henri
Cartier-Bresson, inaugurated in 2003. Another is the
Lee Miller Archive in East Sussex, England.
Another strategy is to pinpoint a genre or topic
that can sustain broader donor interest than a sin-
gle artist’s archive, such as the Women in Photo-
graphy International Archive, which amasses
biographical files, books, and articles on female
photographers past and present and as well as
photographs taken by women.
Archives have also been increasingly seen as a
source of profit. The venerable Bettmann Archive,
long the model of a commercial stock photo arch-
ive, was acquired at the end of the century by Cor-
bis, founded by Microsoft’s Bill Gates to acquire
images for digitalizing and distribution via the
internet. The Hulton Archive, London, is another
large international stock photo archive. Conde ́
Nast publications’ inventory of more than one mil-
lion fashion, celebrity, still-life, and travel photo-
graphs and illustrations is housed in the Conde ́
Nast Archive. Traditional photo agencies such as
Black Star or Magnum Photos, though clearly com-
mercial concerns, also function as archives.
Artifact Archives
‘‘Archive’’ also has been used as a generic term for
collections without regard to form of material,
especially at the George Eastman House in Roch-
ester, New York, thereby introducing an additional
element of confusion over the application of the
word. Originally Eastman House’s holdings of
photographs, cameras, and other photographic
apparatus, and ephemera were called simply ‘‘the
collections,’’ but beginning in the 1980s these hold-
ings came to be called ‘‘archives,’’ in opposition to
the terminology employed by most museums. This
apparently coincided with the ‘‘PABIR’’ slogan
(‘‘photographic archives belong in Rochester’’),
which was used in the successful fund-raising and
public relations campaign to prevent the contents
of the museum from being transferred to the
National Museum of American History at the
Smithsonian Institution. A distinction is now
made between Eastman House curators and archi-
vists: curators collect, organize exhibitions, and
perform research, while archivists care for the col-
lections and provide reference services for research-
ers. Since ‘‘archivists’’ normally deal with papers,
photographs, and media such as motion pictures
and sound recordings according to the archival
traditions previously mentioned, the notion of
archivists working with technological and cultural
artifacts such as cameras, in the museum item-level
tradition, strains the usual definition. On the other
hand, in many institutions so-called manuscript
collections (including photographs) are entrusted
to manuscript ‘‘curators’’ rather than ‘‘archivists,’’
even though they utilize archival methodology.
In the broadest possible, if non-traditional,
sense, an archive may be construed as any body
of original or primary source material maintained
as historical evidence for study, so perhaps East-
man House can be forgiven for its extension of the
term to cover its collection of ‘‘three-dimensional’’
cultural and technological artifacts. If the original
assumption of archivists was that their collections
would consist essentially of language materials—
documents containing written words and mathe-
matical symbols—it soon became evident that pic-
torial materials could not logically be excluded.
Maps, engineering drawings, hand-rendered illus-
trations, and photographs—all documentary, his-
torical evidence—are properly the concern of
archivists. The distinction between museum collec-
tions and archival manuscript collections at times
appears arbitrary in terms of the forms of material
collected, hinging upon the volumetric versus the
flat. Museums, of course, collect both types of
objects, so photographs are found in both mu-
seums and archives. If the distinguishing feature
of archives is their emphasis on groups of objects
that bear some internal relationship or association,ARCHIVES