How To Formulate the Photographic Question: A Context for Architectural and Topographical Photographs in England.

This paper provides an overview of the problems found by both professional and amateur users of archives and libraries who need to be able to phrase specific questions in conventional and online forms. It discusses issues within the context of a national archive holding over ten million photographs and is concerned with the varying roles of not only those individuals who produced images, but also their archival histories. The exploration and interpretation of the lineage of all image producers indicates the need not only to look at the original intentions of photographers, but also at their increasing biographical obscurity--without these two facets, photographs are in danger of becoming digital fodder without any history of their own. (Author/MES)