Organization
What an artist’s archive really holds
The archives of a studio, or of an artist’s family, are not only images. They hold negatives and prints, contact sheets, working notebooks, letters from galleries, contracts, exhibition catalogues, press clippings. And, for the last twenty years, whole hard drives: scans, RAW files, exports, emails saved as PDFs.
This mix of paper and digital is called a hybrid archive. It raises a simple question: how do you arrange it all so that someone else can find their way through it tomorrow, without you?
Archivists have a tested answer. It does not require digitizing everything or re-sorting everything. It rests on a few principles, applied in order.
First principle: respect des fonds
A fonds is the whole body of records that one person created or received in the course of their activities. A photographer’s archives form a fonds. Those of their partner, of the gallery that represented them, or of the agency that commissioned them form others.
Respect des fonds says three things:
- each record stays in the fonds it comes from;
- two fonds are never merged, even when they concern the same works;
- original order, the arrangement the creator gave to their records, is kept as long as it remains intelligible.
The most common mistake is to re-sort by theme: all the portraits together, all the landscapes together. What gives the records their meaning is then lost: who the photograph was made for, in which project, next to which letter. A box of prints arranged by the artist is already information. Write down its order before you touch it.
A collection, by contrast, is a grouping made after the fact, on a shared criterion (a subject, a format), regardless of provenance. If you bought prints by other photographers, they form a collection, separate from the studio’s fonds. These terms are defined in the glossary.
Arrange by levels: fonds, series, files, items
Arrangement goes from the general to the particular. Each level groups the records that come from one activity.
| Level | What it groups | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Fonds | All the records of one creator | Studio archives |
| Series | One activity or function | Commissions, Exhibitions, Correspondence |
| Sub-series | A division of a series | “Shorelines” project |
| File | One matter, one subject | Negatives, Prints, Research |
| Item | The smallest unit | A letter, a print, a scan |
Write this arrangement scheme on a single page first, before moving anything. It should reflect what the artist actually did: personal projects, commissions, exhibitions, publications, correspondence. That scheme, not an invented folder tree, is what will structure everything else.
Each unit gets a reference code that states its place: PH/1 for the first series of fonds PH, PH/1/A for a sub-series. The code is how you find, cite, and put things back. A related article explains how to take on a body of work scattered across several drives without re-sorting it all at once.
Describe: the useful minimum
An arrangement without a description says nothing. The international standard ISAD(G) sets the minimum for each unit:
- a title that says what it is;
- a reference code and a level;
- dates, with their real precision: “ca. 1985” or “undated” are honest answers;
- the extent: “12 boxes”, “412 negatives, 35 mm film”, “1 hard drive”;
- the creator: who made or received these records.
One rule saves a great deal of time: state each piece of information once, at the most general level where it applies. The creator, the language, the reproduction conditions belong at the fonds level. Repeat them only where a branch is an exception, for example a series of commissions created by an agency.
Think about access conditions too. Private letters, medical papers, contracts with living people are not shared like an exhibition print. Decide now what is open, restricted, or closed, and until when.
Keep an accession register
A studio’s archives grow by successive arrivals: a sister finds a box of letters, a gallery returns its files, a collector deposits prints. Each arrival deserves a line in an accession register:
- a number (2026-001);
- the date;
- the source: who handed the records over;
- the method: gift, deposit, purchase, bequest;
- a rough estimate of the volume.
The register shows where each group came from and on what terms. A deposit is not a gift: deposited records remain the property of whoever entrusted them. For the related notion applied to works, see provenance in a photographic archive.
Digital files: gather before you arrange
Files have a problem paper does not: they get copied without anyone noticing. The same scan sits on three drives under three names. Before describing, you need to know what you actually have.
The order is:
- inventory every drive, without changing anything;
- find duplicates by comparing file contents, not names;
- choose the version to keep, then gather the files in one place, keeping their original folder tree;
- only then, attach those files to the arrangement scheme.
Keeping the original folder tree is respect for original order, applied to digital files. On how the comparison works, see finding duplicate images.
Prepare the handover
An archive is passed on through three things: the records themselves, a finding aid that makes them readable, and safe copies of the files.
- The finding aid is a printable document: the arrangement scheme, the description of each unit, indexes of people and places. It is what your heirs, a library, or an archives service will read.
- Keep the inventory in an open format too, readable without any particular software.
- Digital originals should exist as several verified copies, one of them away from the studio.
A description without safe copies, or copies without a description, is not enough. You need both.
With the software in the suite
Memory Atlas follows this method step by step. You build the tree of a fonds: fonds, series, sub-series, files, and items, with a full reference code computed for each unit. It refuses inconsistent placements, such as a unit under an item. If an inventory already exists in a spreadsheet, you can bring it in from a CSV file, with a report before anything is imported.
The Essential view of a unit’s description shows the six essential elements of ISAD(G). Dates are typed the way you would say them (“[ca. 1995]”), and Undated is accepted. What you enter at the fonds level is inherited by all its units, except where you override it. Access conditions are set as Open, Restricted, or Closed.
The accession register records gifts, deposits, purchases, and bequests, with number, date, source, and method, and links them to fonds. Digital objects stay where they are in the Finder: Memory Atlas keeps a link to each file and never copies or modifies it. Dropping a folder of scans on a file-level unit can create one item per file.
For the handover, Memory Atlas exports a finding aid as PDF or HTML, with indexes. By default, the description of units with restricted or closed access is masked in it. It also exports the inventory as CSV and the description as EAD, the exchange format of archives services. Before that, you can validate a branch: every unit is checked and what is missing is listed.
Obscura Trace does the groundwork on the drives. It analyzes a source read-only and finds exact duplicates by their SHA-256 fingerprint. Its Centre de transfert gathers files while keeping the source’s folder tree, and writes a manifest that records where each file came from. Nothing is deleted without your consent.
Obscura Vault then preserves the originals. It imports a folder with the SHA-256 fingerprint of each file, packages it into verifiable archives, and keeps copies on your own media and offsite.
Where to start
Start with one page: the list of creators, then the arrangement scheme of the main fonds. Next, open the boxes and drives without moving anything, and note what you find. Once the scheme holds, Memory Atlas helps you build it, describe it, and prepare its handover. The four applications in the suite are presented on the software page.