How Photography Helps Preserve History and Heritage
A photograph can be much more than a record of a moment.
Look at an old photograph of a street and you may initially notice the buildings, the people or the quality of the image. Look more closely, however, and you begin to discover an enormous amount of information about the world in which the photograph was made.
Shop signs reveal businesses that disappeared decades ago. Advertisements reveal the products people bought. Vehicles show how transport changed. Clothing tells us something about everyday life. Even the way buildings were used can sometimes be reconstructed from a photograph.
This is one of the reasons historical photography is so important.
Photographing a changing world
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, photographers began systematically recording parts of Britain’s towns and cities that were already disappearing.
In London, organisations such as the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London recognised the importance of documenting buildings and streets before redevelopment erased them.
Their work created an invaluable visual record.
Today, we can look at those photographs and see not only architecture but the people, businesses and everyday activities that surrounded it.
The photographs weren’t necessarily created as works of art.
Their value comes from what they recorded.
A photograph can tell us more than we expect
Consider an old photograph of a London street.
A modern viewer might be interested in the architecture, but a historian could find much more.
Look at the shop fronts and you might discover the names of businesses that have long disappeared.
Look at the advertisements and you can identify brands that were once part of everyday life.
Look at the road and you can see how transport changed.
Look at the people and you begin to understand how ordinary life looked at that particular point in history.
This is one of the great strengths of photography as a historical record.
The photographer may have intended to record a building, but they also accidentally recorded everything that happened to be in front of the camera.
Photographing ordinary life
There is an understandable tendency for photographers to concentrate on subjects considered important at the time.
Historic buildings, famous people and major events naturally attract attention.
But some of the most valuable historical photographs are those showing ordinary life.
A photograph of a street market might contain information about food, clothing, transport, advertising and working practices.
A photograph of a factory could reveal machinery, working conditions and the organisation of the workplace.
A photograph of a high street can show businesses that no longer exist and buildings that may have been demolished or radically altered.
The photographer doesn’t need to know that these details will become historically important.
They simply need to record them.
The details photographers might overlook
Modern photographers sometimes deliberately remove distractions from an image.
A vehicle parked in front of an attractive building may be considered an unwanted obstruction. A collection of advertising signs may be regarded as visual clutter.
For a future historian, those same elements could be exactly what makes the photograph valuable.
A shop sign may provide evidence of a business.
A road sign may reveal how a location was used.
An advertisement can establish which products were being sold.
A vehicle can help date the photograph.
Even apparently insignificant details can become important when the original context has disappeared.
This is a useful reminder that the value of a photograph isn’t always determined by what the photographer considered important when they pressed the shutter.
Buildings disappear. Photographs remain.
Cities and towns are constantly changing.
Buildings are demolished, roads are widened, businesses close and entire neighbourhoods can be redeveloped.
Once a building has disappeared, photography may be one of the few ways future generations can discover what was there.
This is particularly important for buildings that were never considered historically significant at the time.
A grand public building is likely to have been photographed and documented extensively.
An ordinary row of shops might not.
Yet decades later, that row of shops may tell us far more about everyday life than a photograph of a famous monument.
The importance of photographic prints
There is another aspect of heritage photography that is easy to overlook.
A photograph needs to remain accessible if it is to serve as a historical record.
Digital photography has transformed the way we create and store images, but digital technology also creates its own preservation challenges.
Storage formats change.
Hardware becomes obsolete.
Files can become corrupted.
A device that was commonplace twenty years ago may already be difficult to read today.
Physical photographic prints have their own preservation requirements, but they have one major advantage: they don’t require specialist technology simply to be viewed.
A well-preserved print can be picked up and examined immediately.
That simplicity is one reason physical photographic collections remain so valuable to museums, archives and historical organisations.
Photography as a form of heritage
The work of photographers therefore has a value that extends beyond the immediate purpose of an image.
A commercial photographer might photograph a building for an estate agent.
A wedding photographer might document a family gathering.
A street photographer might photograph an ordinary high street.
A landscape photographer might record a particular view.
Decades later, those photographs could provide evidence of a world that has changed.
That doesn’t mean every photograph needs to be created with historians in mind.
It simply means we should recognise that photography has the ability to preserve far more than the subject deliberately chosen by the photographer.
What can photographers do today?
The lesson from historical photographic collections is not that every photographer should become a documentary photographer.
It is that we should recognise the value of recording change.
If you photograph your local area, consider documenting places that are changing.
Photograph buildings before redevelopment.
Record high streets and independent businesses.
Document signs and architectural details.
Photograph the way people use public spaces.
Capture the ordinary as well as the spectacular.
The resulting photographs may have little apparent significance today.
In fifty or a hundred years, they could provide an extraordinary record of how our communities looked and lived.
A reminder of why we make photographs
A recent book, Panoramas of Lost London: Work, Wealth, Poverty and Change 1870–1945 by Philip Davies, provides a fascinating reminder of this principle.
The photographs examined in the book don’t simply show an earlier London. They provide evidence of how the city worked and how rapidly it changed.
That is perhaps the most powerful argument for photography as a form of heritage.
We don’t always know what will become historically important.
The photographer’s job is simply to observe, record and preserve.
The historian can come later.
And sometimes, when they do, an apparently ordinary photograph can turn out to be an extraordinary piece of history.
