Winnie playing with soldier, 1914. Photographer unknown.
The Colebourn Family Archive is complex and eclectic. It contains numerous stories: about Harry Colebourn, military and veterinary history, children’s literature, World War I. In its entirety, it also contains the story of its own nature, as a collection of material gathered and kept over the course of four generations. How was it assembled, organized and preserved? For what purpose was it made available to researchers and curators? What does it include and not include, and how do its items relate to one another? Determining an object’s place within a collection can be as important to researchers as the context of the object’s creation. If each individual artifact provides an access point to a history, the collection itself reveals how those histories are made.
Kate Addleman-Frankel, Co-Curator of Remembering The Real Winnie; PhD student in Art History, Department of Art, University of Toronto; MA, Film and Photographic Preservation and Collections Management, School of Image Arts, Ryerson University.
Further reading:
About, Ilsen and Clément Chéroux. “L'histoire par la photographie.” Études photographiques 10 (November 2001): 9–33.
Blouin, Francis X. and William G. Rosenberg. Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Edwards, Elizabeth and Janice Hart, eds. Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images. London and New York: Routeledge, 2004.
Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500–1800. Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990.