To accompany the launch of their digitised Photographic Archive, the Paul Mellon Centre asked us to create a series of films to demonstrate the innovative and surprising ways that Photographic Archives can be used. The series was called Archive Journeys and each film took as its subject a different photo archive user: a conservator, curator, researcher, artist, archivist, photographer and art dealer.

This film follows historian, Montaz Marché. Montaz is interested in highlighting diverse histories in portraiture. Her own research focus is Black British history in the eighteenth and nineteen century and her aim is to give voice to the Black women who have been historically overlooked. In this film, Montaz discusses the value of photographic archives to her research as well as the issues inherent in a collection’s historic biases and omissions.

To ensure that the look across the films was consistent, each interview was filmed in black-and-white with a two-camera setup. This approach was inspired by the timeless quality of historical photo archives, where images of objects or paintings are preserved in black-and-white from various angles. The black-and-white-format, coupled with the multi-angle capture, goes beyond simple aesthetics. It evokes the enduring relevance of those archives – a constant reminder that the stories and faces documented there continue to resonate today.

You can watch the full series and explore the photographic archive here.