PHOTOGENIC - Managing Down the Archive

The image featured above dates from 2008 and was part of a project for charity Christmas Cards featuring children dressed up as their future imagined selves, in this case, a barrister.

Curating an archive that our work has created since 1993 has been a bit of a labour of love. I'm not entirely sure that any other businesses like ours does this, but it was always our policy to retain our work.

Now, in an era of GDPR, privacy etc, we know that if another generation of photographers steps into our shoes, we cannot leave these older records on their shoulders, so we are managing down our Archive to a more commonly held 5 year archive.

We know how precious our photographs have been for our clients and we regularly do prepare prints & framed pieces from the past 30 years and we can still do that. In recent times we have made new pieces for the children, now adults, who appear in the portraits.

But now, with every cost including storage increasing, we have taken the decision to disperse or purge the Archive, from 1993, up to an including 2019. The process of moving the Archive is underway, and if you are interested in having your records you can apply using this form

Here are a few FAQs about the process. This is not an exhaustive list, but it covers most of what we have been asked so far:

1. Yes, there is a cost for retrieval of records and the fee varies.

2. "Surely it can't cost that much to store my few negatives?" Well, the thing is we didn't just store one set of negatives and digital files. We stored hundreds of thousands of them, and we can retrieve almost all of them.

3. Where we have stored images that for whatever reason were never viewed or ordered from, there will be an additional fee, to compensate the studio. Alternately, you can avail of the opportunity to order at least one framed Custom Medium Wall Portrait - ask if you'd like our current Product & Pricing Guide emailed to you.

4. Some of the digital file sets stored amount to gigabytes of data that require external drives for our clients to take ownership of them. We don't provide the hard-drives, but we will add files to any empty drive supplied to us. We will advise on a case-by-case basis if this applies to your enquiry.

5. This process is happening so that our archive is responsibly managed - it's not happening all at once, it's a process.In all honesty, if we don’t carefully manage it down, it could end up being skipped/deleted as many other archives have been, so this is the responsible thing to do.

6. If you have been in touch and not heard back from us, whatsapp us on 087 996 4800, and we can quickly acknowledge you, and let you know where we're at.

7. If you have been in touch and advised us that you do not want the files we have stored, we will proceed to the purging stage later in the year without further contact.

8. Next year, we will start the same process with the 2020 Archive (which is quite small, as we were closed for much of the year!) and annually thereafter.