Territories of images, technologies of memory

Abstract

In this article I examine the classification and preservation systems applied to the Farm Security Administration‐Office of War Information Photograph Collection over the last sixty years, and how these different, and to some extent competing, systems have impacted on access to the photographs and the attribution of meaning to them. I discuss the way in which these systems are part of the struggle over the construction of a visual memory of the years 1935–1943.