Stefanie Klamm and Petra Wodtke argue that Photographs are not only two-dimensional images but three-dimensional material objects in their own right. In their project they consider photographs as historically shaped objects acting as carriers of knowledge sedimented in political, social and cultural contexts. From this viewpoint, they analyze photographs and photo archives as research tools in archaeology, art history and ethnology.
Furthermore, Rebecca Kahn and Sebastion Felten consider the classification work needed to bring objects into a collection such as cataloguing, labeling and storing; and the ongoing labours of recataloguing, relabeling and restoring required to keep them in the collection. Focussing on one well-documented case, they show that ‘good’ recordkeeping has been an important theme in the 250year long history of the British Museum in London, as there was a continual concern that objects might have been misplaced, mislabeled or inadequately described.