Photographs

Photographs are found throughout Special Collections. They may be part of a photographic collection, or kept with other types of objects.

Photographs can be analysed as if they were text. They are evidence of the social and material world they depict, but are not always an objective historical record. Scenes may be staged to manipulate or persuade the observer to a certain point of view or purchase. A photographer may have picked one shot over many others for political, dramatic, aesthetic or personal reasons. The frame is also important: what the photographer cropped out can be as revealing as that which they have chosen to include.

Special Collections hold the Godrey Bingley photographic collection. This includes 10,000 images taken between 1884 and 1913, mostly of Yorkshire.

The West Yorkshire Playhouse archive collection and the Romany Collection also have significant numbers of photographs.

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Image credit Leeds University Library