Activating archives through student projects: The Dick Scott-Stewart Collection and LCC Postgraduate Photography Collaborative Unit

Designing the project

This collaboration offered the opportunity for ASCC staff to be involved in the writing of the unit brief. Being involved in this capacity meant we could work with the course team to shape the ways in which students would engage with material.

We worked with both the unit tutors, Ed Clark and Taous Dahmani, and Vartan Avakian from the Arab Image Foundation. Together, we discussed which collection to use and how students would respond to it. We also discussed the roles of archives staff and unit tutors and how we could ensure students’ access to material during a busy period for the archive. We knew that ensuring that students all had the same opportunity to access material was crucial to the success of each group’s outcome. To ensure this, we allotted bookings for each group to have up to two 2-hour research sessions in the archive at a minimum. Groups requiring further time could book in for further time where we had availability. This made sure that all students had some guaranteed time to engage with material to support them in creating responses grounded in the archive.

We also considered how students could use the archive material in their final output – would they be able to loan original items or only display facsimiles or digital copies? Whilst we do sometimes loan material for student exhibitions, we decided that the display conditions in the gallery wouldn’t be secure enough, and as the exhibition would be deinstalled on a weekend (meaning ASCC staff couldn’t be present), we decided that students would be allowed to display copies.

Ultimately, we decided to use the Dick Scott-Stewart (DSS) Collection as the collection students would engage with. Stewart’s career encompassed varied photography practices, comprising both editorial and documentary practice. Similarly, the Collaborative Unit would involve varied practices, drawing together students from a different postgraduate photography courses: MA Photography, MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography and MA Commercial Photography. Whilst we had discussed using a collection not related to photography, in the end, we decided that as a predominantly visual collection, the DSS Collection would potentially be more accessible for students. Students wouldn’t have to spend lots of time reading through complex material or deciphering handwriting. The straightforward format of the DSS Collection was especially important as the students would have a very short timeframe of just ten weeks to realise their projects.

We also discussed some shared preoccupations in both archival practice and photographic practice, which led to defining four different themes in the brief which resonate across both photography and archives: Access, Language, Absence and Agency. The cohort was split into four groups and each group was assigned a theme on which to focus their response.

Activating the project

We started out by giving the students an introduction to both the Dick Scott-Stewart Collection and archival practice generally. Introducing students to archival theory and practices helped them to be more literate researchers, understanding how archivists mediate and shape material themselves. In the case of one group, these ideas ended up becoming a key part of their final display.

Students then visited the archives in their groups, where Assistant Archivist Erin Liu supported their research sessions, retrieving material for them as well as suggesting relevant items based on their interests. A few weeks into the project, it also became obvious that another session for students which recapped how to find, request and access material would be helpful, so we provided a briefing on this a couple of weeks into the project.

Once the students had researched material, they needed to produce their outcomes. The groups all approached this stage differently but most needed to film, photograph or scan material, and one group also asked to borrow some archive boxes for their display. We encouraged the students to do any digitisation themselves, which would leverage and develop their own technical skills. Because they were scanning original archive material, digitisation was always done under the supervision of ASCC staff.

The student responses

The students exhibited their responses alongside student work from the other elective units at the Copeland Gallery from 21^st-23^rd March 2025. These ranged from textiles printed with material from the archive to films created with A.I. input. We were very impressed with the thoughtful and technically accomplished pieces.

Examples of most of the works responding to the Dick Scott-Stewart Collection can be found below. Click on the captions button on each image (the small square with lines on it) to read through each group's description of their work in their own words.

Students’ engagement with this collection has enhanced and widened our understanding of both Dick Scott-Stewart’s work. It has also offered us the opportunity to see how students perceive archives and archivists. For students, it's exposed them to working with archives and incorporating these into creative, practice-based research. Projects which involve students with not only archival material, but also archival processes help us to make visible the multiplicity of meanings inherent in archival records.

Dick Scott-Stewart