Reading photographs: Photographs as evidence in writing the history of modern science

In the late 1940s, G. C. Heron sat at his desk, frustrated. The photograph archive he directed at New Zealand’s National Library, the Alexander Turnbull Library, was actively soliciting photograph collections. At the same time individuals throughout the country, seeing little value in them, were tossing images away. Heron found this deeply troubling. Photographs “preserve scenes, impressions and faces of bygone days and form an historic record as surely as does any manuscript, diary or printed work,” he wrote, but few historians were doing anything with them.1