THE EDWARD REEVES ARCHIVE PROJECT

In 1858 he moved to 159 High Street, Lewes, where he built a daylight photographic studio in the garden. That studio is still in use today and the business he founded has passed through four generations of the Reeves family.

Edward Reeves Photography is now accepted to be the world’s longest established photographic studio, still in the original premises and owned and run by the same family.

Since the beginning, all the images created by the business have been kept so that ‘copies may be obtained at any time’. They have been filed away in the form of glass plates or film negatives in what has become known as “the Negative Room”. The natural atmospheric conditions there are ideal for the storage of photographic media, so virtually the whole archive is in excellent condition. Still being added to the archive are the digital files created since the business moved away from analogue photography in the early 2000s.

The complete output of the Edward Reeves studio has been kept intact since its beginnings in the mid-1850s. However, the ‘archive’ was never designed as such – records were made so that images could be traced and reprints made during the expected commercial life of the pictures. Therefore, a vast amount of material was practically inaccessible for any sort of targeted research.

The Edward Reeves Archive Project aims to assess the total contents of the archive and make it searchable and accessible. Over the past fourteen years a group of dedicated volunteers has already transcribed the negative ledgers (well over 100,000 entries), so for the first time it begins to be possible to search the entire archive by word. That represents an enormous step forward but is in fact only the beginning.

The work of the volunteers has enabled images to be sourced which have already led to a number of exhibitions and events, and it is hoped that in the future more and more will be possible.