Not one but Many: Photographic Trajectories and the Making of History

This essay examines the networks that form an archive using variations on a single photograph from the Thomas Rodger studio of St Andrews. Using the concept of a ‘thick thing’, the essay charts the trajectories of photographs of bronze age funerary urns as they left Rodger’s studio, were collected in albums and used in lectures, and returned to the University of St Andrews Special Collections. Taking just one of Rodger’s photographic assignments as a prism allows us to think about the circulation of many of his photographs both during his lifetime and after, as both the creation of ‘thick things’ and as ‘material performances’ that have since gained the title ‘Early Scottish Photography’ in the St Andrews Special Collections. From a humble object photograph and its variations, the essay argues for the agency of the photographs and their studio origins in forming the special collections photographic collection, and making, in a very literal sense, the stuff from which we write history