- Jun 16
- 12 min read
Updated: Nov 14
PHOTOFILE | ESSAY
SHADOW ARCHIVES
The Digital Traffic in Vernacular Photographs on the Auction Website Delcampe
Catalyzed by Geoffrey Batchen’s 2000 article “Vernacular Photographies,” historians of photographs, as well as other photography researchers, have embraced the study of ordinary photographs made and remade, bought and circulated, treasured and forgotten by ordinary people.[1] To find these sources, many of which are overlooked by museums or archives, scholars often turn to marketplaces. Photograph by photograph, the historian creates their own private collection or archive. For example, Batchen’s personal collection of vernacular photographs, at least one of which was “found in a flea market in Madrid,”[2] accounts for more than half of sources used in his 2004 book Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance.[3]
Batchen’s use of the word “found” to describe his encounter with these photographs invokes the serendipity of the chance encounter. The discovery of photographs in a marketplace involves the unexpected resurgence of the past into the present, a certain punctum reaching through time to grab the researcher as he or she rummages through cardboard boxes at a flea market. Such encounters are unusual in institutional archives, where scholars order documents in advance based on categories, keywords, and other archival logics. The flea market and the archive almost function as foils to one another: the first is a place of spontaneity, chaos, and discovery, while the second is a site of indexes, inventories, and collections.
Since the early 2000s, a third source for vernacular photographs has emerged: the Internet. In a sense, the Internet is a mediator that brings a search bar to the flea market. With websites like eBay, a photograph is now ostensibly easier to find than ever before. Of course, photographs in archives are also increasingly accessible, since many have digitized their photographic collections, even uploading selections to Commons such as Google Arts and Culture or Flickr. However, archives remain a dispersed constellation. It is often difficult to know where to start an online search, especially as institutional keywords might not correspond to the information guiding a search. While tools like Google Lens can help to identify images or recommend similar images, they often link to commercial websites rather than archive websites, which remain relatively inaccessible to mainstream searches.
While the Internet renders official institutional archives more accessible, it also creates alternative archives in the form of these commercial websites. Building upon critiques of traditional archival structures, Allan Sekula’s concept of the “shadow archive” provides a crucial theoretical lens through which to understand these digital marketplaces. Defined by Sekula in his 1986 article “The Body and the Archive,” a shadow archive “contains subordinate, territorialized archives: archives whose semantic interdependence is normally obscured by the ‘coherence’ and ‘mutual exclusivity of the social groups registered within each.”[4] Fulfilling Sekula’s definition, digital marketplaces for photographs form a nearly “all-inclusive archive” containing both the traces of the known and laudable (e.g. autographed photographs of celebrities, portraits of 19th-century elites, or snapshots of soldiers taken as keepsakes) and of the anonymous, marginalized, or horrific (e.g. pornographic images, photographs of emaciated prisoners of war, or stereographs of anonymized Others in colonial contexts).[5] Assembling this staggering array of photographs for any Internet user to see and to interact with, the shadow archives of digital marketplaces create their own archival logics that destabilize understandings of permanence, access, and the formation of knowledge.
Delcampe as Shadow Archive
To narrow the otherwise vast amplitude of digital marketplaces, I focus on a case study of the Belgian website Delcampe. Founded in 2000, Delcampe defines itself as a “marketplace which puts the buyers and sellers of collection items in contact with each other.”[6] This legal definition is reinforced by the website’s front page, which proclaims itself to be the “marketplace for collectors.”[7] Delcampe thus establishes itself as a place for collectors and for their collections, on both the buying and selling sides, representing more than 180 nationalities.[8] The website does not specifically cater to professional or amateur historians but rather to amateur collectors and their collections. Unlike most archives, which present an exhaustive material and / or textual record of a particular person or organization, collections are often narrower, assembling objects by subject, format, or other thematic criteria.[9]
Taking these definitional differences into account, is this website an assemblage of collections, or is it a type of archive? According to some liberal definitions of the archive, such as the one Katja Muller gives in her chapter “Theorizing Digital Archives: Power, Access and New Order,” from 2021, the term can describe “websites that provide a searchable database of information about the past.”[10] Following Ann Laura Stoler’s warning that “to understand an archive one needs to understand the institution that it served,” we must acknowledge that if Delcampe is indeed an archive, it serves the institution of 21st century digital capitalism, even a Big Data capitalism in which “quantity turns into a new quality.”[11] Certainly, commodity fetishism has always haunted photography, which, as Allan Sekula noted, was invented along with the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century.[12] Much of the merchandise that comprises the inventory or archive of Delcampe thus has always been bought and sold, especially the postcard. Even the idea of commercial quantity and scale is at the core of many collector objects. Millions of postcards were produced at the turn of the century alone. The postcard, originally produced as an object for mass consumption, opens a new chapter of its object biography when it is posted to Delcampe as an object of mass viewing, and eventually as an object of personal collecting. In this commercial display of private collections, the historian participates in a new form of spectacle that privileges the abundance of nearly endless choice but seeks the specificity of a purchasable object.
To further understand how the commercial logics of Delcampe influence the formation of a vast shadow archive, we must begin by considering the sellers and their roles. Often, these sellers are the same ones found in flea markets, who offer a more selective part of their stock for sale online. The most successful sellers might find themselves in Delcampe’s automated “Top Boutiques” list. In early September, the leading seller was one based in France known by the username Karto86. In the past year, Karto86 has sold 9,369 photographs and postcards, and since joining Delcampe in 2018, Karto has received more than 35,000 reviews, giving us a low-ball estimate of the number of photographs and postcards sold. On Karto86’s Delcampe boutique page, one can search his inventory of over 113,000 postcards, a collection spanning all the inhabited continents. The collection is organized automatically by Delcampe by geographic location (continent, country, city) and by theme (agriculture, animals, folklore, ships), allowing users an additional level of meta-data categorization. Keyword searches yield results across categories: if we type in the keyword “guerre” (war, in French), 2,714 postcards appear. The power of this sort of search in otherwise private collections is unprecedented.[13] In institutional archives and in non-digitized private collections, many of which are organized according to easy identifiers such as place, searching a collection for this type of keyword or theme is a time-consuming and sometimes Quixotic feat.
Sometimes, the sellers are also collectors. Collectors may view their collections as art, or as curative attempts to preserve and pass on certain photographs to future generations. Nevertheless, these objectives are intertwined with practices of buying and selling. Collectors might sell some of their collection to finance further collection, just as art museums sometimes sell paintings to finance other acquisitions. As the collector Emmanuelle Fructus writes in an article “Désordres dans la photographie amateur et anonyme,” the anonymous photographs she collects will never belong to her.[14] Fructus pushes back against the idea that collectors of amateur and anonymous photographs like her are curators of an archive. “Archives of what?” she asks. “And belonging to whom? Archives for what reason?”[15] While most of Fructus’ tens of thousands of photographs, that she has collected for over 20 years, are organized thematically in boxes, she told me in conversation that she sells some to fund other acquisitions.[16] These diverse and active constellations of collections add another level of problematization when they are featured, in part or in whole, as objects for sale online. Historians must ask: What does it mean for a historian to purchase a photograph online from collectors, who sometime use websites like Delcampe to acquire the photographs in the first place? Does the prior selection and imposition of category impact not only how the photograph survives through time and how it is acquired, but also how the historian incorporates it into a historical argument?
Moving away from flea markets and closer to garage sales, some sellers are private persons looking to sell family items that they think might interest someone based on their presumed historical or aesthetic qualities. Scholars working on histories of war or violence often encounter private sellers looking to get rid of photographs that reveal skeletons in the family closet.
This diversity of sellers, each with their own way of approaching and valuing photography, thus peoples the online bazaar. It is to be expected that they bring these interpretations of photographs to their labelling of the merchandise, a process which is mandatory on Delcampe. Sellers must label photographs by keywords, approximate or actual dates, location, medium, inscription, and purpose. The selection of these terms is guided by perceptions of value, by a capitalist reading of an image guided by the question: What will make it sell?
The Commercial Logics of the Delcampe Shadow Archive
Online sellers are obligated to handle every photograph, one by one, whereas in the flea market, the photographs are often thrown together in masses. In the case of the more attentive flea market seller, they might have preemptively looked at each photograph to assign an individual price. Yet this assignment of value was performed without comment, based on a tangle of value-making criteria such as historical interest, local relevance, subject matter, aesthetic qualities, or even the gut impulse of punctum. In the case of online markets, the seller is obligated to examine each photograph’s qualities, to transform image into word, to make even the most stubbornly silent of photographs speak. Yet, this capitalist process tends towards an atomization or “librarification” that assigns each illustrated postcard an individual value and object identity, thus often artificially dispersing collections, series, albums, and other assemblages that are essential to understanding historical photographic practices. The commercial imperative to present each item as a unique, sellable commodity can fragment the very contextual relationships that historians seek to understand.
Another consequence of this inventory is its digitization. While this is also a problem faced by traditional archives, many of which digitize their photograph collections, the stakes are different. In the case of archives, digitization is typically performed to simultaneously open and restrict access. By this I mean that digitization allows archives to publish images of documents that may not be accessible for in-person viewing due to their degraded or fragile state, which is especially true of older photographic technologies like daguerreotypes and glass plates. On the other hand, digitization allows archives to restrict access to materials that are not necessarily at risk of immediate degradation. As I found on many occasions, French departmental archives require multi-step authorizations to view postcards in person that are now available online. This idea runs precisely contrary to the purpose of digitization on Delcampe, which is to exchange a digital image for a material one. The copy of the material photograph, however, is prone to all sorts of accidents, anomalies, and inconsistencies in its production and circulation. Unlike institutional archives, which have standardized and high-tech ways of scanning images, most private sellers have basic equipment that distorts the reproduced image. Of course, some sellers intentionally manipulate the digital image to add watermarks (and some archives also do this to avoid copyright infringement).
While historical photographs and postcards are more visible than ever before, they are also visible in assemblages and forms that defy institutional archival logics. Certainly, on Delcampe, the historian is presented with a veritable panorama of photographs, searchable and collectable with the ease of a click of the mouse. But this visibility is not neutral. Shaped by the logics and language of commerce, this unprecedented accessibility is unstable in ways that archives aren’t. First, the shadow archive of Delcampe is a victim of its own success: photographs come and go from the website as the objects behind them are bought and sold. Theorists have long acknowledged that the archive is a process and is always shifting meaning as it organizes and produces knowledge. In its mutations, in its presences and absences, in the number of “hearts” an object has earned, Delcampe tells the historian about commercial value as much as about popular interest, in ways that archives often intentionally hide.
To give a more concrete example of this distorted visibility, we can examine a problem common to most postcards: the inscription. Beyond the problematics of provenance and authenticity, the uploading of thousands upon thousands of inscribed postcards on Delcampe is an incredible opportunity for the researcher. Institutional archives are limited by their collection logics: they are focused on collecting one of each type of postcard in a series, rather than many dozens of the same print of a postcard sent by potentially hundreds of different people. Postcards that travel always have at least one inscription: the name and address of the recipient, and usually also that of the sender. This already can provide significant information about individual and collective customs and habits, one of the most obvious being the development of bourgeois tourism in coastal and rural areas at the turn of the twentieth century. One could imagine a project in which web-scraping allows a historian to map the sending points and destinations of a popular postcard or postcard series. Moreover, while most postcards inscriptions are banal messages written in a “thinking of you” sort of way or to provide updates such as “Arrived last night,” some postcard inscriptions give us precious insights into how the postcard senders and recipients viewed the individual card as well as the general medium. Yet inscriptions can give social historians a glimpse into the relationship between medium and message, as some inscriptions show how photographic postcards resonate with senders in intimate emotional and even political ways.
One conclusion would be to despair about the replacement of humans by algorithms, or about the erosion of historical authority and authenticity in shadow archives organized according to capitalist logics. Yet, such shadow archives offer historians an opportunity to reconsider the fundamentals of historical knowledge creation. In her primer Photographs and the Practice of History, Elizabeth Edwards asks, “What do photographs do to history?”[17] The example of Delcampe forces us to ask corollary questions that deserve further attention: “What does the market for photographs do to history?” and “How does the presence of such vast yet unstable inventories of information about the past impact a larger theory of history?” Indeed, the case of Delcampe suggests that the digital marketplace functions as a unique and complex form of shadow archive, one whose archival logics are deeply intertwined with the dynamics of commercial exchange, raising critical questions about access permanence, bias, and the very nature of historical evidence in the digital age.
Bibliography
Batchen, Geoffrey. Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.
Batchen, Geoffrey. « Vernacular Photographies ». History of Photography 24, no 3 (septembre 2000): 262‑71. https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2000.10443418.
Delcampe. « Delcampe | Acheter et vendre des objets de collection ». Accessed on 10 July 2024. https://www.delcampe.net/fr/collections/.
Delcampe. « Karto86 ». Accessed on 11 May 2025. https://www.delcampe.net/en_US/collectibles/store/Karto86.
Delcampe. « Who Are We? », 11 May 2025. https://www.delcampe.net/en_GB/who-are-we.
Duranti, Luciana, et Patricia C. Franks, éd. Encyclopedia Of Archival Science. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. http://archive.org/details/encyclopedia-of-archival-science-rowman-littlefield-publishers-2015.
Edwards, Elizabeth. Photographs and the Practice of History: A Short Primer. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.
Fructus, Emmanuelle. « Désordres dans la photographie amateur et anonyme ». Photographica, no 8 (16 May 2024): 191‑202. https://doi.org/10.4000/11pba.
Fuchs, Christian. « Karl Marx in the Age of Big Data Capitalism ». In Digital Objects, Digital Subjects, edited by Christian Fuchs et David Chandler, 53‑72. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data. University of Westminster Press, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvckq9qb.6.
« General Terms and Conditions of Use of the Delcampe Websites Charter (www.delcampe.net) », 2024. https://www.delcampe.net/pdf/charters/charter_en_US.pdf.
Müller, Katja. « Theorizing Digital Archives: Power, Access and New Order ». In Digital Archives and Collections, 11: 25‑55. Creating Online Access to Cultural Heritage. Berghahn Books, 2021. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv29sfzfx.7.
Sekula, Allan. « The Body and the Archive ». October 39 (1986): 3‑64. https://doi.org/10.2307/778312.
Sekula, Allan. « The Traffic in Photographs ». Art Journal 41, no 1 (1981): 15‑25. https://doi.org/10.2307/776511.
[1] Geoffrey Batchen, « Vernacular Photographies », History of Photography 24, no 3 (September 2000): 262‑71, https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2000.10443418.
[2] Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 87.
[3] Batchen, 118‑26.
[4] Allan Sekula, « The Body and the Archive », October 39 (1986): 10, https://doi.org/10.2307/778312.
[5] Sekula, 10.
[6] « General Terms and Conditions of Use of the Delcampe Websites Charter (www.delcampe.net) », 2024, 8, https://www.delcampe.net/pdf/charters/charter_en_US.pdf.
[7] « Delcampe | Acheter et vendre des objets de collection », Delcampe, accessed on 10 July 2024, https://www.delcampe.net/fr/collections/.
[8] « Who Are We? », Delcampe, 11 May 2025, https://www.delcampe.net/en_GB/who-are-we.
[9] Luciana Duranti et Patricia C. Franks, éd., Encyclopedia Of Archival Science (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015), 33, http://archive.org/details/encyclopedia-of-archival-science-rowman-littlefield-publishers-2015.
[10] Katja Müller, « Theorizing Digital Archives: Power, Access and New Order », in Digital Archives and Collections, vol. 11, Creating Online Access to Cultural Heritage (Berghahn Books, 2021), 25‑55, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv29sfzfx.7.
[11] Christian Fuchs, « Karl Marx in the Age of Big Data Capitalism », in Digital Objects, Digital Subjects, éd. par Christian Fuchs et David Chandler, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data (University of Westminster Press, 2019), 53‑72, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvckq9qb.6.
[12] Allan Sekula, « The Traffic in Photographs », Art Journal 41, no 1 (1981): 15‑25, https://doi.org/10.2307/776511.
[13] « Karto86 », Delcampe, accessed on 11 May 2025, https://www.delcampe.net/en_US/collectibles/store/Karto86.
[14] Emmanuelle Fructus, « Désordres dans la photographie amateur et anonyme », Photographica, no 8 (16 May 2024): 191‑202, https://doi.org/10.4000/11pba.
[15] Fructus, « Désordres dans la photographie amateur et anonyme ». My translation from: « Archives de quoi ? […] et appartenant à qui ? archives pour quoi ? »
[16] Conversation between the author and Emmanuelle Fructus in her studio on 28 June 2024.
[17] Elizabeth Edwards, Photographs and the Practice of History: A Short Primer (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), xi.
How to cite
Lauren, Lauren. "Shadow Archives: The Digital Traffic in Vernacular Photographs on the Auction Website Delcampe." Archivo Photofile, 16 June 2025. https://www.archivoplatform.com/post/essay-pankin-25. DOI 10.5281/zenodo.15674486
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