The archive

What do you consider to be your archive?

As a photographer with a peripatetic practice, currently living in Shanghai, storage is a particular issue for Hingley. Her archive is mainly exhibition prints and the image files stored on her computer, as well as four hard drives kept in different locations, says Hingley, plus the collection of religious objects associated with the Under Gods exhibition.

The majority of Hingley's work is in digital form and is stored on a hard drive, with a back-up hard drives off-site. Current projects she is working on are held on her computer and one other hard drive. Once edited, all TIFs and JPEGs are saved on three portable hard drives. Projects she has yet to work on are stored on the main hard drive, which is regularly synchronized with the back-up at her parents’ house. “I have moved address every year since I began working as a photographer which means I am endlessly having storage issues and it makes me quite nervous,” says Hingley.

Very large prints of the With Others series on the Emmaus communities are stored at her aunt’s house, degree work is in her parents’ loft. All her negatives are filed and stored in archival boxes at Hingley’s parents' home in the UK.

All email correspondence is kept on her computer and all papers such as signed consent forms are scanned and saved as PDFs on the hard drive (though she hasn’t yet disposed of the paper documents). This is a pragmatic decision as Hingley is peripatetic in her practice and currently lives in Shanghai.

Image: Prix Virginia exhibition, Paris, 2012