Not Just Images: Western Australian Photographs in CIDOC CRM

Photographs provide an important test of the applicability of CIDOC CRM in the cultural heritage sector. When using CIDOC CRM as a tool to bring disparate documentation within a single computational environment, we rely upon the premise that there is a common conceptualisation of the objects being documented that exists across the cultural heritage sector. The photograph however is regarded and documented differently at a conceptual level in different types of cultural heritage institutions: for instance, as a single work, as one of a series, as a document, as the item it depicts, or as an object in its own right. Can CIDOC CRM capture and collectively model what has been widely described as a polysemic medium? I will present mappings produced from the documentation of photograph collections of Western Australian material from the Museum, Art, and Library sectors in the context of the institutional and historical conceptualisations of photography. In doing so I will highlight the flexibility required to map into CIDOC CRM these types of collection items which are conceptually contentious, and will offer a template for collections working towards the computational representation of their photograph collection data.