The backstages of archives: the reverse of photographs

ABSTRACT Photographs in the archive are believed to hold significance because of the information on their obverse. This article rather focuses upon the reverse of photographic materials as a critical tool to look at the archive. To be more specific, it considers the reverse of the images of Atatürk in the collections of the Turkish Historical Society and deals with the traces there, which serve to assess the content of the images in various ways. As the traces on the reverse of these items are relative to their obverse, the article turns to Erving Goffman’s concept of ‘backstage’ in order to understand the thought-landscape of the archive when it comes to handling visual materials as records.