The Harrogate Fine Art Collection at the Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate, holds works by photographic pioneers Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) and Roger Fenton (1819-1869). The collection is wide-ranging and functions as a rich photographic archive, revealing social, political, landscape, and natural history narratives from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The photographs themselves embody the technical histories of early photographic processes, carrying traces of analogue materials, methodologies, and modes of seeing.

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For Landmarks (2016), selections were made primarily from anonymous stereoscopic views of familiar northern landscapes and still-life natural history arrangements. While the identities of many photographers remain unknown, these images offer valuable insights into the visual culture of their time. Produced by amateur practitioners, commercial studios, travelling photographers, and local enthusiasts, such photographs collectively shaped popular understandings of landscape, leisure, nature, and regional identity.

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The anonymity of the makers becomes an important aspect of the work. Detached from a singular authorship, the images operate as fragments of a broader collective memory, reflecting how photography has historically been used to document, categorise, possess, and remember the world. The stereoscopic views, once designed to create an immersive experience for Victorian audiences, transformed familiar sites into spectacles of wonder and discovery, while the natural history studies reveal contemporary interests in collecting, classifying, and preserving the natural world.

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Landmarks reconsiders these archival photographs as both historical documents and contemporary artefacts. Through processes of selection, reproduction, and reinterpretation, the work explores how meanings shift over time and how photographic archives continue to shape relationships to place, history, and memory. By foregrounding images made by largely unknown photographers, the project acknowledges the overlooked contributions of countless practitioners whose work has quietly informed our understanding of landscape and cultural heritage. The resulting series creates a dialogue between past and present, examining how photographs endure as markers of collective experience and how the archive itself becomes a site of renewed interpretation.