Workshop: The First Archive We Knew

A beginner-friendly workshop designed to introduce you to the fundamentals of preserving personal photographs. Led by Cassia Clarke.

Do you have a collection of family photographs and want to learn how to care for, handle, and preserve the memories they hold?

This workshop invites you to reconnect with those memories and develop skills to preserve them with intention and care. Join community archivist Cassia Clarke for a hands-on course designed to equip you with practical and mindful approaches for handling, storing, and preserving your personal photographs and ephemera at home. The session blends compassionate conservation principles with sustainable methods while reflecting on the emotional labour involved in caring for personal materials.

Through a mix of group and individual activities, you will:

• Learn how to safely handle and store delicate materials.
• Explore the emotional and cultural significance of personal archives.
• Reflect on preservation as a form of storytelling and care.

What to expect:

• Please bring up to 10 6x4 and/or 5x7 photographs from your personal archive to work with during the course.
• To support your ongoing journey into preservation, we have created a Starter Kit, which will be yours to take home. It includes all the materials you will work with in the session to continue the important work you start at The London Archives.
• Open to all, no prior photographic experience is necessary.
• This course introduces thoughtful, accessible approaches to caring for personal photographs.

Schedule:

• Arrival & Welcome: 2pm
• Introduction and Tour of TLA
• Photographic handling
• Photographic Documentation
• Social Break
• Packaging and Storage
• Self Archiving
• Collecting and Calm Down
• Workshop Ends: 5pm

About the Workshop Leader:

Cassia Clarke is an independent Community Archivist, Artist Educator and researcher. Her practice is centred around community engagement, participatory archival practices and collective learning, with the aim to democratise and domesticated archival knowledge. She deeply believes in learning as a form of liberation and joy, and in the importance of nurturing inclusive spaces where heritage is actively explored, and not simply consumed. Her work draws from lived experience and community dialogue to reshape archival practices to reflect care, criticality, and cultural responsibility. She is the author of Preserving the Familial Archive, her debut self-published publication, which extends her practice by providing accessible guidance for people engaging with archival preservation at home.