BookSpace Project

The Gawler Library in South Australia was photographed for the BookSpaces Project in 2023. When I first walked through the library, I couldn't quite decide what I was looking at. The building seemed to offer two different identities at once. Only later did I realise it wasn't asking me to choose between them – this is not a library trying to choose between old and new. It is a library deliberately holding both together.

https://www.frame49.photography/Gawler-Library

A BookSpace Library – University Reading Room (Australian National University, Canberra). This was a library for conversation. Its architecture was about hospitality. The room seemed to say, “stay for a while” rather than “study efficiently”. It looked like a room in a large house rather than a grand monument to knowledge and learning. This book-space was severely damaged in a storm and no longer functions as a library.

https://www.frame49.photography/University-House-Library

University House Reading Room - BookSpaces An original part of the Australian National University.

Libraries do more than hold diverse forms of knowledge; they show how those forms can coexist productively. Within the library, printed books sit alongside digital devices, librarians work in partnership with self-service technologies, historic architecture supports contemporary use, and spaces for solitary study exist alongside areas for communal activity. In this balance between preservation and innovation, libraries offer a valuable lesson in how continuity and change can strengthen one another.



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Photography and libraries — what responsibilities does a photographer have when photographing institutions that matter? Beautiful images can honour libraries, but beauty alone risks reducing them to comfort and nostalgia. The danger is that sentimentality can simplify a more urgent truth.
Libraries are grappling with interconnected questions of:
• Digital change, information literacy, misinformation, and cognitive overload
• Social inclusion, community building, and access inequalities
• Preservation of memory and creation of knowledge
A photograph should show not only that libraries are beautiful, but why they matter.


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Libraries and memory - For people working in library services, memory is not an abstract idea. It is part of the daily work of helping communities find, share and make sense of knowledge.

Libraries gather local stories, preserve records, support discovery, welcome different ways of knowing and make information available across generations. They are places where people come to learn who they are, where they have come from and what they might become. In this sense, libraries are not simply storehouses of books or data; they are active civic spaces where memory is cared for, renewed and use.

As a photographer, my challenge is to honour that work visually: to capture not only the collections and buildings, but the human service, trust and continuity that make libraries essential to community life.

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Libraries and memory — as a photographer seeking to capture the stories held within libraries, I find myself drawn to a difficult but vital question: how can an image reveal something as living and elusive as memory? Too often, libraries are described as places that simply store information. But storage is passive. It suggests shelves, catalogues and repositories — things that can be photographed plainly, almost clinically, in a documentary style. A library’s deeper work is far more active and far more human. It selects, preserves, interprets and contextualises. It makes knowledge accessible, connects generations, and returns the past to public life in ways that continue to shape the present. Memory is not locked away in a vault. It is awakened each time a student encounters a historical photograph, each time a family history is traced through fragile records, each time a child discovers a story that has travelled across decades. In this sense, libraries do not merely guard memory; they give it breath, movement and continuity.

This is why traditional library photography can fall short: it may show the architecture of knowledge, but it often misses the invisible labour through which libraries keep collective memory alive.
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Libraries and memory — In my last post, I reflected on the idea that caring for memory is one of a library’s most profound responsibilities. Yet when we turn a camera toward a library, our eye is drawn first to what can be seen: the rhythm of shelves, the weight of books, the sweep of staircases, the fall of light, the presence of readers, the glow of screens and the quiet architecture of shared spaces. Memory, by contrast, resists the lens. It lingers in traces — in stories told and retold, in experiences carried forward, and in the relationships that give a place its emotional depth.

The artistic challenge of library photography, then, is to make the unseen perceptible: to suggest memory not as an object, but as an atmosphere, a resonance, a quiet presence held within the spaces people inhabit.

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Libraries and memory – this is a central, recurring theme in my photography. National libraries preserve the collective memory of a people, while community libraries safeguard the local memories that give places their identity. These memories exist across print, audio and visual forms.

Libraries are where communities recognise themselves, understand their histories and carry those histories forward. Today, many libraries stand at the intersection of memory and innovation; both are essential. The stewardship of memory is not a secondary function of the modern library—it is one of its defining responsibilities.

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Photography and Libraries
Libraries are curated spaces that reveal what a community chooses to value, preserve and make visible. Through photography, they can be seen not only as places for books, but as cultural records of knowledge, memory and belonging.
Every library quietly communicates that:
• This knowledge matters.
• This history deserves preservation.
• This subject has legitimacy.
• This community deserves representation.

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