Keywords

• Institutions preserving photographs contain materials that are invisible to historical narratives
• to which we do not usually pay attention. But if we were willing to change our point of view and consider the materiality of the photographic objects and their sedimentation contexts as important
• we would discover that it is possible to integrate the visual meanings traditionally attributed to photographs with other data useful to understand them. If we consider photographs as material objects to which things happen during their institutional life
• we are allowed to trace their social biography. This is the case of Box 54
• a miscellaneous box of photographs studied for the relations it has had over time with the practical activities of bureaucratic management
• with the curatorial and critical intentions that have shaped its current form of presentation together with various interpretative acts. The authors thereby establish a methodological approach to identify what Foucault defined as the «rules of formation»
• useful for understanding the conditions of their realization