loupeThe study
Papers for archivists, researchers, and anyone who wants the long version.
What the study is
An artist’s archive is where visitors search the work. The Study stands behind them all: what loupe has decided, and the evidence that informed those decisions. If there is something we are not sure of, we will say that here as well.
For artists
Plain papers on keeping your own work: what to keep, how to make it, what to write down.
What to keep
Which file is authoritative, what to do to it, and where it should live. Every photograph an artist cares about ends up as several files, and only one of them is the work. The paper says which one, how to make it, how to save it, and what to write down, with the archives' own guidelines quoted where they agree and where they do not.
Your work's metadata
What loupe reads from your files, what it keeps, and what it writes into every picture that leaves loupe. Metadata is the information stored with the photo; for a photograph of a work, it holds two sets of facts, the work's and the photograph's. loupe lets you choose which parts of that information your visitors get to see.
Your camera raw files
What loupe does with a raw file, from the moment you upload it to the moment someone sees it. What loupe reads from it, which picture it shows and why, when it develops the raw itself and how, what it keeps and hands back, and what it will never do, with how other kinds of tools treat raw files and what we have not settled.
For archivists and researchers
Worked examples and records in the vocabularies institutions already use, with the files beside them.
One photograph, and its provenance
One born-digital photograph with every file from the camera to the finished picture, and its history recorded twice: in the vocabulary archives already use, and in the newer signed form that travels inside the file. The photographer's finishing is carried a third way as well, as an open color transform any program can apply, with how close it comes measured and written down. Made to accompany a comment on a US federal guideline for recording what was done to a picture, it makes one point: a photographer's finishing of their own capture is the making of the work, not a modification of it.
Measurements and method
How the numbers in the papers were made, so they can be made again.
The first paper on this shelf will be the one behind the provenance example: how a finished look is measured from a raw file and its finished picture, and what such a measurement can and cannot carry.
loupe · The study · September 2026