The content of the Photography Collection has been equally disorientating. It has exposed weaknesses in my methodology and prejudices, often leaving me baffled. The conventions of art historiography and photographic connoisseurship seem woefully inadequate in the face of sprawling collections (for instance, 20,000 photographs of steam trains in the Buckland collection and more than 1000 portraits of the people of Tumut in the R.C. Strangman collection). These are collections in which individual authorship, technical excellence and rarity of items count for little, but which have come to fascinate me nevertheless – not least because of the fact that items have an associational, more than an individual, value.

While the Photography Collection can never be fully known, it does have a highly distinctive shape. Since the 1950s, in accordance with a vision of a great national library, this one has focused on acquiring photographs as a form of source material that illustrate the life and development of a nation and its people. Not surprisingly, given this aim, photographs of people and varied forms of human activity are predominant. So are realist or documentary approaches, which are taken as an indicator of authenticity and reality. The rubric is deliberately democratic (though, of course, the exclusions are telling), so that images of well-known members of Australian society sit alongside those of ordinary, often anonymous people whose contributions have been less publicly visible.

The sheer profusion of images enables the creation of multi-layered narratives. In a New Light: Australian Photography 1850s–1930s has stories to tell about people’s lives, specific events and about more extended historical moments such as Federation and war. Official and unofficial, professional and amateur images are included as well as many previously unexhibited works; through the presentation of different viewpoints the aim is to give a finely nuanced, less triumphal view of Australia and its history.

Disorientation has its pleasures. Always, it seems, there are eruptions, photographs that cannot be contained by institutional frameworks (whether imposed by a library or by photographic history) and that break through and assert themselves. For me, one such image shows a span of a bridge on the Hawkesbury River being floated into position. It is a surprising and fantastical photograph, as much from an imaginary world as a workaday one. As a description of an event in process – ‘Floating’ is the first word of the title – it is also suggestive of history itself and of the incompleteness of any historical narration.

My research at the National Library has taken me to places I didn’t expect to go. What I hope now is that disorientation – and delight – will be part of the viewing experience of In a New Light: Australian Photography 1850s–1930s, and that the exhibition will change the ways we think about the National Library’s role in Australian visual culture, and also about photography and history.