Every artefact to the same standard
Photographer turned Archaeologist.Making images of artefacts photographed in detail and at scale.
Collections
At True Scale
Different artefacts from different places, photographed under the same light, at the same angle, against the same background — and reproduced with the scale built into the metadata.
The standard
Three things held constant, object after object, museum after museum.
01
One light source.
02
One angle to that light.
03
One white ground.
Live from the archive
The scale lives in the data, not in the picture.
Zoom in as far as you like — the scale bar stays true, because the image carries its own millimetres per pixel.
Glass bead from Sandby Borg, Kalmar County Museum. Loaded live from photarch.com.
Highlights
Teaching
Bringing the standard to your collection
I teach the method directly — to museum photographers, documentation officers and finds specialists who need their images to hold up ten years from now.
01
Lecture
There is a problem in archiving. Things are photographed by different methods and come out looking different. What would it look like if we all used the same method?
Museums · Universities · Conferences
02
Workshop
Two versions, held at your own premises: one for those who do not work as photographers but want to take good pictures, or one for photographers who want consistent results.
On site · Novice or pro version
03
One to one
Sixty minutes over video link for a single photographer or curator. Bring your images and your equipment, and we go through how it can be optimised.
Video · 60 minutes
About
I photograph archaeological objects. In 2014, during the excavation of Sandby Borg at Kalmar County Museum, I started working out a way to do it that would give the same result every time — the same light, the same angle, the same ground — so that images made years apart, in different museums, could still be compared.
That method is PHOTARCH. It has since been awarded the GFX Challenge Grant and published in The European Archaeologist.
The method and the archive live on photarch.com →
Tools · Autumn 2026
A standard is only as good as its tools.
Coming this autumn on photarch.com. Sign up to the newsletter to hear when.
PHOTARCH Desktop
A catalogue that measures. Import, calibrate, annotate and describe artefact images, then export records in the formats museum systems already accept.
photarch.com →PHOTARCH Board
A calibrated capture surface. The markers let the software derive true millimetre scale across the whole field and verify that a shot meets the standard before anything is measured.
Coming soon
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