The Strong Room (Archive) is an exploration of the contents of a municipal strong room storing blueprints and related borough planning documents, which had remained untouched for forty-five years and have since been moved to a modern storage facility. Bakker wanted to make a record of these out-dated paper-based filing systems with their handwritten labels, stencilled signs and mysterious ways of numbering. No documents were opened or moved and the contents of the Strong Room were approached as if they were in a museum dedicated to an archival system of times past.

The Strong Room (Archive) photographs were taken at Hornsey Town Hall in 2010. Six photographs appeared in the exhibition Still at Hornsey Town Hall, November 2010. Author Nicholas Royle has written a story, ‘The Blind Man’, inspired by one of the photographs from The Strong Room which appears in literary art book Still (Negative Press London, 2012).

A book of photographs and essays by Bakker and artist Jane Wildgoose will be published autumn 2013.

Six photographs from this series won First Prize (Gold) at the London Photographic Association Still Life 5 competition, June 2011. Read

Many thanks to Ian Brinley and Steve Amor.