Let’s take an example. It is entirely made up: Jeanne Valory (1928–2011), a photographer of the Loire estuary, left her estate some forty boxes of negatives, a few hundred prints, contact sheets annotated in pencil, and a hard drive of scans made in the 2000s.
A gallery asks the family how many works the collection holds. The hard drive answers “14,000 files”. That is not an answer. Among those files are scans of the same negative at two resolutions, crops, installation views, photographs of prints. And some known works, published in a book in 1981, no longer have any file at all: the print was sold, the negative is lost.
Answering takes a catalogue raisonné. This article, the first in a series of four, explains what it is, why the work is not the file, why its number must never change, and how to tell a complete record.
A documented census of a body of work
A catalogue raisonné lists every work by an author, as completely as possible, each under a number that lets it be cited, together with what is known about it: who made it and on what evidence, which copies exist, whose hands it has passed through, where it has been shown, where it has been reproduced.
The key word is raisonné: reasoned. An inventory says “here is what we have”. A catalogue raisonné says “here is what exists, or has existed, and here is why we think so”. It also lists what nobody holds any more: the work sold in 1975 and never seen again, the one that was destroyed, the one known only from a reproduction.
The tradition comes from painting and printmaking, where the catalogue raisonné is a reference for historians, museums, auction houses and experts. Photography adds a difficulty of its own: the same image can exist in many copies, printed at different dates, by different hands, on different papers. That is what forces us to tell apart three things that are often confused.
Work, print, file: three levels
The work is the citable unit of the catalogue. It is the image as its author made and acknowledged it: “Grues au crépuscule, Saint-Nazaire”, to stay with our fictional example. It is described, attributed, dated, and its history is followed.
The print is a physical object: a specific sheet of paper, with its actual dimensions, its process, its signature or stamp, the inscriptions on its back, its condition. It is what a gallery sells, what an insurer measures, what a museum hangs. A work may have a single print, a numbered edition, or prints made thirty years apart. The second article in the series is about them.
The file is a digital representation: the scan of a negative or of a print, a retouched master, a web derivative, a photograph of an installation. It is a document about the work, not the work itself.
Why the work is not the file
It is tempting to treat a file as a work: the files are right there, the work is an abstraction. But the two never quite match:
- a work can have several files: scanned negative, scan of the vintage print, master, derivative, exhibition view. Counting files means counting copies;
- a work can have no file at all: lost, destroyed, known only through a publication. It still belongs in the catalogue, or the census lies by omission;
- a file changes, the work does not: a new scan, a corrected crop, metadata written into the file. The file becomes a different file; the work stays the same;
- a file never becomes a work on its own: that is a cataloguing decision, made by someone, for a reason.
There is an in-between case: two states of the same exposure, say a tight crop and a wide one, both printed and signed by the author. A catalogue raisonné often treats them as two variants of one work, labelled A and B, rather than as two unrelated works.
Among all the files of a work, one alone serves as the reference image: the one shown in the record, printed in a portfolio, and that a certificate will point to. Choosing it is already an act of cataloguing.
The work number: a promise you cannot take back
Each work receives a catalogue number. It looks trivial. Yet it is the most durable part of the catalogue, because it leaves the catalogue: it is quoted in exhibition catalogues, insurance schedules, loan agreements, articles. It is sometimes pencilled on the back of a print. It will appear on a certificate.
Hence three rules that any serious catalogue raisonné follows:
- A number is never reassigned. If a work is deleted (a duplicate, a wrong attribution), its number stays reserved. Otherwise a citation made in 2026 would point, in 2035, to another image, with nothing to show it.
- Skipped numbers are not filled in. A gap in the numbering is a fact of the catalogue, not a mistake to fix.
- The number of a published work no longer changes. You may withdraw it from the public catalogue if you have doubts about it; it remains citable under its number.
The format matters less than its stability. A prefix (the author’s initials), sometimes a year, a sequence number: JV-0154, or JV-2026-000154. Mind what that year means: in many systems it is the year the work entered the catalogue, not the year it was taken. Better to know before reading the number as a date. And set the format before the first work: a body of work should have only one citation format.
One last, often overlooked point: the work number says nothing about the quality of the record. A work can carry a number from the day it is created, as a draft, and be published only years later, once enough is known.
What makes a record complete
A catalogue raisonné is never finished. But a record (the entry for one work) can be more or less complete, and it helps to know what it lacks. Here is what is usually expected, from the most important to the least:
- a title, and any other titles: a work published under two titles must be findable under both;
- an attribution, with its argument: who made it, with what certainty (certain, attributed, studio of, disputed…), on what evidence. An attribution without an argument is only an opinion. “Anonymous” is an attribution in its own right: it is a state of knowledge, not an empty field;
- a date as it will be published, and its precision. “Circa 1974, possibly 1975” is an honest date; “1974” would be a wrong one. Sort bounds (1974 to 1975) are kept alongside, for ordering, and are not printed;
- technique and support: gelatin silver print, carbon print, pigment inkjet print, on which paper;
- a reference image, or a note that the work is lost, destroyed or unlocated;
- a description good enough to recognise the work without seeing it;
- at least one print, described;
- provenance, exhibition history and bibliography, even partial.
These criteria do not weigh the same: a record without a title or attribution cannot be published, one without a bibliography can. So you can measure a completeness, and set a threshold below which a work stays a draft. The point is not the figure itself but the question it puts to each record: what is the next thing to look for?
Statuses rather than a switch
Between “in progress” and “published” there are steps. A catalogue kept by several people (the author, an heir, a researcher, a gallery) benefits from naming them: draft, in review, validated, published, and withdrawn for a work that is no longer published but remains citable. Each transition is a decision: you do not publish a record nobody has reviewed.
Why a photographer needs one, not just their estate
The catalogue raisonné is usually thought of as posthumous work, carried out by heirs or historians. Often it is, and often too late: the person who knew which lab printed a given edition, how many artist’s proofs were signed, who received a given print as a gift, is no longer there to say.
A working photographer has good reasons to keep one:
- to answer galleries and collectors: which prints exist, which are available, under which number;
- for institutions: a museum acquiring or showing a work asks for a precise record, sometimes in a format it can import (the subject of the third article);
- to avoid ambiguity: two prints of the same image, made twenty years apart, are not the same object. Saying so when they are made costs little; reconstructing it later costs a lot;
- to pass it on: a body of work that comes with a catalogue raisonné can be handed down, studied and defended. A hard drive of 14,000 files, much less so.
What we are building
Obscura Catalog, the macOS app we are preparing, is built on these principles: the work is distinct from the file, and a file becomes a work only when someone decides it should; each work receives a catalogue number that is never reassigned; the record says what it contains and what it lacks; a work goes through statuses before it is published. Around the work, the catalogue links agents (people and organisations), attributions, prints, exhibitions, publications and provenance.
The terms used here are defined in the glossary. The page The catalogue raisonné presents the whole, and the features page the rest of the app.
In short
- A catalogue raisonné lists all the works of an author, documented and numbered, including those nobody holds any more.
- Work, print and file are three distinct levels: the work is citable, the print is an object, the file is a document.
- A work’s number is never reassigned, and no longer changes once the work is published: it is cited outside the catalogue.
- A complete record has a title, an argued attribution, an honest date, a technique, a reference image, a description, and the work’s history: prints, provenance, exhibitions, publications.
- Starting during one’s lifetime costs less than reconstructing afterwards.
Next article in the series: Prints, editions, artist’s proofs: documenting what really exists