The catalogue raisonné

The whole body of work, described and documented.

A catalogue raisonné records, as completely as possible, an artist's body of work and documents each piece. Obscura Catalog structures it into works, agents, attributions, prints, exhibitions, publications, and provenance.

Works

The work is the unit of the catalogue: it is what you describe, attribute, and whose history you follow.

Agents and attributions

Agents are the persons and organizations linked to works. An attribution links a work to an agent.

Prints

A single work can exist as several prints: the catalogue records them, work by work.

Exhibitions and publications

The exhibitions where a work was shown and the publications where it was reproduced or cited are part of its documentation.

Provenance

Provenance traces the ownership history of a work. Together with the rest of the catalogue, it underpins what is known of its authenticity.

Fields and description rules

A work's record has seven tabs: Identification, Attribution, Prints, Provenance, Exhibitions, Publications, Files. Identification groups the identity (number, variant, title, subtitle, other titles, series, genre, work type), technique and support, the dates (the date as published, which is what prints, and sort dates with their precision), context and rights (place, condition: extant, lost, destroyed, unknown location, not traced; rights statement; confidentiality), the description, the author's statement and internal notes, never exported.

Each work gets a catalogue number when it is created, by default of the form SB-2026-000154: a prefix, the year and a sequence number, all set before the first work. A number is never reassigned, even after a deletion; the number of a published work no longer changes.

A work moves from Draft to In review, Validated, Published, Withdrawn. Publishing requires an accepted attribution in the photographer role and a completeness at least equal to the set threshold (60% by default); completeness, from 0 to 100%, counts title, attribution, date, technique and support, reference image, description, print, provenance, publication and exhibition.

The guide chapter →

The Works section of Obscura Catalog: list of numbered works with their status and completeness, and the record of a published work, Identification tab
Works

Next step

Give every work its catalogue.

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