As part of Disability History Month 2023 I gave a talk at the Norfolk Heritage Centre. I spoke about some of the photographs I encountered in their archive, including this one of Dick Butters, a cow keeper from Thetford. It’s rare to see non-medical photographs of disabled people from this time, but there must be thousands more images like this stored in photographic archives across the U.K.

I called the talk In any Box on any Shelf, as it became clear early on in my research journey that images of disabled subjects were scattered throughout the archive. I was lucky that Norfolk Museums Service had additional written material about Dick, but my research always begins with the photographs: how they were made, presented and archived, and what they might reveal to us now about alternative histories of disability.