I'm not sure if I posed the question in the right way, but maybe explaining my situation might clear up the question. I've been helping my dad research a relative of mine who was an architect in the late 1800s in the United States. There are some sources out there on him, mainly just historical records of buildings that note him as the architect. But in one historical book on the "Tampa Bay Hotel", they have one single photo of a group of men, one of whom in the book is noted as being my relative. It's also noted that this is the only known photo of him.
The print of the photo is too small to make out any detail of anyone's faces, so I was trying to search for the original. I reached out to the author, who responded that she had received permission to use the photo for her book. She credited the source to a Daughters of the Revolution chapter who hold some kind of archive, but from there, nothing. No response from the chapter in the only form I've found to be able to contact them. In image and name search online, I have found 2 other postings of the same photo, but also of bad scan quality.
So in a dead-end such as this, where would an actual historian turn for their research? What kind of sources would they use? And, what is the best process for tracking down specific supporting items such as photos?
Also, I do realize that even finding the original photo, or side might not reveal anything more than the scans given by the age of the photo, but I hoping that it might.
You've already done many of the things historians do when they hit these kinds of roadblocks.
Footnotes and citations, much as they may occasionally irritate general readers, are important to our work for exactly this reason. A later historian--or someone simply with an interest--may want to read documents, find photographs, or access resources that we mention in our work. We expect to be able to do the same when we read work. When the provenance of a piece of information (including photographs) is not clear, we contact the author and hope they can help us trace where it came from.
Sometimes that does lead to a dead end: the original source can no longer be found or doesn't know what happened to the document or photo or has no record of having had it. At that point, you have to back up a bit and ask yourself how the original source might have come by the information you're seeking. In this case, for example, why would a DAR chapter have a photo of a male architect in a group? Possibly because they were given a family archive, possibly because it was in a file of news clippings. You try some other ways to contact that chapter--you talk to the DAR's overall Florida organization or even the national organization, who may have more up-to-date ways to reach the group you need to contact. If you have the time and resources, you actually go to the address listed or go to Tampa Bay to see if there are other local archives.
Sometimes you back up and try a completely different strategy. You think about the one piece of tempting evidence you've found and what it tells you about other places you might find traces of the person or event you're interested in, ones that aren't obvious. You ask yourself if the profession you're thinking about was called something else, or if its members didn't yet have a strong sense of distinctive professional identity and if so, they might have had other kinds of associational lives. You read local newspapers in sequence when you know the person you're tracing was involved in a building or design project. It's tedious but you sometimes find the needle in a haystack. You try to reconstruct why the photo you are looking for was taken and by whom--you make guesses if you have no way to tell.
And sometimes you just have to call it: what you're looking for doesn't exist any longer or can't be found and you'll just have to make of it what you can. I once found the name of a man I was researching in the employee list of a mine at a time when he would have been about 15 years old. It was a plausible place for him to have been, but no other biographical material about him confirms that he worked there. It could be important if that was his first working experience--it would explain some things--but the best I can say in what I write is that it was possible. Someone else someday may come along and say "no, that can't be, because here's another piece of information that contradicts that" or they may all simply say, "we can't be sure, but it sounds right".
The funny thing about historical research is that sometimes at the moment where you're most frustrated or most certain you've hit a dead end, you can switch tracks and work on something else and suddenly come across an unexpected source of information that either leads you right back to what you were looking for before or that changes your understanding completely of the missing information that you wanted.
Hi! I'm currently studying history at a Dutch university so I might be able to awnser a few of your questions.
There are two main types of research material, literature and sources. Literature is previous historical research that is published and can be found in historical magazines and in (university) libraries. When you are looking for literature about a certain subject that isn't so specific that nobody has ever written about it you can use the snowball method to look for more literature once you've found one of the most recent books about the subject. From there you look in their bibliography and then search for the books in there, and repeat this process untill you've snowballed as many books about the subject as you require.
Then there are sources, sources can be everything! From the journal of a ship to a sketch by a certain architect you are researching. The main place to find these kinds of research materials is in archives. How do you know in which archive to look? When looking for something specific you have seen in literature you can look in the annotation, a good historian will annotate in such a way that everyone can find their sources. If you're not sure what you're looking for yet you can find catalogues of databases on the websites of most universities. The university i'm studying at has this website for example.
Now back to your actual question. When you're at a dead-end, what do you do? In my three years at university I've found that newspapers are the easiest to acces and contain the most information of all types of sources. Most newspapers, even local, are available online these days. While not all will be searchable, it is quite easy to skim through them in a fast manner. If you have an approximate date for the fotograph you can look in the papers for the two weeks surrounding that date. It could even be the case that the photograph was originally used for the newspaper, and in that case the quality might not improve with the original in your hands but you will be able to find some more information on your mystery architect.
The other answers are already touching on the subject general, but to add one thing concerning your specific situation:
If you know that there is (or might be) something lying around in the possession of another person or institution, but the person won't talk to you (or talk to you and be unwilling to give you access), then...you are out of luck.
There are endless sources still lying around in family storerooms and the like that no historian ever has seen, but we simply cannot access them until the people are willing to give us access. Its not like there is some universal right for all of humankind to have access to remnants of the past.
Now it might be entirely possible that they didn't even get around to process your request yet - but equally possible they just ignored it deliberately, because you're not even a "professional" (i.e., affiliated with an educational or research institution) approaching them, and its possibly just too much of a hassle to deal with such requests by private persons.
Not much you can do here, apart from writing again once you waited long enough or searching for alternate means of contact. Maybe calling directly, if that's an option? Since what else could you do? Driving there and knocking at the door, and if no one opens, just break the door down? (I wouldn't consider this an option *laughs*)