What have come to be known as "archive/archival images" are now all-pervading in our visual environment through cinema, television, the printed press, museography and school textbooks. Any historiographic process involving images from the past and the way they are used, altered and "recycled" might lead to the theoretical assumption that all of them constitute a documentary resource that can be referred to as archives. In the fields of cinema and television —apart from the reusing of footage practised by film-makers such as Resnais, Farocki, Marker or Ophuls in a constant dialectical interplay between past and present— the concept of archive images is usually understood as a generic term, in tune with its reference to the past. Besides, there are innumerable research projects in Contemporary History, in Arts or in Information and Communication Sciences which are based on exploring these audiovisual archival resources but seemingly avoid investigating the distinctive nature of the documents in question. However, the ‘archivability’, i.e. the potential for photographic or cinematographic images to become archives, is far from intrinsic or self-evident. Even if images have not always been conceived as a repository of memories, some communication strategies seem at odds with the archival vocation of images. For instance, this is the case with live broadcasting, which produces ephemeral documents. Consequently, the objective of this anthology is to question the concept of archive images and more precisely to identify the various processes —strategies, mediations, issues and objectives— which together end up conferring images their archival status. In other words, what is it that turns an image into an archival document and and vice-versa, why do some images never achieve this status? The starting point for this epistemological reflection is that archival images does not exist per se but as a discursive element based on the promise of the satisfaction of remembrance. They constitute a trace —a mediatised firsthand testimony so to speak— which contiguously bears witness to a given moment or a past event. As a result, an archival image is to be understood as an element whose original context is both spatially and chronologically distinct from that of the moment when it is used again. It enables the viewers to cast a retrospective glance at objects or events as they are intended by the director and as they are implicitly meant to be perceived by the audience.