This article explores ontological principles and their potential applications in the formal description of archival photographs. Current archival descriptive practices are reviewed and the larger question is addressed: do archivists who are engaged in describing photographs need a more formalized system of representation, or do existing encoding schemes and description standards provide enough foundation and structure? The emerging semantic Web 3.0 environment presents new challenges. Ontology, formalizations, semantic annotations, and effective machine processing are of immediate and practical importance. To begin exploring these concepts within the context of archival description, a new semantic archives model is proposed. (Contains 123 notes and 12 figures.)