Highlights Archives
Saving Shattered Images
In a quiet project on the Society's fourth floor, photo archivists are resurrecting long-lost pictures of Wisconsin life. For roughly a century, most serious photographers took pictures not with flexible film but with glass plates. Craftsmen such as Andreas Larsen Dahl, H.H. Bennett, and Charles Van Schaick captured their remarkable images on sensitized glass, which they later contact printed to create positive images on paper. The Society library and archives possess more than 40,000 of these glass-plate negatives dating from the Civil War era into the 1960s. Most have never been printed on paper, and their historical information survives only as negative images on century-old, emulsion-coated sheets of glass.
Large glass plates are, of course, quite fragile, and many of them cracked and broke in their creators' hands. Others were fractured long ago during storage or transport. For several decades, Society archivists have carefully set these fragments aside as they were discovered. Today the bits and pieces are being reassembled, digitized, and brought back to life.
The work is performed by graduate students under the watchful eye of Visual Materials Curator Andy Kraushaar. Fragments such as those shown above are lightly cleaned, arranged on a flatbed scanner like pieces of a puzzle, and captured in high-resolution digital format. The digital images are skillfully edited to minimize the cracks and blemishes, then reversed from negative to positive polarity and added to the Society's online photo collection, Wisconsin Historical Images.
After scanning, the original glass fragments are carefully laid out by conservator Robin Carlson in acid-free sink mats. She fashions pieces of archival-quality cardboard into custom-sized spacers to keep the edges of broken glass from rubbing one another and causing further deterioration. Padded in an acid-free box, each glass plate negative is then retired from use. Archivist David Benjamin describes each photo and its contents in a database, images and their metadata are published online, and researchers around the world can study the rare pictures via their digital surrogates.
This project is funded by selling reproductions of historical images on the Society website, including not only photographs but also engravings, posters, maps, and broadsides. Buy one this holiday season and you'll help us continue to save and share these previously inaccessible glass plate negatives.
:: Posted November 6, 2008
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