“When I digitized a collection of glass plate negatives taken between 1929 and 1935 for our predecessor newspaper, the Illinois State Journal, a portrait of Springfield emerged that I barely recognized. Not a portrait found in a single image, but one that was revealed by pictures taken over time of its cultural and built environment, the people walking its streets and in their daily routines, the lively public square in its role as the heart of the city, and the personality of a place that came through in the interaction of all these things.”[1]
This comment by Rich Saal, the photo editor at The State Journal-Register in Illinois, encapsulates very well the importance of newspaper photo morgues to our historical record and our collective memory. I have always loved photojournalism--and journalism generally--because it documents not just the big, world-altering events and tragedies of the day, but also the mundane, heartwarming, and quirky things that constitute our daily lives and comprise our cultural identity.
The archives and journalism professions clearly understand the value of photo morgues to researchers and the general public. Many publications have donated or sold their morgues, which typically contain millions of prints, negatives, and contact sheets, to various institutions. The Library of Congress maintains a lengthy list of links to photo morgue collections in repositories across the country and in Canada. Other newspapers are holding on to their morgues, and I think the digital curation some of them are doing hold lessons for archival institutions in terms of widening the circle of access to the photos, for using the morgues to engage with the public, and for sharing local history with the communities they serve.
The New York Times’ The Lively Morgue on the social media platform Tumblr, Alabama Media Group’s AL.com Vintage, The Miami Herald's Flashback Miami and The Chicago Tribune’s Vintage Tribune Instagram account, are great examples of the ways in which photo morgues can be used to engage readers and researchers with their publications. Mike Zajakowski, the Tribune’s picture editor, observes that the paper’s presence on Instagram, a popular photo-sharing social media platform, offers “millions of potential contact points for our work.” Each of the portals presents curated images or sets of images that provide context for the people and events depicted in the form of narratives or detailed captions, links to original news stories and follow-up stories, and interactive features for commenting on or sharing the exhibits on various social media platforms.
 |
| A screen shot of a portion of Flashback Miami's post on South Beach. Flashback Miami is a web portal where The Miami Herald is curating its photo morgue. |
The simple fact that these newspapers are digitizing and curating portions of their morgues on the internet puts them a step ahead of many archival institutions in realizing the potential of their collections, given overwhelming interest in the morgues by both users of archives and newspaper readers. For example, Vintage Tribune was launched simultaneously with Chicago Tribune Photography, which features the work of current staff photographers. Vintage Tribune, however, quickly amassed substantially more followers than the contemporary photography account. Today, Vintage Tribune has more than 50,000 followers compared with Chicago Tribune Photography’s 9,774 followers. Even a photo as mundane as snow melting off a playground slide can draw more than a thousand “likes.” Likewise, The Miami Herald has seen unique visitors to Flashback Miami increase by 70 percent over the two years of its existence, with popular posts drawing as many as 2,000 "likes."
In the same vein, Jennifer Hain Teper’s study of archival practices around newspaper photo morgues revealed that the level of patron interest in the collections “was far more than anticipated” by the institutions surveyed. Just 12 percent of respondents reported their morgues received fewer than 100 requests annually. Twenty percent reported between 100 and 500 requests annually; 19 percent reported more than 500 annual requests. Other respondents gave nonnumerical quantifications such as “most used collection,” “constant use,” “most highly used.”[2]
Given this demonstrated interest, I was surprised by another of Teper’s findings: just 16 percent of the institutions surveyed included digitization of their morgues among their processing goals.[3] This, to me, is a missed opportunity. I’m cognizant that Teper conducted her research prior to the dawn of Web 2.0 and the social media revolution that has helped to shape projects such as those of the aforementioned publications, but I could not find more recent research addressing this topic. Anecdotally, however, it does not appear that many archival institutions are approaching the curation of the photo morgues in their holdings with any sense of urgency; I visited six of the links on the Library of Congress’s Newspaper Photograph Morgues page, none of which make digitally available any substantive portions of their photo morgues, and certainly not in a way that invites user engagement. The Library of Congress, for instance, has held the Look Magazine Photograph Collection since 1971, yet no portion of the photos have been digitized. The Boston Public Library’s Boston Herald-Traveler Photo morgue is represented online with just a static page of six small images with minimal captions -- despite the fact that BPL curates many other archival photo collections on Flickr, another photo-sharing social media platform.
The four curated photo morgues I looked at each have features that archival institutions might do well to adopt should they decide to expand access to their own morgues by putting them online. Both The Lively Morgue and AL.com Vintage include images of the verso of the prints and/or images of the envelopes in which the photos were stored--giving access to information such as when and how often the photo was used, original captions, and cataloging information--enhancing their value to researchers. “These ephemeral notes create a history of the actual print, and of the publishing industry for which such circulating images were essential,” Mary Panzer observed in “The Meaning of the of the Twentieth-Century Press Archive.”[4] AL.com Vintage is also researcher-friendly, including many previously unpublished photos in its posts, likely giving readers a broader view of the story than when it was originally published. This collection of 42 photos of a devastating 1991 fire at a Huntsville textile mill likely gives much more context to the blaze and its aftermath than the paper’s original coverage did, since it is doubtful that they could have published all of these photos in the newspaper, even over the course of several days. As Martha Sandweiss points out in “Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the Digital Age,” “for the historian the greatest value of an image may lie in its relation to a larger body of work, either within an archive or within what the essayist Michael Lesy calls the ‘sequence,’ a selection of views carefully edited to create a visual narrative.”[5] In this same vein, Flashback Miami’s format also offers value to researchers in that many entries focus on a particular theme or issue (i.e. Little Havana, gay rights, meter maids) that is illustrated with an array of archival images (and accompanying text) spanning several or more years of the paper’s coverage of that theme or issue. An entry titled "Miami drug wars," for example, features photos spanning the late 1970s to 1990.
 |
| A screen shot of The Lively Morgue's guide to the marking's on the backs of photos in the New York Times' photo morgue. |
I am cognizant of the reality that newspapers may be ahead of archival institutions in digitizing and curating their photo morgues because they can provide a source of revenue through advertising sales and the sales of archival photo prints. Yet, that is not the sole motivator for all newspapers, as Amy Driscoll, assistant editor of The Miami Herald recently made clear: “Every time we do a popular post, we sell more photos,” she told Columbia Journalism Review. “We’d love to have it make money but really, it’s a public service.” Surely, archival institutions share the same mission to serve the public that the journalism profession does.
“What do we do with 5 million images?” asked Scott Walker, director of strategic initiatives at Alabama Media Group, when he introduced Flashback Miami in a recent column. “Save them, show them, and share why they matter.”
I would argue that archival institutions that hold photo morgues must get better at doing the very same thing.
___________________________
[1] Fuhrig, L.S. and Saal, R. (2012, June 28). Saving the Treasures from the Morgue [Web log]. Retrieved from http://siarchives.si.edu/blog/saving-treasures-morgue
[2] Hain Teper, J. (2004). Newspaper photo morgues—a survey of institutional holdings and practices. Library Collections, Acquisitions, & Technical Services, 28(1), p. 118.
[3] Ibid., p. 115
[4] Panzer, M. (n.d). The Meaning of the Twentieth-Century Press Archive. Aperture, (202), p. 49.
[5]Sandweiss, M. A. (2007). Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the Digital Age. The Journal of American History, (1). 193.
No comments:
Post a Comment