Oh Snap! Photography in Collections

December 8, 2023, 12:00-1:30 p.m.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if it has no date, place, or known face? Panelists Martha Mahard (Simmons University) and Ron Polito (UMass Boston) will take us through the process of dating, identifying, and then preserving photographs in museum collections. What are the best practices for handling, cataloging, and preserving photographs? What clues can we see in photographs to help us fill in the blanks about their settings and subjects? How can we facilitate digital access to these materials? Join us for this Conversation on December 8 from 12-1:30pm!

Registration is free. REGISTER HERE!

We will do our best to monitor your questions and comments during the conversation. A recording will be publicly available in the Conversations on the Commons Archive. This Conversation will be livestreamed on our YouTube channel.

Questions? Email commons@masshistoryalliance.org

About our panelists:

Dr. Mahard retired in 2005 after 35 years in various Harvard University libraries. While at Harvard she began teaching courses in photographic archives, preservation management, and digital preservation at Simmons GSLIS. Upon her retirement she became a full-time Professor of Practice at Simmons. where she developed and taught new courses and directed the successful Cultural Heritage concentration. In 2014 she undertook an assessment of the Boston Public Library’s Print Department leading to a project to inventory the prints and photographs in the collection. When the project ended in 2019, over 135,000 works of art on paper, and over 250,000 photographic prints and negatives had been inventoried. Dr. Mahard is the co-author of Preservation Management Handbook: A 21st Century Guide for Libraries, Archives, and Museums, with Ross Harvey, and Libraries, Archives and Museums: Insights from the Field, with Michele Cloonan and Peter Botticelli.

Ron Polito has been studying early Boston and Massachusetts photographers for almost 50 years and has served several terms on the Photographic Historical Society of New England’s Board of Directors (phsne.org). A number of his articles can be found in The Daguerreian Annual and The New England Journal of Photographic History. He is also coauthor of the Directory of Massachusetts Photographers, 1839-1900, now available online. His most recent works were the 2020 monograph, T. E. Marr (& Son): Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Photographers—and More: Their Lives, Their Work, Their Photographic Techniques, and material on Simon Wing & Company in the 2022 PHSNE Journal. Now retired, he was a faculty member and administrator at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His study collections of nineteenth-century Boston and Massachusetts photographers are now part of the Boston Athenaeum’s photographic collection.

Conversations on the Commons

Where people from Massachusetts history organizations get to vent, empathize, laugh, complain, think, collaborate, brainstorm, plan, and in general be up to no good.