Earlier this week the blog that I'm following this semester, Time Lightbox, posted a really interesting article about a Romanian army photographer, Costica Acsinte, who opened his own studio after World War I. According to the article, "by the time of his death in 1984, he had built an archive of epic, anthropological scope containing upwards of 5,000 glass-plate negatives and several hundred prints."
One man, Cezar Popescu, has been working to digitize and save the entire collection with no institutional or state support. There's a great video by Popescu that discusses his project, and the collection. According to Popescu, "Piece by piece I hope to add as much information as I can... but right now my main concern is to get the plates digitized. The degradation is quite rapid. Day after day, I notice another crack [in the emulsion]."
The photographs are currently in the public domain, and have been since Costica Acsinte's death.
I just thought it was a really interesting article, and it was really neat to see how the slides have been affected by time, and poor preservation conditions.
So interesting Margaret, thanks for posting this.
ReplyDeleteThis is amazing, it does not seem like he is a trained archivist, but by watching the video it looks like he is adding metadata and backing up the digital files. Hopefully he is taking precautions for long-term preservation, both digital and physical, but it's great that they are accessible via Facebook, Flickr, and that there are no copyright restrictions. He is just in time too, the degradation looks bad. It's nice to also see commenting and favoriting action on Flickr.
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