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Dan Johnston is in charge of the actual photographic process. His office on campus at the Moffitt Library has the slightly cramped ambience of a sub-basement fallout shelter, despite being located on the second floor. Johnston cracks open one of a mountain of old scrapbooks on a cart. "These all are the Jesse Cook collection. He was San Francisco's police chief earlier in this century. These were his personal albums." Johnston randomly opens columnar pages that look suspiciously like a ledger book and unfolds a yellowed newspaper clipping showing a lineup of beefy cops, stiffly posed. "Anything Cook found interesting, he'd glue into his scrapbooks. Among other things, he got copies of a lot of the pictures that the police photographers took at crime scenes. We're leaving out the really gory ones -- the ones with scissors still sticking out of the throat, that sort of thing." Still, there are some biting images going into the collection, like the study of opium addicts in San Francisco's Chinatown, each reclining hop fiend framed neatly within a circular photo shape (which was one of the limitations and charms of the earliest Kodak cameras). The final choice of photos is left to a librarian in the pictorial collection, James Eason. "He's probably got the hardest job of all of us," says Johnston, "unless it's Campbell Crabtree, who has to program the search functions. When you're talking about a collection this large, it's a big deal." Things are going slowly today, Johnston says. Taking shots from scrapbooks takes a lot of time because each page has to be leveled with cardboard wedges. Minimizing folds, creases and waves in the paper are a challenge met by careful lighting and a sheet of glass to flatten everything down. The Heritage Project's archives are full of "black and white" photos, but few of them are exactly that. Johnston's photographers attempt to re-create the photo as close to reality as possible. That means using Ektachrome color film so that every gradation of sepia and even every tear, mark and water stain shows up exactly as is. Photos are not retouched, cropped or electronically diddled with (except some occasional subtle electronic corrections done within the computer when something was accidentally altered in processing). In fact, even over- or under-exposures that could easily be corrected are not. "We don't try to pretty things up. There are a couple of good reasons for this. For one, this is meant to be a catalog of the library's collection as it is. For another, retouching requires a great deal of time and judgment," says Johnston, adding with a grin, "and we don't have a lot of either one of those." The slides get scanned onto Kodak photo CDs, which can hold over 100 photos at very high resolution, before being put on the Web page. The CDs store a semi-permanent archival copy that is at higher definition than what appears on the Web site. "Photo CDs are a very popular medium, and they've been around since 1990," says Johnston. "We figure we have long enough that if any problems begin showing up, they'll happen to other people first and give us and Kodak at least seven years to come up with a fix, if necessary. Generally, though, most people in the industry accept that these writeable CDs will last at least 50 years. So the good news is that 50 years should be long enough until the images are transferred to some new and better medium." "The really good news," he chuckles, "is that at least they should last until long after I retire." Other collections on the Web page cover themes like gold mining, farming, industry, high school classes, wineries, architecture, Chinatown and early moviemaking. One favorite "book" on the Web is "Snapshooting Around the Golden Gate International Exhibition, 1939" -- the exhibition celebrating the completion of the Golden Gate and Bay bridges -- beautifully photographed and whimsically captioned by Oakland resident P.T. Glass. Johnston's favorites are a little darker. "Did you see the plague rats? They're great," he says, pulling up the menu and finding a family shot of a mama plague rat with a bevy of cute little baby plague rats, followed by a photo labeled "Rats Nailed to Boards, Ready for Skinning." "The San Quentin photos are good too. These and the Jesse Cook collection show a wide range of society from the bottom -- unlike, for example, the James D. Phelan collection, which is essentially a bunch of rich and famous people patting each other on the back." Whether you are browsing for richly detailed images from celebrated photographers like Carleton Watkins and Eadward Muybridge, doing serious research, looking for images to round out an eighth-grade history report or randomly acting as a tourist in another era, the site is one of those places on the Internet where you can accidentally spend a few hours serendipitously following your whimsy. "The small pieces of the collection I've seen are amazing," says Nick Cuccia, reviewing the site in the Photoforum Digest, an e-mail list for historic-photo professionals. "I can see that this site is going to be a real time sink."
Jack Mingo is an author and freelance writer living in Alameda, Calif. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and other publications. |
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