January 16, 2019
Discoveries in Photoarchive
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Mind the Antlers
The story of the "overzealous" restoration of a family portrait as related by the painting's current owner illustrates how crucial this type of personal information is to the documentation of the Photoarchive.
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Visualizing the Spanish Artists Dictionary
Photoarchive intern Alexandra Provo and her collaborator Diana Sapanaro discuss their projects to use visualization technologies and Python scripts to make one of the Library's research tools, Spanish Artists from the Fourth to the Twentieth Century: A Critical Dictionary, accessible to the public in new ways.
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Intimate Sketches of New York
One of the most popular series completed by the American illustrator Vernon Howe Bailey was his "Intimate Sketches of New York," which records the city during a period of dramatic growth — and change.
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The Lost Bride
Lost or destroyed paintings are perhaps the most painful reminder of the importance of photoarchives and similar repositories of images and accompanying metadata. An unfortunate example is this portrait of a young bride.
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Analog Facial Recognition
Beginning in 1925, Helen Clay Frick hired the Italian photographers Mario Sansoni and Oreste Nesti to traverse Italy documenting in situ sculptures, paintings, and frescoes that other firms such as Anderson, Alinari, and Brogi had neglected to capture. On several occasions, staff of the Frick Art Reference Library requested photography of objects specifically related to works in The Frick Collection. See more at frick.org/blogs/photoarchive/analog_facial_recognition
