Shaping our collective memories, one photo at a time

When Meredith Reiss looks at a Carleton Watkins work, she imagines the American photographer loading up a mule with equipment and climbing hills to get to the perfect vantage point of Yosemite. She sees him prepping glass plates and carefully pouring collodion solution. In the 19th century, Watkins captured some of the finest landscape photographs of the American West. With their painstaking methods and efforts, it was as if the early greats knew that they were reaching to the minds of future generations. It’s Reiss’s job to ensure that the photos, along with tens of thousands of others, are properly stored and catalogued.

The collections manager for the Department of Photographs at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reiss honed her skills through Ryerson’s photographic preservation and collections management master’s program. She learned how photographs were created through the ages, and got hands-on experience in the university’s darkroom, an asset she says many programs are losing due to cost-cutting. “It’s really helpful to know how a photograph was made, to be able to determine what errors occurred in processing at the time, and what deterioration happened later.” Reiss decides when photos need to be passed on to a conservator, who can employ specialized techniques to repair and prevent signs of deterioration.

Photographic collections are part of what define our collective understanding of the past, and collectors and preservers play an important role in ensuring that evolves with the times. “We’re always trying to fill in the gaps,” says Reiss. Last year, for example, the Met added a collection of studio portraits of African-Americans who lived in the American South in the ’30s and ’40s, including photos of young people in graduation gowns and soldiers with their sweethearts. “They’re not photos that would have necessarily been collected 50 years ago” because they are vernacular images, not part of the traditional art history canon. The photos will be on view at The Met in late June.

In addition to collective memory, institutionally preserved photos can also be incredible gifts to individuals and their families. Alison Skyrme, a special collections librarian and instructor in the collections management program, says several former employees of Kodak Canada and their families have come to view the Kodak collection at the Ryerson University Archives and Special Collections. The collection includes photos of company events, baby showers, softball tournaments and vignettes of daily office life.

“We recently had someone come in who was researching her father for his 85th birthday party,” says Skyrme, who is also a graduate of the collections management program.  Decades after the photos were taken, it was the first time the man had recalled some of the events pictured.

Another big part of both Skyrme’s and Reiss’s work is preserving digital and new media works. Unlike print photos, which can simply be placed in acid-free paper, digital works have to be backed up on secure servers, with frequent checks performed to ensure glitches aren’t occurring, and digital files need to be updated to keep up with new software. “Increasingly, we’re recording our stories digitally,” says Skryme. “If we’re not very attentive to their preservation, they can disappear entirely.”