Past Events
Translating the echoes of the originals
BAAC CONFERENCE 2022 ABSTRACT
Aap Tepper
Senior Specialist
Film Archives, The National Archives of Estonia
In her essay ‘Photographic Meaning in the Age of Digital Reproduction’, Joanna Sassoon writes about the process of digitisation: “What is produced in the process of translating a photograph from the material to digital is not an ‘echo of the original’ [after Walter Benjamin], but a mere shadow of its former being. This digital shadow obscures the carefully documented balance of power between materiality and context that is critical to the determination of photographic meaning.” When film grain is dematerialised, the photo becomes part of a new representational system, which is constructed by bits and pixels, and the physical aspects of an image are disembodied.
My proposal for BAAC 2022 looks at the processes of digitising photographic heritage from a heritage specialist viewpoint. Digitisation today is very similar to darkroom photography. The originals (negatives or prints) are translated into digital surrogates (Tiff files with adjustments). But what about the original and its provenance, how well does it translate in our databases? By using the mass digitisation project that I am in charge of as an example, I want to showcase how we as heritage professionals can better showcase the provenance of the original objects. Colored masks and signs of decay are frequent on glass plates and these things are valuable to the materiality of the original. Negatives are in their essence transparencies and we should be able to showcase it to the users. I want to demonstrate, using raw files and IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) and different viewer applications, how we can better communicate this provenance that is lost in small resolution files on our databases. These tools allow users to zoom into images and manipulate them (invert, tonal adjustments) online. This could result in a situation where the images on databases could better represent the originals and historical photographs become more accessible and educational to the public.
itising Estonian Photographic Heritage
https://blog.ra.ee/eesti-fotoparandi-massdigiteerimine/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueHbyqGFir8&t=514s
The Shadow of Materiality
https://aaptepper.com/the-shadow-of-materiality
The Second Exposure