Scanning and digitising museum collections and creating websites that are accessible by the masses is an extraordinary use of the World Wide Web. There is more to objects and photos than can be captured digitally — this is their materiality: the item’s history in its own right, beyond its image content.
A photograph may be a slice of time captured as an image, but from the moment the print is developed it has a life of its own — passed between friends, glued into an album, sent to printers with reproduction instructions, or annotated with memories of the photographer. All of this information is their materiality: their meaning and their use.
Keeping this sense of the material object or photograph when it has been scanned and put onto the web is a fine balancing act.
Practical suggestions
Good description when cataloguing: are there scratches? Small markings? Faded edges?
Take multiple angles; scan the backs and fronts of photographs and images; scan whole pages that items are from.
Specific examples of these ideas can be found on the Tibet Album website. Recorded in the database relating to photographic images were the types of negatives, evidence of copying, places of reproduction and evidence of exchange. The website also gives access to the original “raw” version of the print or scan as well as an optimised version.
Examples
- Photo of Tibetans charging a battery for radio equipment — Tibet Album
- Photo of British group crossing a Tibetan river — Tibet Album
- Photography of a Northern Larim bowl — Southern Sudan Project