Architectural photographs from countries around the globe, including images from 1980s Middle East, Mongolia, and China, will soon be available via a digital archive.
The open-access photo archive will hold 35mm color images that are being preserved by UC Riverside’s Department of the History of Art in collaboration with the Society of Architectural Historians, or SAH.
The work is being done with a nearly $340,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Collections and Reference Resources. The grant, which runs through 2027, expands work on the already existing Color Film Emergency Project, or CFEP. The CFEP emerged from the realization that numerous, valuable 35mm slide collections created and amassed by 20th-century scholars, preservationists, design practitioners, and photographers of the built environment are threatened with loss, destruction, or environmental damage.
Sonja Sekely-Rowland, principal investigator and visual resources curator at UCR’s Department of the History of Art, is co-leading the effort with former curators from UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine, and in collaboration with eight other universities across the United States. For the next two years a consortium of visual resources professionals, archivists, librarians, and faculty members will process collection subsets with tasks such as assessing, organizing, cataloging, digitizing, and publishing in an online database called SAHARA.
“Our work on the CFEP began in 2016 in response to earlier research indicating SAH member collections totaling more than 1.2 million slides in need of care,” Sekely-Rowland said.
Since then, she said, funding from UCR’s Gluck Fellows Program of the Arts and a 2020-2022 NEH grant enabled the researchers to study the problem and measure their ability to have an impact. The current NEH grant will allow the team to leverage the value of legacy slide collections with an emphasis on building an open-access collection and creating student-centered, pre-professional development opportunities that invest in the next generation of humanists and digital preservationists.
The development of a consortium of information professionals to facilitate the processing of these collections using a ‘right-sized and right-tasked’ assembly-line model is key to the project — an experimental solution intended to mitigate the issues that generally impede the preservation of large-scale slide collections, Sekely-Rowland said.
Digitizing these images means documenting noteworthy contemporary and historic architecture. Photos from countries around the globe, including the United States, Italy, and Mexico, show unique cityscapes, landscapes, and spaces where everyday people live and work. Sekely-Rowland said one of the upsides of this project is documenting how places have transformed over decades.
From the NEH grant, over $135,000 is earmarked for undergraduate student internships and graduate student fellowships, which will provide valuable training and work experience while compensating students for their contributions to this effort, said Sekely-Rowland, who has been visual resources curator at UCR’s Department of the History of Art for more than a decade.
Other Color Film Emergency Project collaborators are UC Santa Barbara, UC Davis, Smith College, University of Maryland, Kent State, Vanderbilt University, Virginia Tech, and The Bristol Historical and Preservation Society.
Work is currently ongoing with new Color Film Emergency Project images added daily to SAHARA on JSTOR. To view the images, visit: www.jstor.org/site/sahara
