Saving Shattered Images

摘要

In a quiet project at the Wisconsin Historical Society, photo archivists are resurrecting long-lost photographs of Wisconsin life. For roughly a century, most serious photographers captured images not with flexible film but with glass plates. Craftsmen such as Andreas Larsen Dahl, H.H. Bennett, and Charles Van Schaick captured their remarkable images on sensitized glass, which they later contact printed to create positive images on paper. The Society library and archives possess more than 40,000 of these glass-plate negativesrndating from the Civil War era into the 1940s. Most have never been printed on paper, and their historical information survives only as negative images on century-old, emulsion-coated sheets of glass.