Welcome to The Collection
Why start a blog now? Why not next week? Why not 25 years ago, in 1996, when my parents died, only a few weeks apart. Trish sometimes referred to them as a matched set of salt and pepper shakers, and that felt right. It didn’t seem surprising that they would die so close together since they lived for their 56 years of marriage as a single entity.
My dad didn’t talk much; his nickname was “Silent Si.” He had his own reasons, but it was not that unusual for the times - one rarely had what we would now consider “deep” conversations with men of his age and cohort, especially regarding feelings of any kind. Still, in one of the few we ever had, the topic of their photographs came up. I think that at 88 he felt overwhelmed by the vastness of that landscape.
He was right. I eventually had to rent a climate-controlled storage unit for their negatives, prints, darkroom equipment and my father’s art. It would have been a serious challenge to whip it into shape for … what? That wasn’t clear to either of us, nor did we discuss it further, since we would not have had an answer.
I knew that my folks were photographers and that they were good ones, based on the exhibitions where their prints were shown. I watched them develop, enlarge and print images and saw the brown 16x20 fiber-board cases go out and come back with prize stickers on the back of the prints. I don’t think that world exists any more and if it does, it is probably digital.
The same seems to be true - perhaps - for camera clubs, which by the 1980’s had all but disappeared. For many decades before that, however, they were the primary medium through which photographers shared their work with others interested in “pictorial photography.” They admired and critiqued each other’s work and learned how to improve their craft.
I’ve been too busy with my life over the past two and a half decades to dig into the collection. I feel that I’ve done my duty by conserving it properly. At this point the answer to the question Si and I grappled with is to find a caring home for it. It is an intact, coherent body of work of two excellent photographers of a certain era. It is well documented and has been properly cared for. Perhaps a museum or university or institution would be appropriate, but first I need to find out just what I have to offer and document it.
I have been working with an intern from the Tufts SMFA program, Adrian Wong, to do just that. Fortunately, Si and Rhyna were meticulous about numbering each image and derivative print, writing down exposure and location details, and tracking where each picture was exhibited. It has been rewarding to have digitized 24,000 images, but intimidating to know that there are more to go. We’ve begun outreach to institutions and galleries, developed a workplan for moving forward, added another intern this semester (Koloris Wu), and created this website.
We hope you will find it interesting to follow our progress and see how we address the challenges that arise. Most of all, I hope you will find it pleasing to see some of Si and Rhyna’s work and to know more about the folks that created it. They were humble people, but dedicated to their art and they played a small, but important role in the early days of modern photography.
Enjoy!
— Gary Goldsmith
