Hello statewide friends! This month, we have a post from one of our illustrious staff photographers. Rose Ingerman is our Digital Imaging Production Assistant, and photographs the majority of statewide materials that come into the BPL through the program. Seeing as she has seen as much of the materials that come through our doors as anyone, we thought it might be fun to ask Rose for some thoughts on her favorite materials in DigitalCommonwealth.org…. 

Through my work photographing collections for the Boston Public Library and our statewide partners I have had the opportunity to handle a wide variety of different types of materials. From photographic prints to letters, slides, ephemera, and once even a wool cap, we get to see all kinds of objects under our cameras. I am genuinely excited for and curious about every collection that passes through our studios, but I have to admit there is a material that I get especially excited about having the opportunity to shoot: Glass plate negatives. 

Negatives in general are always exciting because it isn’t always easy to discern the image when looking at the physical item. The work I do photographing the negative and inverting the image to a positive feels a little bit like magic, and it also mirrors the work that the original photographer would’ve been doing in the darkroom; Instead of placing the negative in an enlarger, exposing the paper and running it through the chemical process, I’m placing the negative on a light table, photographing it, and inverting the image using our image capture software.  Even more than the interesting parallels, the thing that I love most about working with negatives is the immediacy: that film or plate was present with whatever the subject was, capturing not only an image, but a moment.  

I specifically love working with glass plate negatives mainly because they are beautiful! They have a luminosity that is hard to articulate, and a collection that I think perfectly exemplifies this is the Frank Cousins Glass Plate Negative Collection from the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum. This is a collection I photographed about 6 years ago, and it’s one I still think about because of how beautiful the images are.  It mostly consists of interior and exterior shots of historic buildings in Salem, though other cities and subject matter are featured as well.  

I know I talked a lot about how much fun I have working with the materials themselves, but honestly the most rewarding part of my job is when other people discover and use the collections that we digitize. It’s such a privilege to be able to make archival collections from institutions all over Massachusetts more accessible through digitization and I, as always, am looking forward to seeing the new things that come our way!