Andy Visser
14 March 2019. The University of Canberra’s Cultural Heritage and Conservation students will be paging through the ‘albums’ of Canberra’s past in the coming months.
Over 3,500 press photographs taken between the 1920s and the 1990s have returned to Canberra from the USA, to be added to the Canberra Museum and Gallery (CMAG) collection.
The ACT photographs were acquired by CMAG for over $20,000, and University of Canberra Faculty of Arts and Design Cultural Heritage and Conservation undergraduate students will catalogue and digitise the entire collection.
CMAG Director Shane Breynard said that there had been some concern that this important collection could be lost to Australia. The collection encompasses a broad range of images from political, social and historical events, captured by what was then Fairfax Media.
Fairfax sent a huge part of its photographic collection to the USA to be digitised in 2013, but the company undertaking the work was liquidated. After several years in limbo in an Arkansas warehouse, the photos were acquired by the Duncan Miller Gallery in California.
“This collection reflects the development of our city and community over a 70-year period. It also documents an era before the advent of online technologies, when the photographic image on the newspaper’s printed page played a more central role in shaping and reflecting the values of our community than it does today,” said Mr Breynard.
In the collection, you’ll find the work of some of Australia’s most talented photo journalists.
“The task of identifying and acknowledging each photograph’s authorship and establishing image licence agreements will be ongoing. We are currently looking at the best way of drawing on the collective memory of Canberra’s media alumni, and our wider community, to identify authorship of the images,” he said.
Minister for Arts and Cultural Events Gordon Ramsay was at a press briefing marking the arrival of the collection at CMAG.
“It is a real win for CMAG to have secured this fascinating and extensive archive of Canberra press photographs for our community. The collection provides a rich new resource to connect with and research the history of our region,” Minister Ramsay said.
For the University’s Cultural Heritage and Conservation students, this work integrated learning opportunity will provide the chance to work with a real-life heritage collection.
“Our students will catalogue, conserve and digitise the photographs using the comments, captions and date stamps detailed on the back of each photo. Each print has a fascinating story, which we hope will also be captured in the cataloguing process,” said Assistant Professor Dr Alison Wain, Discipline Lead of Cultural Heritage and Conservation at the University of Canberra.
“While this project provides an ideal learning opportunity, the benefits are further reaching. As we uncover the stories behind each photograph, we will be able to piece together some of the history that forms the fabric of Canberra society as we know it today,” said Dr Wain.
The collection will be temporarily rehoused in the University’s Bruce campus in the coming weeks, and students will start working on the collection during the Winter Semester.
The first major exhibition of photographs from the collection will take place in March 2020. CMAG also has plans for future projects that will give local artists and digital humanities researchers the opportunity to respond to the collection.
