digital archives – PAFA Archives Blog

November 2, 2023November 16, 2023

Digital Treasure Trove: Macro Photography

Contribute by Zoe Smith, Project Museum Collections Assistant

PAFA’s collection primarily consists of paintings, works on paper, and sculpture. There are some more unique objects in the collection such as medals! PAFA has a discrete collection of medals that were sculpted for the many prizes it awarded artists during its Annual Exhibitions. These objects are much smaller in comparison to the typical objects that we have photographed for the past year. Because of their size, the photography workflow needed to change to obtain a preservation quality image. The project team added a lightbox and new Helicon Focus software. Together, these dramatically improved our capabilities and efficiency.

One of the benefits of using this workflow with the medium format camera is once the photograph is completed, you can zoom in on miniscule details, showcasing the precision and skills of the artist.

The miniatures in the collection are even smaller than the medals–smaller than a quarter! The focus stacking technique allows us to capture stunning details throughout each piece. Using this technology to photograph these objects brings a new life to each piece. This detail from a Temple Trust Fund Medal is less than 2 inches and shows an amazing rendering of PAFA.

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October 13, 2023November 16, 2023

Digital Treasure Trove: Parallel projects-John Rhoden sculptures

Contributed by Adrian Cubillas, Photographer and Digital Collection Coordinator & Zoe Smith, Project Museum Collections Assistant

PAFA’s Digital Treasure Trove project and the exhibition Determined to be: The Sculpture of John Rhoden both embody the institution’s mission by expanding the stories of American art. The grant project preserves and makes artworks more accessible to the public, while the exhibition showcases the work of an artist whose contributions challenge conventions and broaden the understanding of American art. Together, these projects reinforce our commitment to inspiring and educating through its world-class museum and school. For the Rhoden exhibition, Dr. Brittany Webb, Evelyn and Will Kaplan Curator of Twentieth Century Art.

John W. Rhoden (1916-2001). Three Headed Lion, 1954. Bronze, The John Walter Rhoden and Richanda Phillips Rhoden Collection, 2019.27.3

Zoe and I had the pleasure of attending the opening of Determined to be: The Sculpture of John Rhoden. We were lucky enough to walk through the exhibit as it was being installed with the curator Dr. Brittany Webb. Getting to see the behind-the-scenes as well as the final exhibit was a great experience that opened my eyes to how much goes into creating such a big show. We also had the amazing opportunity to make some gifs of the sculptures to promote the show! (see below). We loved being able to contribute to such a wonderful project.

June 23, 2023July 25, 2023

Student Stories: Internship Experience

Contributed by Catherine Wan, intern

I write many essays and never give much thought to the creation of the primary sources I use. The databases, articles, and journals are all simply online. However, this internship has allowed me to participate directly in the creation of a digital collection comprised of primary source documents and photographs.

The digital collection will showcase archived documents from Asian students who attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1917-1949. The work will help support PAFA’s initiative to highlight historically marginalized groups in the US. As a Chinese American, a history major, and someone interested in art, the chance to put a spotlight on these students is very important to me.

My work of scanning, formatting, and cataloging has allowed me to hold the delicate, aged papers these students once poured their hopes into. Each document describes their unique view of art and beauty, and their willingness to contribute to the field. The process of digitization ensures that this section of their life spent at PAFA will not fade nor remain hidden from the public. Instead, these newly digitized records will be preserved digitally and available freely online.

Like many general users, I didn’t realize all the necessary steps that were required to create digital collections. During my work in school, I never thought about how the digital records/collections came to be. Now, I was part of the creation process! I have the satisfaction of contributing a bit to the sea of online resources for users.

June 1, 2023July 25, 2023

Intern Spotlight – Catherine Wan

Contributed by: Hoang Tran, Director of Archives & Collections

The archives is excited to introduce this years summer intern, Catherine Wan. Catherine is currently an undergraduate student pursuing a history degree at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. For the summer internship project, she will help identify, digitize, catalog and research student academic files. Since Catherine has a strong interest in Asian history, the project will focus on students of Asian descent.

In typical PAFA fashion, Catherine jumped into the project and began working diligently. Digitizing and cataloging were the first part of the project.

Summer intern digitizing archival records.

The next phase of the project will be researching and analyzing the data to form new knowledge. This internship project contributes to the Archives’ hidden histories initiative by identifying and researching untold stories from underused areas of PAFA’s collections.

May 15, 2023May 8, 2023

Digital Treasure Trove: The Watercolors of William Trost Richards

Contributed by PAFA Museum Collections

For the last several photography sessions, the collections team has been working to photograph a unique set of small watercolor paintings by the artist William Trost Richards (1833-1905). With some slight variations, the dozens of paintings are each only a little larger than 3×5” and depict a range of beautiful wide-angle landscape scenes. The images are executed in striking detail for their scale and medium. Together, the works demonstrate a superior command of light and texture. It has been a pleasure to spend time photographing these works, and once the project is finished, they can each be viewed and enjoyed in significantly greater resolution.

William Trost Richards – Boats at Pier for Joseph Wharton’s Workmen, Conanicut Island (1883), Watercolor on paper, 3 3/16 x 5 1/8 in. (8.09625 x 13.0175 cm.). Gift of Dorrance H. Hamilton in memory of Samuel M. V. Hamilton, 2008.5.87

View more works by Richards on PAFA’s online database: https://www.pafa.org/museum/collection-artist/william-trost-richards

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April 24, 2023September 1, 2023

Digital Treasure Trove: Recto//Verso

Contributed by PAFA Museum Collections

As the collections team has been photographing some of PAFA’s framed paintings over the last several weeks, we have been able to enjoy documenting the rarely seen reverse side of these works.

In the museum world, we define recto as the front or main image and the verso as the back or reverse secondary image. So why may we want to photograph the verso?

Many paintings in our collection have a long exhibition and ownership history, and this provenance can be followed through various notes, labels, stickers, and other markings on the backs of frames. Pictured below are a few examples of works in the middle of being photographed showing the front side view (recto), followed by the corresponding reverse side of the painting (verso).

Charles Burchfield, End of the Day, 1938. Watercolor over pencil and charcoal on white paper, 28 x 48 in. Joseph E. Temple Fund, 1940.3

John Neagle, The Studious Artist, 1836. Oil on canvas. 30 1/8 x 25 1/16 in. Gift of John Frederick Lewis, 1922.1.3

Thomas Eakins, Walt Whitman, 1887. Oil on canvas, framed-shadow box: 38 1/8 x 32 1/4 x 4 in. General Fund, 1917.1

Francis Martin Drexel, Unidentified Girl, 1818. Oil on canvas, 30 1/8 x 24 1/4 in. Gift of John Frederick Lewis, 1923.8.19

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November 22, 2022November 17, 2022

Digital Treasure Trove: Post-Production Photography Editing

Contributed by PAFA Museum Collections

As part of our ongoing IMLS grant project to digitize portions of our collection, we are continuing to photograph works in our collection, but we are also beginning to process and edit some of these new images in preparation for their integration into PAFA’s databases.

If you have followed the Museum’s previous digitization initiatives, then you should know that these efforts are resource intensive. It is important that we take the time to digitally capture works of art that represent our collection as true-to-life as possible. To ensure we obtain high quality digital assets, there are two points in the digitization workflow that we focus on: 1. the moment we take the photo 2. the post-production work done after digital capture. For paintings and works on paper, this can be as simple as adjusting for the amount and color of the light, ensuring the work is square to the lens, and cropping as needed. For sculptures and 3-dimensional works, however, there are many additional variables that need addressing, including the consistency of the gradient background.

In a perfect world, the background would appear perfectly consistent across our hundreds of images, but this is not always the case. Often when shooting the images, the accuracy of the represented object must be prioritized over the look of the background, leaving artifacts in the image like folds in the paper or markings from other sculptures. To address this, we must correct these issues in post-production.

For every individual image that requires this correcting, we must break them down into three separate Photoshop layers: (1) an isolated background without the object (2) a copy of this isolated background without the object that has had a gaussian blur applied to it (3) a top layer that has only the isolated object. These layers are then carefully stitched together in such a way that the distractions of the “imperfect” background are fixed, while preserving all the necessary elements of the artwork (the object itself and its shadows) to create a clean, long-lasting, and useful image.

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November 14, 2022November 14, 2022

Digital Treasure Trove: Post-Production / Image Cropping

Contributed by PAFA Museum Collections

An important step of the digitization workflow is post-production. This step always performed after the actual digital asset is created, hence the prefix “post”. This crucial process allows us to make minor adjustments for things like light and color, as well as cropping the dimensions to match the work being viewed. Sometimes, this is as simple as matching the rectangular edge of a TIFF file to the edge of a rectangular painting. Other times, this is more complicated, with works that are not perfectly square, are three-dimensional, or have other non-standard edges. In any case, it is our job to produce and maintain these cleaned up images—what we would call “access files” for broad dissemination to our audiences. These files are unique and distinct from our archival “master files,” which do not get the ‘post-production’ treatment and are kept for posterity.

It has been a slow task, with the need to go through and edit images one by one, but we are nearly finished. In fact, the Museum is almost ready to integrate these legacy files with the newly photographed works of art taken this year.

Evelyn Statsinger (1927-2016) – *Forest Rythms,* uncropped (1983), Oil on linen, 33 x 39 in. (83.82 x 99.06 cm.), Gift of the Evelyn Statsinger Cohen Trust, © Evelyn Statsinger Cohen Trust, 2018.36.35

Evelyn Statsinger (1927-2016) – *Forest Rythms,* cropped (1983), Oil on linen, 33 x 39 in. (83.82 x 99.06 cm.), Gift of the Evelyn Statsinger Cohen Trust, © Evelyn Statsinger Cohen Trust, 2018.36.35

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October 17, 2022October 3, 2022

Digital Treasure Trove: Resolving Duplicate and Mystery Files

Contributed by PAFA Museum Collections

We are nearing the end of the weeks-long process of renaming the files in our digital collection. As mentioned before, this work was important for establishing a file naming convention/schema to improve its usefulness and accessibility both internally and externally. Doing so is one of many parts of our IMLS grant project, and so far, has included a combination of automated computer scripting via Python, and slowly combing through the filenames by hand.

With this combination of tools, we were able to confidently correct the names of approximately 16,000 files, which was a huge step forward for the project and PAFA’s collection team. During this process, however, we identified over 1,000 files that were either unnecessary duplicates or were files that did not carry with it enough information to adequately identify them in our database.

These duplicate and mystery files arose from the old folder structures that we are no longer using and have recently phased out as part of this file renaming process. Formerly, things could hide and get copied, moved, updated, and renamed without any meaningful way to ensure that outdated or unnecessary files are removed. In the process of migrating files to fewer sub-directories, which use only their unique accession number to identify them, it became immediately clear which files need review and correction, beyond a simple renaming.

Once the duplicates were double checked, they were easily discarded. The unknown files, however, we had no way of knowing how important any given file might be. Out of a commitment to thoroughness the collections team decided to work together to identify several hundred of these files, often by finding some physical works in our storage vault that could be related. Only after reasonable certainty could be reached would we know for sure how to rename (and then either keep or discard) these mystery files. This process alone took around two weeks but has resulted in a repaired digital archive that is ready for the introduction of our new high-resolution photography from this year.

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October 3, 2022

Digital Treasure Trove: Introducing the New Museum Collections Assistant

Contributed by PAFA Museum Collections

The Museum Collections Team is pleased to introduce L Autumn Gnadinger (they/them/theirs), who will be stepping into the role of the Museums Collections Assistant through the remainder of the IMLS grant project. L is an artist, writer, and educator with a background in museum work. They earned their MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture and have previously studied at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany, IN and Transylvania University in Lexington, KY. L is a former Core Fellow of Penland School of Craft in Bakersville, NC, and an editor and co-founder of the journal Ruckus, which engages art in the American Midsouth and Midwest.

With a range of experience in photography, design, and file management stemming from their work with Ruckus, L will be helping PAFA with its core goals of photographing works of art in the permanent collection, updating the file management connected to the permanent collection, and finally testing out the new content management system for the new—forthcoming—online collection.

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