Internship AOK Special Collections Post #1

For my internship with the UMBC Library Special Collections I have been working on a number of projects concerning the archive of Baltimore sun photos stored in the basement. While more supplies are being ordered for the main rehousing project, I had the opportunity to work on a pilot project cataloging the contents of one of the boxes full of photo negatives from the Sun’s photographers. I wanted to take this first post as an opportunity to talk about  three of the interesting aspects of the collection of photographs and the stories with which they correlated. 

The first major surprise in going through these folders was the sheer number of photographs the newspaper collected every day. On Thursday December 1, 1994, there were thirty stories photographed by 16 photographers amassing over 1500 photographs. While it was one of the larger folders in the box it was by no means the most dense and the whole month of december ended up with more than 23000 photographs taken. Of course, only a small fraction of these photographs ended up being published and made publicly available, but it is interesting to think about just how much information or insight might be stored in the other photographs preserved in the box. 

The next interesting point that going through the negatives impressed upon me was the variety of stories that the paper covered every day. As the box in question stored the photographs taken from  December 1, 1994-January 7, 1995 there are many of the types of stories that one would expect to see. Christmas lights, Hanukkah parties, and salvation army collectors are all recorded throughout the month along with the fires, crimes, and sporting events that popped up day to day. However, there are also photographs from interviews conducted throughout the month and from a series of recurring articles highlighting different students in the city. There are flower shows and government events alongside  stories on recycling and studio art glass. We as historians tend to look at newspapers as snapshots of daily life in their places of publication, however, to me it seems like going through the photographs in this fashion provides a distilled version of that same snapshot view. 

The last point I wanted to talk about actually caused me some frustration in recording and cataloging these folders. That is the insight into each photographer's process in taking the photographs and packaging them to the newspaper. Some photographers went by slightly different names or nicknames than those recorded by the newspaper in their labels while others simply did not write their names on the packets of negatives at all. Other sets of negatives came with a whole paragraph describing biographical details about the person or event being captured while others had no label or descriptions. As someone trying to record the contents of the individual folders this was not the most ideal situation forcing me to at times try to hold the negatives up to the light to see what was going on. However, for a researcher looking at these photographers a lot can be gained by seeing how they present their work and what information they feel is important to record.