Lantern Slide Project

Lantern slides in archival envelopes and box, on display

My favorite project at the museum is the Percy Palmer Lantern Slide collection.  I took over working on the collection when I first got here in September and I am almost finished with it.  The museum has a collection of nearly 800 lantern slides donated to us by teacher and former Brawley principal Percy Palmer.  Palmer taught high school science, especially geology.  Lantern slides were the original PowerPoint slides- glass negatives on 3x4 pieces of glass that could be put into a small 'magic lantern' device and projected onto the wall.  Between 1930-1940 Palmer took photographs throughout Imperial County of different geologic formation to illustrate his school lectures.  He also seems to have either taught or had a personal interest in natural science and architecture, because a large number of photographs are of evolutionary trees and skeletons in museums, cathedrals around the world and historical tourist locations like the Library of Congress and Mount Vernon.  I can only assume he gave lectures on these as well, but he also could have collected them for himself.

Cleaning a lantern slide

My project is to take the slides, clean them, write descriptions of the image and the slide's physical condition, repair any damage that I can, and then re-house the slides in archival envelopes and boxes.  When I'm finished we're going to get them all scanned with a backlit scanner and digitized.  We may set up a separate link on our website to them, we may use the images for prints we can frame and hang on the walls in an exhibit. Palmer didn't do much in the way of writing down locations of the photographs he took, or the names of any people who appeared in the pictures.  I'm hoping to post these 'unknown' photographs on sites like Flicker, Facebook, or other crowdsourcing sites to see if anyone can identify the people and places we can't.  Identification can come from unexpected sources. Some of our Ocotillo friends brought their children and grandchildren to see the exhibit in progress and they saw one of the lantern slide images we have already blown up and framed and are planning to use to illustrate one of the exhibit panels. Palmer hadn't identified the location or the people posed in it, but we were thinking it might connect to one of the mines.  They looked at the pictures and said "That's where we were yesterday!" They had gone on a hike in Shell Canyon and had a picture on their camera that was the exact same location, with one of the grandkids on the same rock as the people in the original 1930s image.  They're going to send us the picture so we can use it as a 'then and now' in an exhibit after the Gold Rush.  It is a great example of never knowing who will be able to help you out and know something that expands what you have already.

Adding Mylar over slide

Most of the slides I have are in good shape and only need a little cleaning. I use an eyeglass cleaning cloth on them and they are fine.  Some are broken in pieces or cracked and need extra support.  For these I encase the image in Mylar and easily removable archival tape along the edges and make notes in the Excel database I've created for the slides. I'm considering working on an article about the collection and my work with them to get published in one of the archival magazines, since getting published is something that potential employers always seem to like to see. I love the collection, and working on the slides is sometimes the best part of my week.  I got a taste of glass negatives in Martha Mahard's Archival Photographs class at Simmons, and getting my hands on actual slides has been a fantastic experience.  Whether it is one others would consider worth writing about, I don't know. But I'm more and more drawn to old photographs- daguerreotypes, tintypes, glass images, etc. and it would seem a shame not to write about this collection so that when I'm finished with it, it will be a collection others know about and can use for research.  That is, after all, one of the points of an archive.