On Feb 15, 2010, at 22:40, Kim Davis wrote:
I suspect one of the reasons museums in general do not have images out there is because they don't know exactly what they have, and don't want to admit it.
That may be one of the reasons. Another reason could be that they don't know how much detail lace-fanatics really require for proper study. I saw that aspect of it, when I got into correspondence with a museum in Poland. The museum holds a series of miniatures of several figures from the Jagiellonian royal "line" by Cranach. I have a few postcards with those figures and, some of the trimmings on their clothes -- the shiny ones in particular, but some white veil trimmings as well -- looked like they might have been very early bobbin lace, as it was transitioning from the passementerie stage. But, of course, by the time the miniatures were further miniaturised and then printed on postcards, it was really hard to tell what was what. The people at the museum were very friendly and obliging and sent me -- for free -- a disc with photos of all the miniatures in the series. Very good photos, as such :) But, even by isolating and magnifying fragments, the best I could determine (before I got into the same situation that the photographer of Antonioni's "Blow Up" did) was that it was not bobbin lace.
So I gave up, thanked them most effusively and that was that. But. *Had it been* bobbin lace and I wanted to study the design of it, I'd have been up the creek, without a paddle. Photos of lace for study purposes require very good photography, with multiple, close-up shots of different bits, all done at very high resolution . Which might be another reason why some museums shy away from posting photos of their lace collections.
A while back, there was a bit of a "campaign" to get the Metropolitan Museum in New York City to photograph their lace collection and make it avilable, on-line, to everyone who wants to study it. Victoria and Albert did, why couldn't the Met? I got into a correspondence with Tom Campbell (then the curator at the Ratti, now the director of the Museum) on the subject and this was, in part, the response I got:
Data entry staff cost a minimum of $25 per hour, for the most rudimentary data entry, not to mention proofing and correcting by the curators or other specialist staff. Photographs by our photography studio cost about $200 per image, when broken down in terms of staff time.
The Museum holds 5000 pieces of lace. More than one photo of each piece would really be needed for proper study. And it was more than 2yrs ago; I expect that the costs have gone up since. He also suggested "substantial donations" were always welcome but, even those could not guarantee that they'd be directed at exactly the spot (lace) that I was interested in. He also suggested I should come to NYC and do my study in person. Since the reason I wanted to study on line was the little matter of the cost of getting to NYC and staying there for a week or longer, I realised that his idea of "substantial donations" and mine were not even in the same ballpark...
Nothing's ever as simple as it appears at the first glance :) -- Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/ Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland) - To unsubscribe send email to majord...@arachne.com containing the line: unsubscribe lace y...@address.here. For help, write to arachnemodera...@yahoo.com
