Johns Hopkins University students Christie YoungSmith and Gracie Golden helped curate the exhibition In Focus: Ara Güler’s Anatolia.
“Is this glitter?!”
Emily Jacobson, paper and photographs conservator at Freer|Sackler, peered closely at shiny speckles glimmering on the surface of a black-and-white photo.
“Perhaps Raymond Hare had a going-away party when he was given this set of photographs,” Nancy Micklewright, head of scholarly programs and publications, joked in response.
Emily was assessing the condition of Ara Güler’s photographs in the collection of the Freer|Sackler Archives. Although U.S. Ambassador Raymond Hare gave the images to the museums in 1989 in fairly good condition, the collection seemed to have been barraged with a number of glittery specks.
David Hogge, the museums’ head archivist, helped us to better understand the importance of archives collections. Museum archivists carefully select documents to preserve for research and display. Because archivists make deliberate choices about what to keep, museum archives not only document the past, but they also reveal what professionals find important about the past. They contain what is deemed worthy to preserve for future generations. The Freer|Sackler Archives contains more than 140 collections (amounting to more than one thousand linear feet of materials) dating from the eighteenth century to the present.
David also helped us figure out the origins of this particular photograph collection. Contained in two gift boxes made of Islamic-patterned cardboard and blue tape, Raymond Hare’s colleagues originally gave him the collection upon his departure from Turkey, where he served as U.S. Ambassador from 1961–65. The inscription on the gift box describes the Seljuk and Armenian ruins depicted in Güler’s images as remote and hard to access at the time—artifacts that Hare would have appreciated seeing as an architecture enthusiast. Finally, David recounted that in 1989 Hare gifted the photographs to the Freer and Sackler Galleries as part of a larger collection of images of Islamic architecture.
And the glitter? Without any factual information to link the glitter to the history of the photographs, it was cleaned off to protect the images.
For a look at the never-before-shown images, visit the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery for In Focus: Ara Güler’s Anatolia, on view through August 3, 2014.
