Today marks the 101st anniversary of Hugh Morton’s birth. Despite the difficulties of keeping the blog as active as it once was, this is a day that needs to be remembered.
The number 101 is commonly assigned to introductory collegiate classes. Seems it is also quite the prime number! For A View to Hugh, “Hugh Morton 101” will need to be a return to basics. As my duties have evolved and the photographic collections have grown over the past twelve years to 3.25 million items, it becomes more challenging for me to carve out the time required to work on long-form posts that I truly love to research and write. The pandemic has also hindered Jack Hilliard’s ability to research and write his contributions to the blog.
Nonetheless, there has been noteworthy work completed on the Morton collection behind the scenes. Prior to the pandemic, we had a few thousand Morton negatives scanned at high resolution sufficient to meet the federal preservation digitization standards. While many of these negatives had been scanned when Elizabeth Hull was processing the collection, many others had not—and none had been scanned at high resolution. In fact, there was no accepted standard in the field at the time. We scanned negatives at a moderate level to assist with processing the collection, and also serve many researchers basic needs.
A few years ago, I examined each and every 3×4-inch negative and all 4×5 negatives made prior to circa 1970 in the Morton collection in order to choose what would be digitized. All tallied, more than 4,400 negatives now have preservation-level scans. (For the technologically interested, the file sizes for 4×5-inch negatives routinely exceed 630 megabytes. A future post will dig deeper into the project.) And that is why it is time to get back to basics. By the end of March, I will have completed a plan for making those scans—along with several hundred more made from the Bayard Wootten and the Colvin M. Edwards collections—available to users.
Many of these newly scanned negatives are unidentified, which will enable us to return to the early days of the blog when we could post images for which we knew little to nothing and many people would contribute their knowledge or ideas toward their identification. The scene above is an example of a negative that had never been scanned before and the person is unidentified. Here’s looking forward to an active year at “V2H” as we introduce more Hugh Morton images to the world. Happy 101st, Mr. Morton!
