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Week 4: Scanning Vernacular Photos

July 27, 2024 by kjmooney

One of the next steps in my internship was scanning Peter Cohen vernacular photos into the computer. The photos were donated to the Berger Archive by Peter Cohen who is a famous photographer. This week, I learned how to use the scanner we have in the archive and why it’s important to digitize materials and have them scanned into a computer. It was a lot of fun to sort through the photos and put them into a digital folder. I would go through and scan hundreds of photos a day to be sent to a friend of the archive to be used for their art! It was a lot of repetitive movements of taking the photo from the box of photos to the scanner to be scanned, but it is important work! I had to make some decisions about what photos would fit in our collection and which ones would not. For example, if a photo was too recent (taken within the last 15 years or so) then we did not choose to scan it in to be part of our collection. Something interesting I learned was how to make the decision of what to keep in the photography collection and what not to. By the end of scanning photos in, I had scanned around 300+ photos altogether. It was a lot of fun to see what people decided to take photos of and what was important enough to take a photo of.

In the photo above, you can see the scanner to my right and a stack of photos next to it. The photo lying next to the scanner is a photo we decided not to scan in because you cannot see the faces of the people in the photo!

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