Eadweard Muybridge Mammoth-Print Collection: Assessment and Rehousing Project

FAIN: PG-51230-11

California Historical Society (San Francisco, CA 94109-2840)
Mary Morganti (Project Director: May 2010 to November 2012)

Hiring a consultant to conduct a condition assessment of 386 photographs including stereographs, glass plate prints, and large format prints that document the history of San Francisco, central California, and Nevada in the 1860s.

The California Historical Society's collection of more than 350 photographs by 19-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge includes a group of 97 mammoth-plate prints with 47 views of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada and 50 depicting his animal locomotion series. In this project, the Society will contract with conservator Martin Salazar to conduct a preservation assessment of its Muybridge mammoth-print collection, resulting in prioritized recommendations for conservation treatment of the prints. Concurrently, the prints will be rehoused in right-sized archival folders and storage boxes. This project coincides with international attention being brought to Muybridge through a major exhibition organized by the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., and traveling to the Tate Britain, London, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This project will position the Society to plan to conserve the oversized Muybridge photographs and better make them available to scholars and the public.