Palace of the Governors Photo Archives Wins Award for Excellence

Palace of the Governors Photo Archives Wins the Edgar L. Hewett Award for Excellence

 New MexicoAssociation of Museums to present the honor on Nov. 4

Santa Fe—Citing its many resources and online accessibility, the New Mexico Association of Museums will bestow its Edgar L. Hewett Award for Excellence on the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives at its annual business meeting in Farmington on Friday, Nov. 4.

“The staff of the Photo Archives has worked diligently to make the state’s visual record readily available to people in any part of the state and even the world,” said Dr. Frances Levine, director of the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors. “These resources will prove especially valuable as we prepare to enter our Centennial year as a state. We’re honored by this award.”

The History Museum as a whole received the Hewett Award in 2009, the year it opened on a campus that includes the Palace of the Governors, Photo Archives, Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, Palace Press, and Native American Artisans Program. The award is named for the first director of the Museum of New Mexico, Edgar Lee Hewett, who led the agency from 1909 until his death in 1946. He also taught anthropology at the University of New Mexico and was instrumental in encouraging the development of small museums throughout the state.

“The Palace of the Governors Photo Archives is a rich and tenured resource in our state that promotes preservation and scholarship through a unique collection of historic photographs, films, glass plate negatives, photo postcards, and other visual imagery,” said Laurie Rufe, president of NMAM and director of the Roswell Museum and Art Center. “Recipients of this award illustrate exemplary leadership in the field, and the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, with its multitude of resources and online presence, serves a community of scholars, authors, researchers, and the general public on an international level.”

The archives hold an estimated 800,000 items dating from 1843 to 2011. Included among them are historic photographic prints, cased photographs, glass plate negatives, film negatives, stereographs, photo postcards, panoramas, color transparencies, lantern slides, and more than 1,500 books on photography. More than 16,000 images have been digitized and can be keyword-searched by clicking here. Other images can be searched in person. Nearly all are available as high-quality digital scans and prints, for editorial reproduction, and use in advertising, publishing, media projects, and TV news media stories at nominal cost.

Research into what the archives already hold is ongoing. Just last year, Archivist Daniel Kosharek discovered a rare, ca. 1870s photograph of famed Navajo war chief Manuelito. The image, now on display in the History Museum, was among photographs, glass-plate negatives and other photographic ephemera in the archives’ Henry T. Hiester/Melander Brothers Collection. Most recently, staff and volunteers have been processing and digitizing 5,000 early 20th-century images of Santa Fe and northern New Mexico taken by Jesse Nusbaum.

Some of the most important 19th- and 20th-century photographers of the West are represented in the Photo Archives’ collections, and the subject matter spans the history and people of New Mexico, anthropology, archaeology, and ethnology of Hispanic and Native American cultures. Smaller collections document Europe, Latin America, the Far East, Oceana, and the Middle East.

The archives are widely used by researchers, authors, publications and the public. More than 1,000 people visit the archives each year to conduct research, and several thousand more submit direct research queries, photograph orders, and permission requests each year from the website.

The collection continues to expand, and long-range preservation and conservation projects are underway. To inquire about donating historical or contemporary photographs, contact Daniel Kosharek, Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, 120 Washington Ave., Santa Fe, NM 87501; (505) 476.5092; or Daniel.kosharek@state.nm.us.

Image above: "Hispanic family, New Mexico," 1949, by Anacleto (Tito) G. Apodaca. From the Tito Apodaca "Mi Gente" Collection, Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, #142320.


Media contact: Kate Nelson, Public Relations and Marketing
 New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors
 (505) 476-1141; (505) 554-5722 (cell)
 kate.nelson@state.nm.us

http://media.museumofnewmexico.org/

The New Mexico History Museum is the newest addition to a campus that includes the Palace of the Governors, the oldest continuously occupied public building in the United States; Fray Angélico Chávez History Library; Palace of the Governors Photo Archives; the Press at the Palace of the Governors; and the Native American Artisans Program. Located at 113 Lincoln Ave., in Santa Fe, NM, it is a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs.

History, One Photo at a Time

Click here for interactive look inside the archive

The Wall Street Journal
May 11, 2011

When my grandmother passed away a few years ago, it fell to me to clean out her apartment—after the good stuff was divided among family members or sold—and decide what should be thrown out and what kept. It was also up to me to preserve things such as photographs, some dating back to the 19th century, and postcards. The latter ranged from black-and-white scenes of Eastern European capitals in the 1920s to a view of the Empire State Building before it got its antenna to a 1940 color photograph of the brand new Pennsylvania Turnpike.

My mother was pretty good at being able to identify many of the faces in the photographs from the '20s and '30s—friends and relatives relaxing at the beach, having a picnic, going out for a spin in a roadster and my grandmother proudly posing alongside her cowboy tour guide during my grandparents' first trip to the U.S., in 1938.

There were also some people my mother couldn't recall, but that her parents surely would. Short of death, there are few things that remind one of the evanescence of life as profoundly as the realization that when loved ones go they often take with them, and forever, information they would have had at their fingertips.

I was also surprised that I seemed almost the only one in the family who had any interest in preserving all this stuff. I'm not sure what to chalk it up to—possibly sentimentality, a hoarding instinct or the belief that it remains important, though for reasons I can't quite articulate.

In any case, it's hard enough keeping track of this material across a couple of generations, let alone five of them, as the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation, which I visited recently, has been able to do. And theirs aren't family photos, either. Started by Frederick Hill Meserve, the family patriarch, in the 1890s, and comprising more than 200,000 items, the collection constitutes one of the nation's greatest archives of Civil War and Abraham Lincoln photographs, taken by the likes of Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner. The trove includes a lock of Lincoln's hair (with an accompanying handwritten note from Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt, Frederick's daughter, explaining its provenance) and the battered wooden boxes Matthew Brady took into the field for storing his negatives.

Gordon Parks/The Gordon Parks Foundation

The foundation has Gordon Parks photos of such luminaries as Muhammad Ali, pictured in 1970.

Furthermore, Meserve-Kunhardt owns the photographic archive of Gordon Parks, the celebrated Life magazine photographer. Mr. Parks, who died in 2006, was a civil rights trailblazer as Life's first African-American photographer. And he was a close friend of Philip Kunhardt, a managing editor at Life, and Mr. Meserve's grandson. "Gordon Parks, who was an old friend of our family and spent Thanksgiving at our home, was so impressed by this family keeping its collection together he decided he wanted the Gordon Parks Foundation to be established as a division of Meserve-Kunhardt," explained Peter Kunhardt Jr., the foundation's current director and Frederick Hill Meserve's great-great-grandson. "He was incredibly close with my grandfather on a personal level. That's a big reason why we have the Gordon Parks collection."

Within the last few years the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation has also acquired the archive of another Life magazine photographer, Edward Clark, whose most famous image is that of the tear-streaked face of Graham Jackson, a Navy accordion player, taken as FDR's hearse passed on the way to the train station in Warm Springs, Ga. Meserve-Kunhardt's copy of the print is autographed by Messrs. Jackson and Clark.

The experience of visiting the foundation—located at SUNY Purchase in Westchester—is nothing short of thrilling, though one wouldn't normally associate sifting through old photographs with high excitement. (Then again, maybe I'm not the right person to ask, as I decided we had to save the pictures from the '30s of my grandmother flirting with her ski instructor in St. Moritz.) Open any drawer and you're pretty much guaranteed to get—please, oh, please forgive me, Henry Steele Commager, James MacGregor Burns, Shelby Foote, etc.—a Jell-O shot of American history.

The Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation

The foundation has a trove of Lincoln photos.

It starts with the Lincoln portraits. Indeed, there are so many of them that in 2009 the Kunhardts published "Lincoln Life-Size" a monograph devoted entirely to studies of Lincoln's face across a 20-year span from 1846 to 1865. But Lincoln is just the tip of the iceberg. While I fully understand that the earliest image of Lincoln ever taken might make stand the hairs on the back of the neck of a presidential historian but not excite everyone, who can resist Ed Clark's image of JFK taking a break from the pressures of the presidency to check in on baby Caroline in her crib?

The Kennedys apparently so liked the image that President Kennedy was photographed holding a framed copy of the picture. And Jackie Kennedy sent Mr. Clark a thank-you note in 1964 describing the picture as one of her favorites and adding, "I shall treasure it forever—as a reminder of such happy days—when we were all together…." The note is also part of the collection.

However, it's the Gordon Parks connection that lends the foundation much of its glamour—attested by the fact that the honorees at a June 1 gala for the Gordon Parks Foundation include Spike Lee, Karl Lagerfeld and Arianna Huffington, with Iman serving as mistress of ceremonies. Among the Parks works are intimate portraits of celebrities taken over the course of his eventful career and ranging from the likes of Aaron Copeland and Ingrid Bergman, in the throes of her love affair with Roberto Rossellini, to Muhammad Ali.

Cataloging the images has been a monumental undertaking, the Parks material just now reaching completion after a four-year process, the Ed Clark archive barely begun. And then there's "Pat The Bunny," the venerable children's book written by Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt, Frederick's Meserve's daughter and Peter Jr.'s great-grandmother. The Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt Collection includes manuscripts, drawings and the original, handmade 1940 prototype.

It also serves to remind that Meserve-Kunhardt remains very much a family affair. Indeed, Peter Jr. grew up with the Foundation's 1863 Alexander Gardner imperial albumen portrait of a seated Lincoln. "It hung in the living room over the fireplace," he remembered, "until we realized it shouldn't be in that environment."

Write to Ralph Gardner at ralph.gardner@wsj.com