Reimagined Collections and Archives
Digitised Diapositives and Discourse: Finding a Place for the Analogue in a Digital World
Eric Riddler (AGNSW)
Abstract: The digitisation of the Art Gallery of New South Wales Julia Davis Slide Library has been an ongoing process for close to twenty years. What began as a project to allow continued use of the Slide Library’s analogue material, as art history lectures moved into the age of the PowerPoint, has expanded into a wide-ranging endeavor embracing the visual material held in the Gallery’s National Art Archive.
With this expansion has come the opportunity to use and distribute digital archival images in the process of curating exhibitions and researching art historical publications. Some notable developments in recent years have been the inclusion of Margaret Tuckson’s photographs of Indigenous artists at work in a survey of the art and curatorial career of her husband Tony Tuckson [AGNSW 2018], the opportunity to reconsider historical art exhibitions, using newly uncovered installation shots, in publications like Australian Art Exhibitions: Opening Our Eyes [Thames & Hudson 2018] and exhibitions like The Field Revisited [NGV 2018], and even inspire new artworks, like the installation by Ian Milliss in Making Art Public: 50 Years of Kaldor Public Art Projects [AGNSW 2019].
About: Eric Riddler is an art historian and researcher who is currently the Visual Resources Librarian at the Art Gallery of New South Wales National Art Archive. He has worked on a number of exhibitions, publications and research projects about Australian and New Zealand artists, especially in the mid-twentieth century.