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The Smithsonian's Photographic History Project
Bringing Light to an American Institution's Photo Collection
 Listen to Susan Stamberg's report.
 View a photo gallery about the Smithsonian photo project.
March 7, 2002 -- The average American home is cluttered with shoeboxes full of family photos just waiting to be organized. Merry Foresta has a similar objective, but her collection is much bigger than most.
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William Henry Jackson's photo equipment on muleback.
Photo: Smithsonian Institution Archives, Hayden Survey Party. Record Unit 7177, George P. Merrill Collection.
View a photo gallery.
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Foresta, senior curator of photography at the Smithsonian Institution, is sifting through 13 million photos from the institution's 16 museums. Her task: to survey and organize all of the Smithsonian's photographs for the first time.
In examining the photos, "I'm always saying, 'Why was this made? What meaning does it have? What's... our emotional response to this?' They just have great meaning."
One of the first results of Foresta's work will be At First Sight: Photography and the American Imagination, an exhibition scheduled to open in Washington, D.C., in May 2003. The exhibition will feature collections that have rarely been seen by the public. The photos chronicle the history of the United States and that of the Smithsonian itself.
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Boxes of photos wait to be surveyed and organized at the Smithsonian.
Photo: Jim Wildman, NPR
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NPR's Susan Stamberg recently visited Foresta at the Smithsonian to discuss the project. One of the photos that caught Foresta's eye shows legendary photographer William Henry Jackson's equipment being carried on muleback during a geological survey of the Western territories in 1871.
"The photographers, more than anyone, seemed to be very aware that this was a moment of change in this landscape, that people had been there but more people were coming and that it would never look like this again," Foresta says.
Jackson's photos ended up in the Smithsonian's Department of Geology -- records of a long-ago time and place. Today they sit in acid-free boxes, on shelves with miles and miles of other pictures, from other times, Stamberg reports. A photograph from the early 1900s documents another expedition but one that's a little ghoulish.
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A man of uncertain identity holds the skull of James Smithson.
Photo: Smithsonian Institution Archives, Exhumation of Smithson's Remains. Record Unit 95 Photograph Collection.
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The photo shows a man holding the skull of James Smithson, the institution's benefactor, who died in 1829 in Genoa, Italy. The identity of the man holding the skull is unclear, though the photo is believed to have been taken by the wife of Alexander Graham Bell.
As regent of the Smithsonian, Alexander Graham Bell was sent to Genoa in 1904 to retrieve Smithson's remains and bring them to Washington, to rest in a crypt at the institution he endowed but never saw. Someone in Bell's party posed with the skull. And Mrs. Bell's blurry photograph, like so many at the Smithsonian, captures a little-known instant of history.
Foresta says that though the photo is out of focus -- probably because Mrs. Bell didn't know how to operate the camera correctly -- "it still has the immediacy of the moment, which is why we so value these older photographs. They were there and we weren't."
Other Resources
• Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Smithsonian Institution
• Exhibits on Smithsonian History
• James Smithson biographical information
• Smithsonian Magazine article about senior curator Merry Foresta
• American Photographs: The First Century
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