We are sweltering in a long, long hot spell down here in Oz right now; too hot to be doing thinky things like paleography. So I have embarked on the Great Flickr Project to put all my medieval photographs somewhere in cyberspace, caption and annotate them, organise them into something coherent and useful, and perhaps revive some of my old projects on medieval visual culture. I mean, how hard is it? It's just a bit of digital image jiggerypokery, updating my ever so complete database, doing a bit of sorting and recataloguing, and lo and behold, I will have a smorgasbord of medieval feastery to play with. Easy peasy.
The photographs, mainly from Britain but also some from the Continent, were taken during the course of a number of extended visits over the years, but all in the days before digital photography was a goer. I had a reasonably good SLR kit, but it was really urban guerilla photography. Certain sites banned tripods and/or flash and sometimes you had to be pretty quick on your feet. I used slide film, so what was in the box was what was in the box.
They have been digitised and databased over the years, so I know what they all are (mostly), but they are in totally random order, batched in folders of around 100 images because that was what you could put on a CD-ROM. Coherent sets of images are scattered all over the place, but that doesn't matter because I've got a database, you see.
It's been great fun upgrading the quality of the images to compensate for having to take the original photographs in a variety of bodgy lighting conditions, trying to do long exposures by bracing myself against a pillar with my shoulders, with knees bent and elbows tucked in. I'm sure some church and castle visitors thought I was practising some strange antipodean form of yoga. But the results give some satisfaction. I can even correct those ones where I slightly lost my sense of verticality. Terrible temptation to sit fiddling with the digital dials to just get it a little bit better.
Of course, the database isn't quite as comprehensive and detailed as it might be. That means some time spent googling around to get more information. The pictures were taken some years ago, and things have happened. Discovered to my horror that one church I had visited had completely burned out not long afterwards. A quick check of stats says I have over 5500 images in my database, not all of which are mine but mostly. I have currently uploaded 140 and used 0.00053% of my allowed 1 terabyte of Flickr. So far they are all of misericords and other bits of church woodwork. I gotta work faster!
Meanwhile, does anybody recognise this dude? Not all databases are perfect. Check out here every so often and see how I'm getting along. Maybe the paleography would be easier after all.
Starting many many years ago, I made periodic excursions around England and parts of Europe photographing medieval stuff. This was originally to provide teaching materials for the family medievalist who liked lots of visuals in his lectures and tutorials. In those days, photographs were made on little strips of transparent material. You got it right in the camera or it was no good. Heaven knows what I thought I was going to do with about 5000 of the things.
I crawled under pews, got very good at bracing myself for long exposures in places where you weren't allowed to use flash and found strange and wondrous things in dusty places behind the organ.
The only trouble with those little strips of transparent material is that they go off, even with the best of care. Over a number of years, once the technology was available, we got them digitised. First professionally, then I did them myself. I stored them on CDs, because that was the way of the future. Then the word got out that CDs are not archival, so I copied them all on to the biggest plugin hard drive I could find. I think it was 300 gig at the time. Then the cloud came into being so they all got copied again to Dropbox. Surely they're safe now.
Fortunately I entered all the information into a database as I went, at least the most important bits of information, or all would be at sea by now. But somehow I still had a great unsorted mass of images from which the odd few have been plucked for various purposes.
I have just discovered Flickr. Kid in a lolly shop. They can be re-archived in the great fluffy mass in the sky, annotated, organised into sets and collections, marked on a Google map and shared with whoever is interested. Only trouble is I think I'm going to have to live to be 150 to get through all the work of it. And I did promise to do some more paleography as well. And I've got all those photographs of art and artifacts from Borneo from my PhD days, and the old family photos that were given to me that are all jumbled up in a box. I better eat my veggies and get some exercise. It's gonna be a long old age.
Have a squizz at http://www.flickr.com/photos/114756006@N06/. There are just a few pictures of misericords there right now, but that's only the beginning. Watch this space.
