the american museum of natural history
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Top left, clockwise: Dutch women, Ellis Island (LS173-33); Viewing Brontosaurus skeleton, 1937 (287895); Woman wearing headdress, Mongolia (LS5-36); Seminole maiden, The Everglades, Florida, 1907 (48246).
With the project ongoing, staff will still pick images on request for researchers, but Tom hopes in the future this will be a thing of the past. “The one benefit of having a viable and well publicised database is that rather than working with existing staff, we’re going to seek funding from private and public sources to hire additional staff to speed up the process. What we hope to do is whet folks’ appetites and make researchers aware of the existence of these images. If they want to see a higher-res image, and have good reason to, we can provide it.”
The Seminole images are particularly unique, and what Tom calls, “absolutely endangered images of, unfortunately, endangered cultures,” with many researchers in agreeing that there is nothing else quite like them. A photographer and anthropologist, Julian Dimock is dedicated to a social realist approach. His work and the collection escape the stigma of being classed as romanticised, like many photographers shooting native people at the time, such as Edward Curtis, can be accused of. In addition to Seminole people, Dimock also photographed African Americans in the south: “It shows them at work, school and play,” says Tom. “His images in south Carolina show folks who are born slaves or the children of slaves, so they’re very poignant portraits; very powerful images of people living in those places at that time.”
Jesup Expedition Julian Dimock Image use is something of a concern for the library, particularly with collections such as Julian Dimock, which contain pictures of Seminole people in Florida at the start of the 20th Century. “We don’t want images on Native Americans or sacred sites to be used for advertising or marketing purposes by organisations,” explains Tom. “If someone is making a request that we deem to be inappropriate, we’re in a position to limit that use.”
Another fascinating collection essential in forming our view of the world is the Jesup North Pacific Expedition collection. Full of striking portraits as well as camps and villages, the images document the trip made by Franz Boas at the turn of 19th Century, to better explore the Bering Strait migration theory, which postulates that north America and east Russia were populated by the migration of Asian people. The museum itself sponsored the expedition in 1897 to Siberia and the Pacific North West of º