Welcome!

This week I have taken up my new post of Project Assistant with the Lakeland Arts Trust, at the Museum of Lakeland Life and Industry. Within this role, I will be working with a collection of photographic negatives produced by the photographer Joseph Hardman. Originally from Radcliffe in Manchester, Joseph moved to Kendal in 1911 where he joined a local photographic society allowing his interest in photography to grow. For the last 30 years of his life, Joseph travelled to every part of the Lake District by taxi working as a freelance photographer and allowing him to create an invaluable record of a rapdily disappearing Lakeland life during the mid-twentieth century. Joseph also spent time working for the Westmorland Gazette and had many of his photographs published.

The photographic equipment used by Joseph Hardman would have been very different to the type commonly used today. It would have comprised of a view camera, inside which glass plates coated in light sensitive emulsion were placed. When exposed to the light, an image would have been captured as a permanent record within the photographic emulsion onto the plate. These are known as glass plate negatives and from them, it is possible to produce black and white photographic prints. It is possible to purchase some of Joseph Hardman's black and white prints of the Lake District from the shop at the Museum of Lakeland Life and Industry.

At the start of this week, I was introduced to the task that lies ahead of me by James Arnold, the Assistant Curator of Social History at the Museum of Lakeland Life and Industry. James has already scanned and catalogued 1500 of the glass plate negatives leaving 3000 remaining for myself to complete. To scan the negatives I will be using a standard flatbed scanner to capture raw images, which will then be edited using Adobe Photoshop Elements 9. At the same time I will catalogue information about each negative recording details such as their accession  number, a brief description, condition and tag words. The second part of the project will then be to upload the images onto a specially commissioned online library which will allow members of the public to search through the scanned images. Not only is this a method of safeguarding the images, but it is also hoped that the online library will provide an excellent resource from which further research or enquiries regarding the Joseph Hardman archive can be made.

The post of Project Assistant has been kindly funded by the Gannett Foundation and the deadline for completion of the digitisation project is the end of 2012.

Within this blog, I hope to bring you a brief insight into some of the very interesting and fascinating landscapes, locations and aspects of mid-twentieth century Lakeland Life that have been captured in these images, including any unusual or funny stories that I may also uncover!

I hope you will find the blog interesting!