The Family Snaps

[Right: Pumping a tyre, Merrigum, 1910, by Lillian Louisa Pitts. See more images at www.museum.vic.gov.au/bfa and in Photo Review magazine Issue 30]

The online photographic collection Museum Victoria calls ‘The Biggest Family Album in Australia’ is about to get even bigger with a major drive to boost its Melbourne content. The museum is asking people to come forward with photos depicting life in Melbourne from the earliest days of the medium up until 1980.

‘We’re focusing on images of people in everyday life and asking for a diverse range of subjects, cultures and places from as early as possible,’ says Fiona Kinsey, the museum’s curator of Domestic and Community Life.

Photos of interest will be copied digitally and returned to their owners, with a selection to be reproduced for an exhibition on Melbourne to open in 2008. The museum is organising the search around the subjects: people at home; street life; holidays and outings; events (Moomba, Federation, etc); people at work (offices, shops, factories, etc); people shopping; and cultural diversity. The last category includes migrants on their journey and arrival, and establishing their lives and continuing their traditions over the years in Melbourne.

The photos need to have a location and be dated as closely as possible. Any information identifying the people and filling in other details is also considered valuable.

The Biggest Family Album (www.museum.vic.gov.au/bfa) has about 9500 photos, mostly from rural Victoria. Only about 1000 are from Melbourne, where there hasn’t been as much intensive collecting by the museum. Although the museum has hundreds of thousands of photos in its various other collections – the organisation encompasses the Melbourne Museum, Scienceworks Museum and Immigration Museum – very few are of the family album type.

When the Biggest Family Album was established in the 1980s, the museum was a pioneer in a new kind of public photographic collection based on an ‘alternative history’ not captured in official or commercial collections. ‘There has since been wider recognition that family photos are an important source of history and should be copied for the archives to retain their many layers of historical information,’ says Kinsey.

Until now, the album’s cut-off date has been around 1950. With the 30-year extension, colour will be included for the first time. ‘Most people don’t think about photos of themselves and recent relatives as being of historical value, but the later pictures are equally important. We hope to get a lot more interior photos due to the improved flashes and faster films. The time will come when we’ll be collecting digital images. Our digital management system will be ready in the not too distant future.’

The museum considers the quality of a photo important, but secondary to what it depicts about human activity. It is also interested in the photos as artefacts. It copies them in their entirety, be they paper prints, film, slides, glass plates or other media. The extraneous material around the outside of the images is then cropped before the entire image is included in the internet album, which is arranged for easy browsing and keyword searches.

With its new campaign, the museum hopes to uncover a lot of small collections from families and individuals, and also the work of more prolific photographers like Bill Boyd and Lillian Louisa Pitts in the current album. The museum collected additional material about Boyd, and his camera, and published a book, Having a Go! – Bill Boyd’s Mallee. Pitts, who died in 1947, put together an album with a narrative, which she gave to her family. One memorable image shows a small boy painting zebra stripes on a large horse.

By accessing Museum Victoria through Picture Australia (www.pictureaustralia.org), you can also find easy access to a collection of World War I images and the Sunshine Harvester Works agricultural collection. The museum has many other collections available online at www.museum.vic.gov.au/index.asp

Photo courtesy of Museum Victoria.