Saving Shattered Images

Saving Shattered Images at the WHS. "...In a quiet project on the Society's fourth floor, photo archivists are resurrecting long-lost pictures of Wisconsin life. For roughly a century, most serious photographers took pictures not with flexible film but with glass plates. Craftsmen such as Andreas Larsen Dahl, H.H. Bennett, and Charles Van Schaick captured their remarkable images on sensitized glass, which they later contact printed to create positive images on paper. The Society library and archives possess more than 40,000 of these glass-plate negatives dating from the Civil War era into the 1960s. Most have never been printed on paper, and their historical information survives only as negative images on century-old, emulsion-coated sheets of glass."