Wisconsin Historical Society - Albertype Collection

The Wisconsin Historical Society holds a remarkable postcard-related collection, the nitrate negatives of the Albertype Company. This collection is comprised of 12,000 nitrate negatives produced by the Albertype Company of Brooklyn, New York between 1890 and 1952 that were used to create over 25,000 photographic prints, souvenir books, pamphlets and postcards for national distribution during this time period. The former photograph curator of the Society, Paul Vanderbilt, obtained them from the Library of Congress and brought them to WHS in 1954 and 1955.

The negatives are stunning and fragile for the same reason, the nitrate-negative reproduction process the Albertype Company employed. Invented by Austrian Photographer Joseph Albert (1825-1886), the process used a collotype coated glass plate to produce a printing plate for inking and reproduction on paper. It made high-speed mass production of photographs on paper which mimicked the appearance of photographs possible for the first time. The process has been replaced today with offset lithography but is still in use in fine art reproduction. The large format nitrate negatives ranging from 4” x 5” to 8” x 10” the Albertype Company used for this process have a gorgeous level of detail but the nitrate negative material itself is an unstable format that will degrade into noxious, flammable, outgassing goo over time. Over time, other cellulose formats replaced nitrate negatives because of these problems and today the more stable polyester format is standard. Cooling will considerable slow the nitrate decay process and WHS stores the negatives in refrigerators to mitigate the decay of the negatives. Meanwhile, the Visual Materials Digital Lab is digitizing the negatives and placing them online to allow greater access to the collection.

The collection fascinates me for a number of reasons. First, its management and description reflects changing priorities and approaches in archival visual materials practices. The Albertype negatives are arranged topically and have item-level description including location typewritten on each sleeve. Vanderbilt also dispersed some of the collection to other repositories based on content affinities. This item-level treatment is no longer possible for most collections and as I read the type on each sleeve I consider the amount of time and research that went into to the work. Moreover, during Vanderbilt’s time, photos were seen as useful for their content and properly separated from their provenance-based original order in collections. Distributing parts of the collection to other repositories based on the location documented in the photo and completely physically reorganizing the collection into subject categories (including, for instance, glaciers) was appropriate and obvious. Technologically facilitated access to visual materials allows archives today to provide both subject and content-based access while preserving provenance context. More important, I also think that archivists in our media saturated society have shifted to considering photographs as records in a way they were not previously.

Approaching the materials in the Albertype collection as a whole exposes many other layers of what it documents apart from particular places at particular times. When the collection was originally produced ostensibly it offered a new visual lexicon to America, of America. It was the cutting edge of mass-produced visual materials in a geographically-large young nation composed primarily of immigrants with many barriers to transportation. In other words, I see the Albertype collection as a record of the visual stories the nation told itself about itself to create itself across the barriers of space and culture.

Perusing the digitized portions of the collection underlines this propagandistic nation-forming function of the images. It documents regions, history and citizens of the country as stereotype and grand narrative. Here is the ice breaking up in Alaska, here are the things that belonged to the Pilgrims, here are the “Indians,” here is the impoverished and happy “negro,” here is the city beautiful, here are the giant trees to be cut in the west, here are the portraits of “great men,” here is a room where George Washington lived. These were postcard images to send to distant relatives and friends. Looking at the collection as a whole, I read these images against the grain, seeing both the image itself and how it contributed to a construction of “America.”

Ice Break in Alaska, Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID 68799

Pilgrim Chair and Cradle, Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID 72074

Buffalo Hunting in the Southwest Painting, Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID 70725

African American Boy, Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID 71438

Fountain in New York City, Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID 69585

Old Growth Forest, Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID 68498

Andrew Jackson, Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID 70754

George Washington’s bedroom, Valley Forge, PA Wisconsin Historical Society Image ID 71964

Digitization of these remarkable and fascinating images is ongoing. Currently there are over 2700 online. Find the collection by searching “Albertype” as a keyword in the Wisconsin Historical Images Database at: http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/whi/

Many thanks to Andy Kraushaar the Visual Materials Curator at the Wisconsin Historical Society for introducing me to the Albertype collection and for his work to make it broadly available online.

I wonder what we will tell ourselves about ourselves with these images now.

Entry compiled by: Virginia Corvid.