1.5 million personal memories could be preserved online
The legendary Elmwood Studios collection of 1.5 million Southland photographs from the 1940s to the 1970s could soon become searchable online and with names attached.
But it won’t be cheap. To properly digitise and make searchable the former Invercargill studio’s collection, one of the treasures in the region’s new Te Pātaka Taoka Southern Regional Collections Storage Facility in Tisbury, would probably cost $1.5m to $2.5m, regional collections manager Wayne Marriott said.
“We’re going to have to ask the public for its help in terms of supporting the funding,’’ he said.
Part of the beauty of the collection was that the photographers’ notebooks had also survived, so people would be able to search by name to find generations of their family, or others who mattered to them.
Marriott said the result would be “absolute gold for our community – a really good intergenerational legacy”.
“Here or from anywhere in the world you’ll be able to type a name in and see ... maybe your great-grandfather, cigarette hanging out of his mouth...”
The photographs, in many cases taken by Elmwood Studio’s owner Stuart Geange and his brother George, became famed throughout Southland.
They photographed both formal and informal occasions, and were particularly famed for capturing shots of people turning Bank Corner in Invercargill.
The corner had long been notoriously windy, Southlanders either battling westerly gales into Dee St or, from the other direction, being gently nudged around the corner and blown halfway down Tay St.
Former Southland Times women’s editor Pat Veltkamp Smith contended that the corner photography tradition proved good for everyone because it had people beaming whatever the conditions.
“Aware of the lurk of a possible camera, we often smiled – bravely it’s true – so if caught we’d be looking our best.’’
Asked why they chose such a windy place, Stuart later replied: “For the light; no verandahs.”
Marriott said the digitised collection would provide a great opportunity for people not just to call up the images, but to share the stories and memories they invoked, and also to help fill in gaps in identity and context.
The Tisbury facility, recently opened, was a storehouse of regional museum artefacts, artwork collections and photographs, not only keeping them safe and digitising them for easier research, but also arranging for physical objects’ careful circulation to facilities and for events around the south.