Can our archivist pick one favourite photo?
Th Historic Environment Image Resource (HEIR), is an interdisciplinary image resource at the School of Archaeology, created by Dr Sally Crawford and Dr Katharina Ulmschneider, and curated under the direction of Dr Janice Kinory. HEIR contains thousands of digitised historic photographic images from all over the world dating from the late nineteenth century onwards. HEIR’s core images come from lantern slide and glass plate negatives held in college, library, museum and departmental collections within the University of Oxford. New resources are being added all the time, including collections from outside the University.
So, for this Festive Trowel, we asked Dr Kinory the meanest question: to pick her favourite picture from this incredible collection and to tell us a little bit about why it is so special to her. She picked two and we agreed that was okay. Here is her response and the two photos. Why not have a look at the collection yourself, it's online here and free to access.
Oh dear! I've been asked this question previously and the truth is that I don't have a single favourite. However, as I would never want to forego the chance to promote HEIR (http://heir.arch.ox.ac.uk), I will give you two choices and you can pick. One is our Resource Number 50103, the "Bridge at Mien-Chau", now Mianzhu City, Sichuan, China. Not only is it a lovely image, but it was also taken by an intrepid woman traveller and early photographer, Isabella Lucy Bird Bishop, in 1895. It came to the HEIR Project from the Geography Collections of the Social Sciences Library. The bridge no longer exists, so it is keyworded as a "lost vista" as well as a "bridge."
A second favourite, from the School of Archaeology's contribution to HEIR, is Resource Number 33706, the Temple of Minerva Medica in Rome, Italy, pictured by T R R Stebbing in the late 19th or early 20th century. It is one of the 66 pictures in the HEIR Project digital image archive keyworded "laundry". The presence of laundry in so many of the early pictures we digitised was an unexpected surprise.
