Boston Public Library Historic Photographs on Flickr

Birthplace of John Adams, Quincy, Mass., taken 1929 by Leon Abdalian, originally uploaded by Boston Public Library.

We’ve become spoiled, and a little jaded, perhaps, by great resources like HABS and the New York Public Library’s on-line image collections but there’s a huge amount of newly digitized historic material still being put on the web. Yesterday, the Boston Public Library posted a fabulous collection of historic photographs on Flickr that deserves attention from architectural historians and others. It includes 781 photographs by Leon Abdalian, an Armenian immigrant who photographed sites in and around Boston between the 1910s and early 1950s. It includes a number of wintry landscape views but most images show significant buildings in the region, including the old and new Massachusetts State houses, Faneuil Hall, Richardson’s Trinity Church, and many many others. For anyone interested in the early architecture of eastern Massachusetts, or the colonial revival in New England, they are a marvelous resource.

At the moment, the images are well captioned but not tagged. It would be fantastic to have them geo-tagged, as well, but having them available digitally is a great start.

I’d love to know more about Abdalian himself, and the circumstances of these photographs. His day job was, apparently, driving a trolley but was he paid to make these expensive glass-plate negatives? If he was a hobbyist, shooting what was of interest, how did he choose his subjects? The buildings in the collection include some of the oldest in the Massachusetts Bay area, though he also recorded some sites that seem to have been of greater historical than architectural interest, like Benjamin Franklin’s birthplace.

It’s worth noting, as well, that the photographs in the collection are predominantly of 17th, 18th, and 19th-century buildings. There are very few images of contemporary architecture, which presumably reflects Abdalian’s preferences but perhaps also says something about the building culture of Boston in the first half of the twentieth century. The few early 20th-century buildings in the collection are predominantly Beaux-Arts civic structures. There is also a very nice series of religious buildings, including Old South Church and Temple Israel Synagogue in Boston, and a series of public monuments.

After you’ve looked over the Abdalian images, don’t miss the BPL’s Boston Stereographs collection.

A Blog? Seriously?

How can anyone with any claim to scholarship spend time on something as seemingly frivolous and self-absorbed as a blog? To be sure, there is no shortage of dreck on the web but a weblog is no more and no less than a medium for written communication and therefore a useful tool. I have taken up this tool for two reasons, both centered around the utililty of computing for architectural history.

First, there is little understanding evident among my peers about the potential of digital technologies for architectural research. Our friends in history, archaeology, architectural design, literary studies, the social sciences, and even art history have begun to explore digital possibilities for their work with much more enthusiasm. So, I hope, this blog can help shine a little light on what architectual historians have to gain from computers.

Second, I want to explore, through writing, the possibilities of working digitally and the larger implications of rendering buildings in digital form. What is gained or lost in representing architecture in a digital photograph, or a digital model, or a database? What happens to our work as its publication moves from print to digital, and from the library to the web? To help understand these questions, I am beginning to explore the history of architectural representation in writing, drawings, and models to help me place digitization within our particular disciplinary context.

My hope is that short posts on particular digital topics–imaging, CAD drafting, database construction, for example–will, over time, develop as useful web-based reference materials for architectural research. I have posted several notes to email discussion lists on some of these subjects over the last few years, and given advice to friends privately, but this material is not widely available even though experience suggests that it should be.

Finally, I hope that the discipline of writing short public pieces on a regular basis will help me clarify my thinking on architectural representations and motivate me to push my research along. Because I work in a museum, I do not have a regular audience of students for testing ideas but a blog seems a fine venue for semi-baked notions that are not ready for a conference paper or publication. The very qualities that make blogs seem to lack seriousness (they are unvetted, spontaneous, and ephemeral) are the same ones that make them an ideal testing ground for new material.