Negatives are a Utah treasure trove

For those who want to see firsthand the construction of the Salt Lake Temple or the face of a turn-of-the century copper miner, there's a treasure trove deep in the basement of the Rio Grande Depot.

The thousands of negatives stored there by the Utah Division of State History provide snapshots of the people, buildings, streets and landscapes that have shaped Utah's history. Many of the older negatives, stored in boxes on rows of shelving, are particularly fragile because they're made of glass.

"It's a big concern for us," says Doug Misner, information center manager. "The library shelves are very old, they've had a lot of stress over the years."

This year, the Legislature allocated $75,000 in funding to purchase new, more sturdy shelving for the negatives that will be tied together and secured to the floor and ceiling, Misner said. The project will start as soon as funding becomes available at the start of the new fiscal year on July 1.

The Utah Division of State History has posted prints from many of the negatives to its Web site as part of a digitization process in partnership with the University of Utah. It's also important to preserve the original negatives, said Philip Notarianni, director of the Division of Utah State History.

"The U. cleaned the negatives and placed them in acid-free storage," he said. "Now we're making sure the shelving is adequate."

The state's largest private collection includes 100,000 negatives from 1902 to 1980 taken by the Shipler family of photographers.

"Ten thousand are online, and that's just a drop in the bucket," Notarianni said. "It's a tremendous collection in it's size and scope. It documents life at the turn of the century."

Another collection of glass-plate negatives was taken by photographer William Edward Hook from 1878 to 1882.

Photo curator Susan Whetstone said the state's collection includes as many as 40,000 glass-plate negatives, dating from the 1880s into the early 1900s. The entire glass-plate process had to be done while plates were wet with developing chemicals, Whetstone says, so photographers would develop pictures at the scene. Other methods that pre-date modern photography in the state collection include ambrotypes, tintypes and daguerreotypes, dating back to the 1860s.

John McCormick, a historian and dean of humanities and social sciences at Salt Lake Community College, said those who explore the past are dependent on the information sources available.