35 mm Slides as Archival Documents : Connecting our past and future cultural heritage
By Tyler Doyle-Chenard— Practicum Student 2024
Pierre du Prey, “Versailles, Petit Trianon, Pavillon français,” photo April 8, 1987, 5 pm (Acc. C4-01821, AVRC, SSAC, Carleton University; License CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0: Creative Commons).
I came to my two semesters of practicum at the Audio-Visual Resource Center (AVRC) with three years of undergraduate studies in art and architectural history (AAH) and an interest in working in an art library or archival setting. My hands-on experience at the AVRC was primarily in cataloguing and digitizing many 35 mm slides of Versailles and Paris Hotel Particuliers, all part of a collection of 40,000 photographic slides donated by Pierre du Prey, a Canadian researcher and architectural historian.
Not only did I learn the digitization process, but I also became interested in slides as archival records, vehicles through which we connect the past to the present and future. Slides are images and physical objects that embody a specific social and cultural experience, that of their author, a place, and a time.
As an object, the 35 mm slide is a transparent positive film with an image surrounded by a plastic, cardboard, or metal frame that measures 35 mm x 24 mm. Its name comes from its 35 mm width. Slide photography was created in the 1940s and gained popularity throughout the 1950s, 60s, 80s and 90s. During these years, professors and students in art and architectural history classes used projected slides as pedagogical resources. However, others like researchers, architects, and museum professionals used light tables and small handheld viewers when working with slides. Slide photographs were taken by researchers and other professionals like architects and professors to document their projects or provide the visual content of lectures and conferences. Universities and museums amassed extensive collections of slides that they produced, purchased, or received as donations. With the arrival of digital technology and new media platforms like computers and smartphones, 35 mm slides fell out of use. They were replaced by digital images stored in databases, which are easily downloadable for viewing and incorporated into visual presentation programs like PowerPoint or websites. Sadly, in the early 2000s, slide libraries and their collections were devalued and deaccessioned. Fortunately, that has not been the fate of the AVRC, which still houses a collection of over 250,000 35 mm slides.
Pierre du Prey, “Versailles, Petit Trianon, south facade,” photo April 8, 1987, 1 pm (Acc. C4-01822, AVRC, SSAC, Carleton University; License CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0: Creative Commons).
My experience with photographic slides comes from working with the du Prey slides, carefully handling them to transfer their content to digital format. However, with my interest in archiving, I started to think about how 35 mm slides in the du Prey image collection of architecture and built environments carry much history and are valuable documents that retain his visual interpretation of the sites. The slides are archival documents because of their content’s value, their unique perspective, and their materiality. Materiality is the slide photograph as an object that exists in time and space. For example, a slide of Versailles ‘Petit Trianon’ taken by du Prey in 1987 is both material and intellectual. It is a physical object made of film, chemicals, and a framing mount. However, it also represents content expressed through du Prey’s chosen view and interpretation of the Petit Trianon and its environment on April 8, 1987, at 1 p.m. Du Prey’s motivation and purpose in photographing this eighteenth-century building are his own and remain open to interpretation for the viewer, the researcher, and the student.
The ability of du Prey to select his views and manipulate his medium at a specific moment influences the architectural and contextual reading of the built environment. How du Prey captures historical context through photography is not simply or quickly snapping a shot with his 35 mm camera; he is not just applying a technical process. As a photographer, he constructs his images and expresses an architectural and historical past through the lens of the present. His decisions regarding lines, angle, light, and distance are likely not random; they correspond to the precise moment he takes the picture and encapsulates his ideas, values, beliefs, and experience as an architectural historian and photographer intuitively. His research projects for books, exhibitions, or teaching also inform his photographic decisions. His choices are many, but ultimately, as a photographer, he looks to produce objective documentation or aesthetic expression of architecture.
Pierre du Prey, “Versailles, Petit Trianon, garden facade,” photo August 1, 1965, pm (Acc. C4-01775, AVRC, SSAC, Carleton University; License CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0: Creative Commons).
With time, du Prey’s slide photographs become historical documents that connect the built environment of a past time to ours. For example, du Prey’s slide photographs of the Petit Trianon, dated August 1965 and April 1987, are now studied from the present perspective 2024. Du Prey’s slide photographs contribute to a re-evaluation of architecture in relation to a vantage point corresponding to a specific moment, the date and time of his slide photograph, that fits into a precise socio-cultural context. The notion of historical consciousness can help us connect past, present, and future representations of architecture.
His slides’ content and material form also contribute to a trajectory through time and space, making his slide collection an archival document. For example, to define the history and usage of du Prey’s Petit Trianon slides, a researcher or archivist asks questions like: Have they been on loan to educational or cultural institutions for teaching or exhibition? Were they discussed in a lecture or text? Have the slides been for conservation treatments because of damage or as per standards of practice? How did they become part of the AVRC’s collection? Visual Resources Librarian Jasmine Burns of Cornell University writes, “Such information can be valuable to researchers in understanding the larger cultural context of the work itself or the artist’s [architect/architectural historian’s] larger body of work.” In other words, archiving du Prey’s 35 mm slide collection is helpful because it can support our understanding of the evolution of the built environment and its place within his body of work.
I enjoyed learning about 35 mm slides and conversations with Nancy Duff, Supervisor of Resources Services at the AVRC, regarding the value of the du Prey slide collections as original archival documents and markers of our understanding of Canadian and world cultural heritage.