Eating Melon with Girls of the Last Century: Digitising Glass Plate Negatives in Kunszentmárton

Albert Sáray Szabó opened his first photographic studio in Kunszentmárton in 1898 and for a full half-century photographed his beloved town in the Tiszazug region. In the attic of the photographer's studio, some 8,000 glass plate negatives were later found, all of which bear witness to the life of the urban culture emerging around the turn of the century.

Girls of marriageable age went to the town photographer to surprise the one their heart had chosen with a portrait, and of course freshly conscripted young men also had portraits taken of themselves in uniform. Weddings and the arrival of new family members were recorded. But it is not only the life of individuals but also that of the town that appears in these pictures: the town's theatre company is there on them just as proudly as the municipal council is.

As photography became more and more a part of the life of an increasingly bourgeois Kunszentmárton, after a while pictures were taken not only in the studio but also in homes and in the town's public spaces. So, for example, anyone who looks through the pictures taken over several decades can also trace the development of agriculture. The social picture shown by the glass plate negatives is nuanced by the fact that a further 2,000 or so glass plate negatives came into the collection from the estate of the former photographer of Cibakháza, a nearby village.

Today these roughly 10,000 glass plate negatives in total are a treasured asset of the Local History Museum of Kunszentmárton (Kunszentmártoni Helytörténeti Múzeum), holding immeasurable value for researchers and enthusiasts of ethnography, local history, social history and cultural anthropology. But glass plate negatives are very sensitive: silver degradation is particularly dangerous to them, since a protective gelatine layer was not yet applied to these glass plates. As a result the silver has already begun to separate out, and shiny silver spots, clearly visible to the naked eye, have appeared in the dense areas. In addition, fungi also attack the emulsion surface.

Despite careful conservation, the glass plate negatives of the Local History Museum of Kunszentmárton are at the eleventh hour: they can still be digitised now, but there must be no delay. And, what is especially important from the point of view of local history, there are still local residents alive who can add their own memories and stories to the later photographs.

At a demonstration, Tripont digitised 7 glass plate negatives in Kunszentmárton with a Phase One IQ280 system. The Local History Museum is looking for an opportunity to digitise, because the quality and richness of detail of the resulting images made it clear to everyone that the digital form, beyond archiving, greatly facilitates research on the images. What is more, the enlarged, clearly visible images would be more enjoyable for the museum's visitors as well.