Digitising the glass plate negatives of the Kiscell Museum

The history of the Kiscell Museum (Budapest History Museum) in Óbuda is unique. It stands out among the country’s museums not only for its location but also for its exciting history. The museum was originally built in the mid-18th century as a monastery of the Trinitarian order. Under the decree of Joseph II of 1782, however, the monastery was dissolved; it then first served military purposes, after which the capital set up emergency housing in the building. This lasted until 1910, when the Viennese furniture manufacturer and art collector Miksa Schmidt bought it and had it converted into a castle. Schmidt bequeathed the building to Budapest in his will, so in 1941 the Capital Museum (Fővárosi Múzeum) was moved into the castle.

The Photograph Collection

Within the Kiscell Museum’s collections on urban history is one of Hungary’s largest historical photograph collections. The Photograph Collection is one of the museum’s best-known and most researched collections and, in terms of numbers too, its largest, holding more than 200,000 objects. Arranged according to the topographic principle that defines the collection’s profile, the views of the city and its streets have documented the development of Budapest and the changes in its townscape since the 1860s.

The pictures are works by the most renowned photographers of the capital in each period (György Klösz, Mór Erdélyi, Antal Weinwurm, János Müllner, Rudolf Balogh, Zoltán Seidner, Kálmán Szőllősy, István Szendrő). The photographs cover an extremely varied range of subjects: they show the transformation of the old Pest city centre in the late 19th century just as they do the urban development programmes of the first decades of the 20th century, and they give a picture of vanished districts such as the Tabán or old Óbuda. The collection also includes the material of the photographic archive of the former Budapest Town Planning Design Company (BUVÁTI), containing tens of thousands of photographic negatives. The street views and architectural photographs depict, among other things, the streets and squares of Budapest before the reconstruction after 1956 and the urban redevelopment that followed. Alongside the cityscapes, the collecting of photographs of events related to the capital also began in the early 1900s.

Among the most valuable, and at the same time most fragile, groups of objects in the Photograph Collection are the glass plate negatives. The collection holds several thousand glass plate negatives from the late 19th century and the early 1900s.

The Tripont Cultural Heritage Solutions team – in line with the museum’s digitisation strategy – began digitising this especially valuable part of the collection in January 2022. The work began with the largest-format glass plate negatives. The specialists captured these extremely sensitive objects with the 150-megapixel Phase One iXH camera system, developed for the digitisation of flat objects.

Proper storage is very important for glass plates. With gelatin silver emulsion, particular attention must be paid to changes in humidity and temperature, since improper storage can cause glass plate negatives to corrode irreversibly and, through silver deposition, to lose the content they carry. In such cases it is worth making a copy of the glass plate negatives before restoration or, as in the present case, digitising them in the best possible quality.

The post-processing was carried out with the purpose-developed Capture One Cultural Heritage software, in which, thanks to the high dynamic range, even the hidden, darker areas came to life in full detail. As a first step, roughly two thousand negatives were digitised, and we hope the work will continue in the future. Thanks to the high resolution, we can zoom in on the glass plate negatives right down to the silver grains, as the images below illustrate well. These large-format analogue images were digitised with Phase One’s camera at extremely high quality and high resolution, which made the richness of detail in the images visible.

References:

Judit Baróti: A Budapesti Történeti Múzeum fényképgyűjteménye [The photograph collection of the Budapest History Museum]. In: Magyar Munkásmozgalmi Múzeum Közleményei [Bulletin of the Hungarian Museum of the Workers’ Movement] 1984/1-2. 79 – 91.

Károly Vörös: A világváros útján [On the road to becoming a world city]. 1873-1918. In: Budapesti Negyed [Budapest Quarterly] 1998/2 – 3. https://epa.oszk.hu/00000/00003/00016/voros.htm

István Wagner: Erdélyi Mór kilencven vintázsa – Kiscelli kiállítási sorozat [Mór Erdélyi’s ninety vintage prints – Kiscell exhibition series]. In: Fotó Piac – Foto Mozaik. 2007. 12.01. 64.

http://www.kiscellimuzeum.hu/gyujtemeny