From 2005- 2016, a major focus for the museum Puke Ariki has been the Swainson/Woods Collection which totals over 111, 000 negatives from two Taranaki-based photographic studios.
The studio was first established by Joseph Swainson in 1923 and sold to Bernard Woods in the early 1960s. In the 1980s Bernard Woods Studio was taken over by Bernard’s daughter Jennifer, who continued the business until 1997 before donating the collection to Puke Ariki in 2005.
To explore the collection’s potential, Puke Ariki engaged in cleaning, rehousing into archival storage, cataloguing and finally digitising the negatives in a major project that was completed in 2016. As digitisation progressed images were shared through several community-focused initiatives with the aim of connecting them with the people to whom they matter the most.
The community was asked to share their knowedge through commenting on images online, at exhibitions held at Puke Ariki and the Taranaki district libraries, and in response to photographs published weekly in the local newspaper.
That work is still not over, so if you spot someone you know, get in touch with the team at Puke Ariki.
This article was republished with the permission of Puke Ariki. To see the original article, see here.
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