By Greg Staskiewicz, Reporter
Omaha’s Durham Museum is working to restore and bring to light thousands and thousands of memories of the city.
The museum’s exhibit, “Omaha Uncovered: Revealing History through Art and Story,” highlights the in-house photograph digitization project. Ongoing for 11 years, the project seeks to organize and upload to the museum’s Photo Archive over a million photographs and negatives kept in storage, said Becky Putzer, collection manager.
Many of the photos were taken by employees of the Omaha World Herald from the 1940s to the 1970s, and depict numerous aspects of life in the city, from horse racing, to weddings, to Christmas tree decoration in Union Station, the building now known as Durham Museum.
“And in Union Station here, we have a huge Christmas tree,” Putzer said. “In the past when they used to decorate it, they would hoist some guy up on a chair, and he would be hanging to decorate.”
The collection also contains tens of thousands of negatives from the Bostwick-Frohardt collection, Putzer said. It is named for Louis R. Bostwick, a photographer at the Weekly Illustrated Bee, and later an independent photographer, and his colleague Homer Frohardt. Many of these photos date back before 1905.
The digitization work requires delicate care for the many different types of images held in storage. The archive includes flammable nitrate film, 35 millimeter negatives, and old-fashioned glass plates. These sometimes come in broken, requiring repair and special attention before scanning, Putzer said.
“Omaha Uncovered” features the photo archive, but the centerpiece is an old oil-paint mural portraying Omaha as it was in 1905. “Aerial View of Omaha”, painted by Edward J. Austen for the Omaha Daily Bee newspaper, depicts the city from a bird’s-eye view in a time before airplanes, said Kenneth Bé, paintings conservator at the Ford Conservation Center.
The photo-realistic mural includes many locally famous landmarks, such as the Old Market, the county courthouse, Jobber’s Canyon and Central High School.
“This is unbelievable if I tell you, but he used no aerial photography, and no aerial means to view Omaha at the time,” Bé said. “He was an Englishman who was skilled at making murals, and he did this entire project just from familiarity with Omaha, on the ground and from maps.”
Bé restores thousands of paintings per year, but for this exhibit, he is taking his time. Bé slowly works on the painting in front of museum visitors and shares his knowledge about the conservation process. So far, he has removed the old, discolored varnish, cleaned the painting, and is working on adding new pigment and tone to areas of paint loss.
The exhibit, which opened in August, will run until Nov. 21.
