Angela Todd will speak on

"Digital to Daguerrotype: Portraits at Hunt Institute"

Digital Imagers Meeting Field Trip

Sunday Feb 1, 2009 at 1:15, CMU Hunt Library 5th floor, on Frew Street

The Presentation:

For fifty years, the archives dept of the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation has collected portraits of botanists from around the world and throughout history. Mrs. Hunt began the collection with engravings, lithographs and prints of the elder statesmen of botany and gardening. Later the collection became a more public one that also documents the present, photographs quickly became our most collected portraits. My talk will be artifact driven, with a vast array of photos on display: our one daguerreotype, autochromes, glass negatives, cartes de visite, and of course photo prints. From standard institutional head shots to photos of botanists in the field, to government records of plant production, showing indigenous peoples, this talk questions what counts as a portrait, and what the job of the portrait is in historical docum,entation.

Biography

Ms. Todd earned a B.A. in literature and women's studies from the University of Southern Maine and a Masters in English from State University of New York at Binghanton. With a job she loves, as Archivist at the Hunt Institute, she finds herself considerably slowed in working on her cultural studies dissertation, tentatively titled "Sir Hans Sloane, Don Saltero and the Professionalizing of Natural History". She has been at the Hunt Institute since 1996, and Archivist and Research Scholar since 1999.

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