Photographic Memories Workshop

/ culturalstudiesleuven

By Clarissa Colangelo

Photographic memoriesP1How was life in Leuven a century ago? Where did people meet up? Which was the most frequented shop? What games did kids play? While looking at photographs of the landmarks of Leuven, these are some of the questions that cross our minds. We want the photographs to speak to us and share their memories of past times. We not only want to see how the city used to look like, but we also want to know more about the city’s past inhabitants and their ways of living.

On Friday, November 27th the Europeana Space Photography Pilot coordinated by Professor Fred Truyen will host the “Photographic Memories Workshop” in collaboration with the Leuven City Archive. Seniors, students, citizens of Leuven and surrounding areas are invited: join us for a voyage in time, through the stories hidden in our photographic heritage and a Wet Collodion demonstration, and back to the present with the most modern digitization techniques.

We are looking for traces of this past and we need your help. If you hold photographs, negatives and even glass plates that show the past life in the streets, squares and market places of the city, bring them along to the workshop and tell us more about them. Top digitization specialist Bruno Vandermeulen will be there to digitize your photos using state-of-the-art technology, so have a USB stick* with you to bring back home the beautiful, high-quality, digitized versions of your photos. We only ask you to license the photographs as CC-BY-NC, which means that you allow us to reuse the photographs in a non-commercial context.

You will have the opportunity to get to know better the City Archive and its photographic collections.

At 14:00 professional photographer Frederik Van den Broeck will give a demonstration of the Wet Collodion technique and produce few tintypes and ambrotypes. The Wet Plate Collodion procedure is an early photographic process invented in 1851 by Frederick Scott Archer, and takes its name from the Collodion emulsion used to make the plates sensitive to light. The demonstration will be followed by the digitization of the newly-produced tintypes and ambrotypes by Bruno Vandermeulen: a way for us to connect and show you past photographic technologies and present ones.

Don’t miss the opportunity to witness the past and present of photography come together!

Photographic memoriesP2Programme:

  • 10:00 to 19:00
    • Browse through the City Archive collection
    • Digitization Process by Bruno Vandermeulen
  • 14:00 to 17:00
    • Wet Collodion Demonstration By Frederik Van den Broeck
  • 17:00 to 18:00
    • Digitization of a tintype or ambrotype produced with the Wet Collodion Technique

*recommended size: 8GB. Otherwise we can send you the file(s) via email.

Photo courtesy of Stadsarchief Leuven.