On National Photography Day.
From early days, photographs were used to teach the history of art and architecture. Since the 1880s, lantern slides were used for teaching, and then in the mid 1930s, the 35mm slide was introduced one year after the invention of Kodachrome, Kodak's three-color process. 35mm slides were vital for teaching - think of today’s PowerPoint!
Since the founding of the Fogg Art Museum in 1895, the Fine Arts Library has served the needs of teaching faculty, art museum staff, undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and historians at Harvard and around the world. By 1920s, many universities had slide libraries, including Harvard. Since then, FAL has acquired over 600,000 35 mm slides, mainly from the courses taught by Harvard faculty over the decades.
Caramate is a vintage slide projector. Instead of using a standard slide projector to project images onto a screen for group viewing, the Caramate allowed individual users to quickly check the images and make sure that slides were inserted into a carousel in the right direction and correct orientation.
We have digitized most of the 35 mm slides, but over the long term the archiving of this significant teaching collection, nearly in its original arrangement, will serve as a valuable record both of the past art historical interests of faculty and students, as well as a tangible reminder of bygone classroom teaching practices.