By Kira Pollack
Washington Post
Photographer Edward Burtynsky, known for his dramatic landscapes, has been pioneering a solution to one of the greatest challenges in preservation: scale. Burtynsky developed a high-tech scanner designed to digitize and catalogue images at an unprecedented rate — up to 2,000 per day. What used to take years can now take months. The system functions like a precision turntable, scanning both sides of prints simultaneously with high-resolution cameras and synchronized strobe lighting.
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Read MoreBy Kate Taylor
The Globe and Mail
89,000 Inuit prints have been languishing in storage at Ontario’s McMichael Gallery for decades. Finally, a technological innovation spearheaded by Ed Burtynsky means the public will be able to see these works – in many cases for the first time – in digital form.
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Read MoreGalleries West
The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University will digitize 25,000 press photographs of Canadian events, speeding the normally laborious work with an innovative machine developed by Toronto photographer Edward Burtynsky.
Burtynsky says a vast array of stunning photographs at various institutions languish in dark boxes in temperature-controlled storage with no public access.
"It's a thrill to finally be able to initiate an effective and innovative solution to this problem and bring this important photographic history into the light," he says.
Burtynsky has assembled a team of hardware and software developers to digitize the images with his equipment, known as ARKIV360, along with their folded captions, tear sheets and attached ephemera.
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Read MoreThe Image Centre
Toronto Metropolitan University
Innovative ARKIV360 machine, developed by famed photographer Edward Burtynsky, will be used to scan The Image Centre’s Rudolph P. Bratty Family Collection and make it accessible in an online database.
Toronto, ON – The Image Centre (IMC) at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) is pleased to announce that the Department of Canadian Heritage has granted over $300,000 to support the digitization of the IMC’s Rudolf P. Bratty Family Collection of press photographs drawn from the New York Times Photo Archive.
This funding was issued through the Digital Access to Heritage component of the Museums Assistance Program (MAP), which provides support to heritage organizations to digitize collections, develop digital content and build their capacity in these areas.
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Read MoreBy Larry Humber
The Art Newspaper
A trove of Inuit art—some 89,000 drawings in all—was created in Cape Dorset (now Kinngait) near the southern tip of Baffin Island between 1950 and 1980, providing a way for the community in Canada’s remote Nunavut territory to generate income. But very few of those works have seen the light of day through the issuing of limited-edition prints, with the Toronto market very much in mind.
After a devastating fire destroyed a similar archive in a nearby Arctic community, the Ontario-based McMichael Canadian Art Collection moved to acquire the Cape Dorset drawings in 1990, giving them a secure home. “Inuit art was always folded into our national identity,” says Sarah Milroy, the McMichael’s chief curator, making the acquisition an obvious move.
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