Kellan McNally

Archives

In the late 1880s, state asylum and hospital superintendents, like other physicians across the United States, began photographing the facilities they oversaw. The scenes they captured were then reproduced as halftones, a process that translated each photograph into a pattern of dots, reducing fine detail while allowing visual information to circulate in the administrative reports they sent to state authorities. Over recent decades, large libraries have made these reports available online through mass digitization, increasingly treating digital versions as replacements and, in some cases, considering permanent withdrawal of originals. This project considers how digitization creates information loss in the visual record of state asylums and hospitals through scanning workflows that prioritize cost and speed, and copyright claims asserted by commercial digitizers that restrict access to public-domain materials. These images are part of a larger project that has reproduced over 200 high-resolution scans from original bound volumes. A link under each image allows for a comparison of these reproductions with existing online versions, where skewing, cropping, and other scanning effects reduce the clarity of this archive. Archival master files are maintained as 1200 dpi uncompressed TIFFs; derivative files can be prepared for publication, exhibition, or research use upon request (info@kellanmcnally.com).