Behind the Pictures: The Wurts Brothers Collection

The National Building Museum’s collections are estimated at greater than half 1,000,000 gadgets. The largest materials kind (by amount, not by dimension!) are photographic supplies: prints, negatives, transparencies, slides, and extra. The Museum’s pictures collections embrace the company archives of many architectural photographers all through the medium’s historical past, relationship again to the 19^th century.

One of those long-spanning collections is the Wurts Brothers Photography Collection. This unbelievable trove paperwork the works of brothers Norman and Lionel Wurts, and later, of Richard Wurts, who inherited the household enterprise from his father and uncle within the Nineteen Twenties. They traveled the nation on behalf of people, authorities, and company shoppers, together with St. Gobain Glass, Otis Escalator, Alcoa, and extra. Our employees workforce on the Museum preserves, describes, and digitizes this archive of fragile glass negatives, polyester-supported versatile negatives, black-and-white prints, and colour transparencies.

In cataloging these photographs, the Collections division consists of the Wurts’ personal descriptions of their work as incessantly as doable, assisted by a replica of their enterprise ledger ebook. Much of the Wurts assortment might be recognized utilizing the “Wurts Negative Number,” a singular six-digit quantity the Wurtses assigned to every picture and scratched into the nook of the adverse. This quantity was additionally recorded within the ledger ebook after which used to match pictures to shoppers.

Not each web page of the Wurts ledger ebook is legible or consists of helpful data. Many of the early entries are merely strings of six-digit numbers, indicating that these specific Wurts Negative Numbers had been used already and shouldn’t be reused. Sometimes the ledger ebook additionally contradicts data that the Wurtses recorded on the again of a print. In that case, the Collections division researches the contradiction and information each units of knowledge within the Museum’s collections database.

Like trendy photographers, the Wurtses recorded fascinating and useful particulars on the again of their images, like this notation about coral water filtration methods at a lodge in Bermuda in 1940:

The handwriting on the again of the print reads: “Goldfish are kept in water tanks to eat any larva that forms in supply …  All drinking water on the islands is rain water collected from the white washed coral roofs of each house or cottage as well as any out buildings, sheds, -etc. and all draining down via stone or metal gutters and leaders to a central storage tank. In older buildings, tanks were separate and partly above ground as in this view, but in recent buildings, tanks are usually built in cellar when foundations are laid and pumps used to carry supply upstairs.”

Sometimes the main points on the again of prints are extra whimsical, recording the names and relations of the house owners over time and native lore concerning the website.

This print declares that the home depicted was in-built 1753 for Oliver Wolcott Sr., a signatory to the American Declaration of Independence. At the time the picture was taken in February 1969, it was residence to Mrs. Frederick W. Sherman. Additionally, the print reveals: “Story has it — Behind this house statue of King Geo. III was melted down + made into bullets to fight the British during Amer. revolution.”

But typically, one of the best details about {a photograph} is textual content included within the picture itself, like this shot of a mannequin residence in Westchester County, New York.

This picture depicts a two-story brick residence with a copper roof, an connected one-car storage, and a fenced-in again yard. The signal within the spacious entrance yard reads: “This 1936 Westchester County Model Home will be given away at the Better Homes Exposition County Center May 12th to 20th 1936. Tickets 45 [cents symbol] now on sale”.

These textual particulars supply extra context into the worlds these photographers depicted, revealing not simply the visible scene that lay earlier than the digital camera, however the oral traditions and actions of the place. The Wurts Brothers endeavored to point out not solely how a spot appeared, but in addition what was mentioned about it on the time and the way individuals interacted with the place. This fuller image is important to our cataloging course of and the preservation of those photographs.