Saturday 12 December 2009

New Years Resolutions

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all from Jackie and Bob.

Our new year resolution is to improve pompeiiinpictures.com by adding two new areas for the Sarno Canal and for views of all streets. We also want to add more older pictures.

We would love to include pictures such as those taken by Tatiana Warscher before WW2, in particular those of Regio I.2 and I.3 and Regio 7.6. These insulas interest us greatly as they have changed so much over the years.

We would also be interested in any pictures from anywhere in Pompeii that you may have which show houses and features that are no longer there or not now visible.

If we had the use of some of these pictures we could return to Pompeii in the Spring to take a new photograph from exactly the same positions and publish the old and the new next to each other.

The problem with a free site such as ours is that we do not have funds to pay for lots of pictures, however all pictures are published with appropriate credits to their copyright owners.

Can anyone help identify sources where our request may be sympathetically received.

6 comments:

xyz said...

Well, the Oplontis Project has been scanning all of the archival images of the excavations of Villa A. These will, eventually, be made publicly available through our database. But, I will certainly check into the transferal of these onto a more public arena. As the Sarno Canal plows directly through our villa...we can be added to your new category!

Jo Berry said...

The Warscher photos were most bought up by Van der Poel (I believe, because he funded some of her work at Pompeii I think) and are now at the Getty.

Jackie and Bob at pompeiiinpictures said...

Thanks Lea.
Look forward to hearing more.

Thanks Jo.
We did get in touch with the Getty in July 2007 and were informed that they were "currently researching the copyright status of the photographs in this collection, none of which were taken by Vander Poel himself".

We followed this up in July 2008 and were informed they were "still looking into the rights issues".

They also said they did not feel the collection was suitable for our site as the photographs are "primarily close-up shots of architectural details without any surrounding visual context for the shots".

Does anyone have any up to date information or has seen the collection and can verify the comments made or suggest possible contacts or approaches?

Merry Christmas
Jackie and Bob in 39 DegreeC Oz.

Jo Berry said...

I've never seen the photos, but I've discussed them with Laurentino Garcia y Garcia (who worked with Van der Poel). Van der Poel funded Warscher's work in Pompeii, but she was kept away from any of the 'new' Maiuri excavations and worked mainly in the areas that had been uncovered years before and were in bad condition. I understand that the photos document details, and are not overviews of the excavations (so the Getty are right about that). I think you need a trip to Los Angeles!

Jackie and Bob at pompeiiinpictures said...

Thanks Jo and Laurentino.

When you next speak to Laurentino Garcia y Garcia you can let him know that Jackie really loves his Danni di guerra a Pompei. Its her favourite Pompei book and she really agrees with and feels the "dolorosa" in the subtitle and the similar comments he makes in the text. It shows just what we would like to achieve with old photographs. Many of the old photographs shown were taken by Tatiana Warscher.

Regios I.2, I.3 and VII.6 that we mentioned in our original post were badly bombed or earthquake damaged and a lot has been lost. If the other Warscher photographs are similar in style or content to those used by Laurentino Garcia y Garcia in his book then they might show features that are not there now and we think would make an interesting addition to the existing pictures on pompeiiinpictures.com.

As Eric Poehler said in his recent interview (thanks for the kind words Eric) we record the whole house including including bare masonry walls. Any photographs that fill in the detail, show a wall before it was bare or even show now absent walls, are of interest to us and to those using our web site.

Our coverage of Pompeii is wider than most, and anything and everything Pompeian is therefore of interest to us. We will eventually reschedule our deferred 2007 trip to the Getty, but in the meantime we would still love to hear from anyone about any older photographs or drawings of features no longer visible or of artefacts no longer in situ.

Jackie and Bob

Eric Poehler said...

A completely random search on the web - just a shot in the dark about the excavations in Bottaro in the 1930s - revealed an inventory of the van der Poel archive:

http://www.oac.cdlib.org/data/13030/81/kt3s202081/files/kt3s202081.pdf

Search the (huge) document for Warscher or head down to page 130 for her papers.

Hope this is useful to you... it looks good.

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