As part of the museum’s transformation, our Kodak gallery has been undergoing a refresh. To make this happen, our Collections Services and Curatorial teams have had to move a large number of objects out of the gallery into temporary storage—but now they’re back.
This is no small undertaking, and the teams have been busy for several weeks, carefully moving our important objects back into their cases in time for the museum to reopen in January 2025.
What was the process like to reinstall the Kodak gallery after the museum’s temporary closure?
Vanessa: There are a lot of stages to this process! First, we have to clean the glass showcases which house the objects. Then we bring the objects themselves from their temporary homes to the gallery, and carefully remove them from their boxes. We document this process, removing and storing the object labels in a folder covering the exhibition.
Next is installing the object, placing it carefully in its place in the case. Each object has a label added, with information and context about it. Once everything is in, we lock the showcase and record the object’s new location in our database.
It has been really enjoyable working on the install with lots of colleagues from different teams working together. And it’s so nice to see the objects again after they’ve been tucked away in store during the building works. Not to forget the most important part of the process—tea breaks fuelled by doughnuts and biscuits!
How did the reinstallation process provide an opportunity to refresh the gallery’s content?
Ruth: We took the opportunity to refresh the ‘digital revolution’ section, bringing this content up to date and including our first-born digital acquisition—the ‘Absolute Unit’ meme.
There was also an opportunity to install a new case in the gallery, ‘Pedal Power’. This includes the story of the Bradford Camera Club, featuring elements from an album detailing the club’s history through the life of co-founder Mabel Bruce. The entire album was not suitable for display, but if visitors wish to see the full album in greater detail they are welcome to request a research visit to our collections centre, Insight.
Can you share any new elements that visitors can look forward to in the reinstalled Kodak gallery? What do you think visitors will really enjoy?
Saquib: We have a new interactive in digital revolution section which gives a nice selfie opportunity—we think that will be fun. And the new ‘Pedal Power’ case mentioned before tells the story of how cycling and photography brought people together, including the Bradford Camera Club. Overall, it’s still the familiar Kodak gallery our visitors know and love.
Did you take any new approaches to the install that you hadn’t before?
Alex Greenhough: We used barcode scanners to help us with some of the documentation processes involved in the project. We have used technology like this before at the museum, but not for a gallery install like this one. This helped us speed up tasks like updating locations in our collections database, and it worked really well!
We also implemented a new method for reporting on our progress with the install which tells us how many objects we have installed (and how many we have left to go) at the end of each day. This was great because it helped us keep track of how we’ve been doing, and give ourselves a round of applause every time we reached a new milestone!
Ruth Quinn: We commissioned a new facsimile of one of our most treasured objects, a daguerreotype of Jabez Hogg photographing Mr Johnson, made in 1843. We needed to give the original image a break from display for conservation reasons, but we wanted our visitors to still be able to experience the beauty of a daguerreotype image. We commissioned leading expert in historic photographic processes, Mike Robinson, to make a new daguerreotype using the historic process. The final result is an image that’s almost identical to the original, and faithfully reproduces the mirrored surface of an 1840s daguerreotype.
Vanessa Torres: I used my project management skills to define the work planned to be carried out each day, which included:
- Preparing each object needed for install on each given day
- Identifying where objects were stored and where they needed to be moved to
- Knowing how many people I needed each day
- Knowing what equipment was needed each day depending on the complexity of objects
- Which keys were needed to open the relevant showcases
This really helped the install team understand the tasks ahead, monitor our progress clearly and recognise our achievements. What a fabulous team—we had fun, finished every day with an incredible sense of achievement and gave each other a round of applause at every opportunity to celebrate our goals and recognise our efforts!