Black-and-white photographs that accompanied stories told decades ago in the pages of the Cayman Compass are adorning the walls of the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands.
This new TimeBack exhibit at the gallery is part of the Compass’ extensive archives that are being made available to the public to give people a glimpse into the not-too-distant past, to relive fond memories, see old friends and family members, and celebrate the Cayman of earlier days.
Speaking at the launch of the exhibit on Friday evening, 14 March, Richy O’Carroll, the Compass TimeBack project leader, explained that, at the start of the endeavour to make the newspaper’s photos accessible, it was estimated that there were about 30,000 photographic negatives and photos. As the project got under way, it was discovered that there were, in fact, more than 330,000 of them.
Nineteen large boxes of photos were shipped to Los Angeles where they were scanned and saved to the Cloud.
Each month, 100 photos from the archive – dating back to 1965 – are released on the timeback.ky website, nicknamed ‘Cayman’s family album’, where viewers are invited to comment on the pictures and help identify the people, places and events shown, if it’s not known already.
Craig Merren, Kieron Rankine, Jewel Levy, Barrie Quappé, Nasaria Suckoo Chollette, Lucille Seymour and Clinton Ebanks, along with Ivan Burges, the newspaper’s archivist, contributed to ensuring the project – a collaboration between Dart, Compass Media and the National Gallery – came to fruition.
O’Carroll paid special thanks to long-time Compass staffer Burges, who, he said, had been so instrumental in restoring “all this history in print, photos and video”.
He also thanked the Kenneth B. Dart Foundation for funding the project.
He noted that, with the successful archiving of the photographs complete, the next project was to scan more than 9,000 editions of the Compass, so they can be turned into searchable webpages within the newspaper website, caymancompass.com.
After that, the archive team will begin the next phase, along with the National Gallery, to scan and tag 27 years of video footage from Cayman 27 and CITN, which will add to the programming of the television station Compass Media will soon be launching.
The gallery’s collections curator, William Helfrect, told the large audience who got a sneak peek of the exhibit on Friday a little about the challenges the team faced in putting it together, including the difficulty of choosing just 70 or 80 photos from the 330,000 available.
“As you’re walking around, bear that in mind,” he told those in attendance. “This exhibition is merely a sampling of a much, much wider archive.”
Pointing out that most of the images on display were from the 1980s and 1990s, Helfrect said, “I think the real impact of this show is that it deals with the recent past, with memory that is accessible to many, many people in this room. In fact, you may well, as you’re looking around, recognise individuals; you may well recognise yourself; you’ll certainly recognise some of the locales and some of the places that are featured in these images.
“I think it has a poignancy and an immediacy, particularly now in this moment, that really reinforces what we do here at the National Gallery and our sister cultural organisations, and that is preserving and protecting Caymanian culture.”
The exhibit can be viewed at the National Gallery until 20 June.
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