David Larsen

It took the Africa Media Online digitisation team two months to digitise over 4,000 traditional Zulu artefacts at the Phansi Museum in Durban. The project, funded by the National Lottery Commission was awarded to the Phansi Museum for the digitisation of their collection and the building of a digital archive. The funding was awarded in 2015. We, however, were on site at the museum premises toward the end of 2016.

Scott Cronwright assisted by Sandile Mhongo, operating our Phase One XF camera tethered to a computer. The camera allows us to set the range of focus and the number of focus points within that range to capture. Phansi Museum, Durban.

Our digitisation team headed up by our photographer, Scott Cronwright, used our Phase One IQ3 100 megapixel digital back on two cameras, our Phase One XF camera for 3D objects and our Alpa FPS 12 camera for flat objects.

Sandile Mhlongo, who has just loaded a flat object onto the capture surface, waits for Scott Cronwright to capture a flat object while Timothy Zuma prepares the next object. The object being captured is a beaded waistcoat. It is illuminated evenly by our Broncolor lights. Phansi...

In May 2018 Robyn Keet, our picture library manager at the time, teamed up with the PhotoZA Gallery in Rosebank Mall, Johannesburg, to create an exhibition of photography that covered the apartheid period in South Africa from the 1950s to the 1980s. DocuFest Africa: The Exhibition, showcased at times rare and unusual images of life in South Africa taken by leading photographers at the height of apartheid. Curated by Reney Warrington, the Exhibition was drawn from collections represented by Africa Media Online. It covered a broad cross-section of society at the time, from the woman’s movement and boys on the border to protest action, the trade union movement and the development of Johannesburg.

The collection of images was at one time unfamiliar – speaking to us from a different time, a different political reality – and familiar, with so many of the challenges faced then being still with us in 2018. The exhibition included images from the Tiso Blackstar group Collection, Paul Weinberg, Gille De Vlieg, George Hallet, Eric Miller, Graeme Williams and a single image by me, David Larsen.

On Saturday, May 12, 2018 veteran Black Sash activist and photographer, Gille De Vlieg, conducted a walkabout of the DocuFest Africa exhibition, particularly...

By the end of March 2018 the 14-member Africa Media Online team resident in Alice, Eastern Cape and working in the National Heritage and Cultural Studies Centre (NAHECS) at the University of Fort Hare, had completed the digital capture of all the material assigned to them in the current phases of the ANC Archives digitisation project.

While the overall project actually started in the last quarter of 2011 and continued into 2012, the current phases of the project kicked off in November 2015 and are due to end at the end of April 2018. By then the team will have digitised the contents of 3,576 archival boxes as well as museum objects, posters, banners and other materials. At one time we had five different workflows running concurrently – one to digitise bound manuscripts, another to digitise fragile manuscripts, another to digitise plain paper, another to digitise photographic prints and the final one to digitise slides and negatives. In all we would have captured close to 2 million pages with over 1.3 million being plain paper, over 300,000 being fragile papers and also over 300,000 being bound manuscripts. We also captured almost 82,000 photographic images and over 3,000 museum objects. The team worked exceptionally hard often operating in two shifts and at times in three shifts around the clock to keep to targets. They not only digitised the archive but ordered and documented it as well.

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The Africa Media Online team was on site at Kingswood College in Grahamstown for two weeks in June 2016 to capture over 4,700 photographic prints, paintings and building plans. A significant number of the photographic prints were framed prints hanging on the walls of the school. Kingswood provided a team of assistants to remove the pictures from the walls all around the school and transport them to the museum where they were captured using our Alpa 12 FPS technical camera together with the Phase One IQ3 100 digital sensor.

Kingswood College suffered a fire in one of its main buildings some years ago and so are highly aware of the risk of losing the irreplaceable historic record contained in the historic photographs spread around the school and gathered in the school Museum. If you lose such history, a significant element of the perceived value of such an institution is lost which has significant implications for the marketability of the school to say nothing of the intrinsic value of preserving the record of the thousands of scholars and staff that have passed through the school gates since its founding in 1894. With this in mind, Kingswood College’s Business Manager, Steve Gardner insisted on digitising many the school’s priceless records.

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Toward the end of last year, team members at Africa Media Online were excited to take delivery of a brand new Phase One XF camerawith an 80-Megapixel CCD digital back. For some years now we have been looking for a more versatile high end medium format camera technology to boost our scanning capability. Camera technology generally has been receiving far more of the research and development dollars in the industry as a whole than scanning technology and so we were on the hunt for a system that could take our digital capture to a new level.

We looked at systems from the world’s best medium format camera manufacturers. Finally we settled on Phase One as the system that could both deliver very high quality 16-bit per colour channel digital images with the high throughput of a single shot system ensuring we can deliver the best images in a cost effective way.

Main entrance to the Kwazulu-Natal Museum in Pietermaritzburg (The Heritage Portal)

Our first project on the new system was the digitisation of maps and posters at the KwaZulu-Natal Museum. We had developed a custom rig to hold the camera in place and were able to set it in a position that produced an image of any item on the surface of the copy table at exactly 300 dpi. We were amazed at the...