Inspired by the Hungarian Fortepan project, the University of Northern Iowa has announced the establishment of a new public digital photo archive featuring curated photos made by ordinary Iowans over the 20th century. Taking its name from a panchromatic black-and-white film stock manufactured in Hungary right up to the closure of the Forte plant in 2007, the original Fortepan archive started out as a private project of collectors Ákos Szepessy and Miklós Tamási, borne out of a desire to demonstrate that photos - even "artistically worthless" snapshots - taken by ordinary people can help us better understand the history of the 20th century. Thanks to donations, the collection has grown to include over forty thousand digitised black-and-white and colour photographs, from a pseudo-bucolic idyll dating back to 1900 to a 1990 photograph of a still-standing section of the Berlin wall. Based on this project, the new Fortepan Iowa archive will display thousands of photographs along a sliding interactive timeline and invite visitors to horizontally scroll through highly curated, well-documented photographs digitised at "tremendously high resolution," the university says. The open-source platform will inspire visitors to engage digitally with the high-quality images — a rare opportunity in a heavily copyrighted age. Fortepan Iowa will launch in March 2015 with at least 2,000 photos in the archive.

Website: University of Northern Iowa

University of Northern Iowa Press Release

The Launching of FORTEPAN IOWA: A Public Digital Photo Archive of Iowa's History

Wednesday, Jan 7, 2015

FORTEPAN IOWA, a public digital photo archive of Iowa's history developed at the University of Northern Iowa, will launch on Wednesday, March 25, 2015, at 7 p.m. at UNI's Rod Library.

This digital archive is the first of its kind in Iowa and the United States, and is unique in that it features curated photos taken by ordinary Iowans over the twentieth century.

Because the photographs of FORTEPAN IOWA will be available for free public download and carry a Creative Commons license, the open-source platform will inspire visitors to engage digitally with the high-quality images — a rare opportunity in a heavily copyrighted age, and a significant contribution to the digital humanities, history education, and digital literacy. Unlike other photo archives that arrange images according to collection donor or subject matter, the FORTEPAN interface conveys history chronologically, so it will be easily searchable.  The project has been funded in part by a UNI Capacity Building grant and a Humanities Iowa grant.

The online collection is called FORTEPAN IOWA because it is the first international sister site to the Hungarian FORTEPAN project, founded by Miklós Tamási and Ákos Szepessy in 2009. Dr. Bettina Fabos, associate professor of visual communication in the Department of Communication Studies, first developed the idea for the project after meeting with FORTEPAN directors in Hungary during her Fulbright fellowship there in Spring 2013.  The name FORTEPAN comes from the name of a well-known Hungarian photographic film that was made from 1922 to 2007.  Fabos, Dr. Leisl Carr Childers (UNI History, and public historian), Dr. Sergey Golitsynskiy (UNI Communication Studies, and database expert), and Prof. Noah Doely (UNI Art, and photo expert) are among the UNI faculty working on this project. Those same faculty members are currently working on a NEH Digital Humanities Implementation Grant for the project.

FORTEPAN IOWA is based on the Hungarian FORTEPAN project and will display thousands of photographs along a sliding interactive timeline and invite visitors to horizontally scroll through highly curated, well-documented photographs digitized at tremendously high resolution.  

FORTEPAN IOWA will launch in March 2015 with at least 2,000 photos in the archive.  Many of these have been obtained with the assistance of students in UNI's Interactive Digital Studies program.  The photos represent the broad span of the twentieth century, and contain images of everyday life from across Iowa:  recreation, family gatherings, fairs and festivals, political events, agricultural activities, business and innovation (e.g., the archive has extraordinary photos of the earliest John Deere facilities), education, and much more.  The archive avoids the typical "great men" version of history, and instead presents Iowa history democratically, from a grassroots perspective.

András Török, managing director of Summa Artium and a representative of the original FORTEPAN project in Budapest, Hungary, will visit and speak at the Mar. 25 launch event.

Your Comments