Reel to real 

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In a corner room at Visual Studies Workshop on Prince Street, Patti Smith’s “Because the Night” plays in the afternoon sunlight. The song doesn’t emanate from Spotify or YouTube. It beams in directly from the past.

Nilson Carroll, VSW’s assistant curator and preservation specialist, has loaded a half-inch open-reel tape into an electronic mechanism. The scene on screen in the Media Transfer Lab, where Carroll digitizes old tapes, follows patrons at the House of Guitars likely in 1978 or a bit later.

Long-haired, mustached guests mingle, twirl drumsticks and listen to records, including Smith’s hit. The vibe is relaxed and natural.

“It's really interesting to see people on video that are not used to being on video,” Carroll said. “Today, if someone's taking a video with their phone, we all know how to act. No one had ever really thought about how it was possible to be on video at this point.”

The footage was likely shot by community members involved with the Rochester media group Portable Channel, founded in 1971 by filmmaker Bonnie Sherr Klein. VSW houses the group’s entire collection, which staffers like Carroll diligently convert and upload to VSW’s Vimeo page as part of the organization’s ongoing digitization efforts.
It’s quite an undertaking. The 200 Portable Channel tapes account for a fraction of VSW’s nearly one million still and moving images. Tapes are only one format. Film reels, photographs and transparent glass positives called ‘lantern slides’ line the shelves inside the castle-like building; books and audio recordings are also kept.

Most of the materials came from libraries, museums and educational institutions that could no longer store the physical materials. VSW keeps them in air-conditioned, high-ceilinged rooms equipped with dehumidifiers. And while tapes can mold and the chemicals in film can turn into hazardous vinegar, Mary Lewandowski, VSW’s collections manager, said digital files can be corrupted, too.

“We're digitizing, but you still can't throw it away, because now we know how fallible digital is,” she said. VSW keeps both versions.

Carroll demonstrates the process. After pressing play on the tape, he surveys some squiggles on the analog waveform monitor. The preview screen above renders the nearly 50-year-old scene at the House of Guitars into high-contrast realism. The footage runs into a time base corrector (to fix mechanical issues) and eventually becomes a digital signal that shows up slightly dulled on a large computer monitor. “The digital video and the analog video are pretty different,” Carroll said. “It's sort of my job to make them as accurate as possible.”

The care and detail shown in the digitization process reflect VSW’s continued mission of connecting art with the folks outside the doors of the institution itself. This includes its Community Curator program, which Tara Merenda Nelson, who runs the initiative, stressed is a trademarked title.

VSW invites community members — among them Doug Curry of WRUR’s “Blacks and Blues” radio show and local civil rights organizer Jalil Muntaqim — to curate their own screenings based on what they find in the digitized video archive spanning a half-century.

“We thought, how can we help the archives meet the needs of the work being done in our community?” Nelson said. Since launching in 2016, the program has given Nelson a way of engaging with VSW’s massive collection by prioritizing what best serves the community.

“As a curator, it helps me learn about the collection. When I know that we have these keywords of, (for example), police brutality, I can then direct my own research into what the collection holds and pull up things that may be relevant to that,” Nelson said. “And one thing always leads to another.”
This effort is part of how organizational leadership looks to the future. SUNY Brockport ended its MFA partnership with VSW in 2022; this year’s class, the final VSW MFA graduates, just finished their thesis shows. Artist residencies, exhibitions and publications, anchored by the collections, remain VSW’s focus.

“We have these wonderful collections that make us super unique,” said Jessica Johnston, VSW’s executive director. “We're one of the earliest and longest running photo spaces in the country.” Back on the lower level, near a shelf of lantern slides dating back to the late 19th century, Lewandowski points out that the work of scanning all 80,000 images is simply too much for their small team. But artists who dig into digitizing them during residencies often hit unexpected jackpots.

“We're very happy to help people dig through the magic of the archives,” Lewandowski said. “I'm glad that we have some collections that are not cataloged because that's a real fun activity, stumbling on things and making your own connections.”

Patrick Hosken is an arts writer at CITY. He can be reached at [email protected].