Daily Sitka Sentinel

Project to Secure Merrill Glass Plates for Sitka

By SHANNON HAUGLAND
Sentinel Staff Writer
    Tlingit clan elders.
    Bird specimens.
    People mauled by bears.
    Landscapes.
    And 958 other black and white images captured on glass plate negatives by Sitka photographer E.W. Merrill from the 1890s to the 1920s.
    A nonprofit group is working with the Sitka National Historical Park to purchase the more than 900 glass plate negatives from Sheldon Jackson College Board of Trustees, to preserve in the park’s collection and make the images widely available to the public.
    The new nonprofit, The Merrill Project, Inc., has the goal of raising $20,000 for the purchase. A website, merrillproject.org, that outlines the campaign is already up and running.

Reber Stein, photographer and E.W. Merrill print collector, holds up three photographs from his collection that will be on display at the upcoming E.W. Merrill Night event. (Sentinel Photo)

    Fundraising will kick into high gear with E.W. Merrill Night, scheduled for 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 10, in the Exhibit Room of Centennial Hall. There will be an exhibit of Merrill photographs, and a talk by professional photographer Dan Evans about his research into the work of “the mysterious and romantic E.W. Merrill.”
    An appraiser familiar with the Merrill plates, and with the private market for rare historic photographic collections of this quality, set the value of the SJ collection at $119,000. The SJ trustees, who have worked with many Sitka groups on the sale and transfer of other college property, set $20,000 as the offer price for the collection, on condition that it remain in Sitka and accessible for public enjoyment.
    In conversations with the Sitkans who later organized as The Merrill Project, Sitka National Historical Park Superintendent Mary Miller made the commitment under which the collection, if donated, would remain in Sitka and “be curated to the same National Park Service museum standards as other significant NPS collections.”
    Also, the park managers would make rotating exhibits of the pictures. They also have a commitment to making high quality digital images available, suitable for large-scale reproduction, “which would provide the local community the opportunity to display and reproduce the images in their homes and business,” Miller said.
    The Sheldon Jackson Board of Trustees agreed to sell the prints at less than the market value, with the provision that they remain in Sitka in a public collection. The Sitka National Historical Park has committed to keeping the plates permanently in Sitka, in a controlled environment and security of the park’s resource study center. (The Merrill Project organizers have agreements with both the SJ trustees and Sitka National Historical Park, which call for the plates to remain permanently in Sitka.)
     Brinnen Carter, chief of resources at the historical park, said the Merrill glass plates are well worth acquiring for the benefit of the public.
    “He was the premier photographer for Sitka for quite a while,” Carter said. “Having the original images as part of the park collection has been a longtime goal of the park management. Being able to have them in the collection would be fantastic.”
    “His photographs are the most artistic images of any of the Alaska photographers,” agreed Rebecca Poulson, who is an organizer of The Merrill Project. “You can spot one a mile away because they’re so beautifully composed. They’re works of art.”
    “The cool thing is they’re fairly diverse,” Carter said. “They cover everything from scenic landscape, to Tlingit clan elders, to baskets to people mauled by bears, bird specimens, photos of the Pyramids, of Kruzof, Tlingit canoes on beaches ... It’s a tremendous range of different types of scenes around Sitka.”
    “He documented the 1904 potlatch, he did portraits,” said Poulson. “He photographed the Sheldon Jackson School. He was also very interested in natural history.”
    Once the plates are purchased, the park hopes to purchase high-resolution scanning equipment, and scan the images to make them available online for the public. The park would also bear the cost of storing and preserving the delicate glass plates, along with the 200 Merrill plates already in the national park’s collection. A total of 52 images from the SNHP Merrill plate collection are on the park’s website.
    The scanning of the photos – and putting the images online – is an important part of the project, in making the images widely accessible not only to Sitkans but researchers around the world and anyone interested in the culture of Sitka on either side of the turn of the century, or the artistry of an accomplished photographer.
    “It would make the images much more accessible – that’s the main objective,” Carter said.
    Poulson said modern scanning technology of today should bring out more of the details than can be seen in pictures made from copy negatives of  many of the Merrill prints made from the SJ collection in the 1980s.
    Poulson said she and other local Merrill enthusiasts are eager to keep the collection in Sitka. John Holst, executive manager working for the SJ Board of Trustees, said the board understood the value of keeping the plates here.
    “This is something that ought to stay in Sitka,” he said. Disposition of the Merrill plate collection is one of the remaining items of business for the SJ trustees, who are winding up the affairs of the private college which shut down academic operations in 2007.
    Carter, who has a framed Merrill photo hanging above his desk at work, said he also appreciates the quality of the work.
    “I like them personally because they’re so detailed,” he said. “It’s not the same as a 35 millimeter picture. It has a type of crispness you don’t see in small-format images. They’re really very detailed and high-quality.”
    Carter said he also likes that the focus of the collection is on Sitka.
    “They’re all about Sitka – Sitka Sound, the park, the Tlingit people, local buildings,” he said. “It’s all about being here.”
     SNHP curator Kelsey Lutz showed a visiting Sentinel reporter the park’s own collection of Merrill plates, which are stored in fire-proof cabinets and individually wrapped in protective material.
     The negatives are mostly on 8-by-10-inch or 5-by-7-inch glass sheets, and can be as thin as one-sixteenth of an inch, Lutz said.
    “They’re hugely, hugely fragile,” Carter said. For the past 10 years or so the park has acted as caretaker for the much larger SJ collection of Merrill plates. Unlike the park’s own Merrill plates, the SJ collection is housed in boxes designed for compact storage.
    Carter said he hopes to have storage facilities for the newly acquired plates improved, allowing experts to handle them as little as possible once the images are scanned.
    Lutz said that getting scanning facilities on site will further limit the risks of damaging the plates.
    Poulson said her interest in Merrill goes back to her childhood.
    “He’s part of Sitka lore,” Poulson said. In ninth grade, she wrote a paper about Merrill, and learned that he came to Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush, ending up in Sitka when his boat fell apart.
    “He spent his whole life here,” Poulson said. “He loved Sitka; it really comes through in his portraits.”
    Besides being a photographer, Carter said, Merrill was the first caretaker of the park after it was established as a federal park in 1890. It was designated a historical monument in 1910, and renamed Sitka National Historical Park in 1972.
    “He was interested in how the park looked in the early days,” Carter said. “He set up the arrangement of the totem poles, how they were going to be placed, how that would look, the scenic properties of the totem poles.”
    Poulson added that Merrill is one of a handful of Sitkans who “stand out on a national level.”
    “It’s not a big group,” she said. “Peter Simpson, Andrew Hope, John Brady, E.W. Merrill. ... They can stand next to anyone in the history of our country. Merrill’s photography is world class, and they’re all of Sitka.”
    Poulson said she and other Merrill fans are grateful that the National Park Service agreed to become the caretaker of the plates, preserving them under the high NPS standards. It means, she said, “They’re going to stay in Sitka forever. It’s huge they agreed to take this on. ... It’s an incredibly generous commitment they’ve made.”
    Donations to the project can be made online at merrillproject.org, or at the Oct. 10 fundraiser, which is free and open to the public.