Item of the Week: Photographing Gill

Published: September 23, 2010

As a part of her job as Eric Gill Artwork Project Archivist at the Clark, Jennifer Bastian has been photographing and describing each piece in our somewhat unwieldy collection.  When she’s done, her hard work will form the basis for a new online finding aid linked to the digital images, which will be enormously helpful to us here at the library, and hopefully to researchers around the world.

While some pieces are easily photographed with the equipment we have here at the library, there are some artworks that are just too large for Jennifer to try photographing here onsite.  Thankfully, our friends in the UCLA Library Conservation Lab had a solution for us, in the form of the floor in their documentation studio, some lovely lights, and a giant library ladder.  When our big items are on the floor and Jennifer stands on the 6-feet-plus ladder, photographing these beauties is now possible!

This is a two person job, so those are Jennifer’s feet you see above, while Manuscripts & Archives Librarian Becky Fenning is on the ground with the artwork.

The works in these two images are posters from the workshop of Eric Gill and Rene Hague, who later became one of Gill’s sons-in-law.

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Patrick on

This will be an invaluable resource when you are finished. Gill was such an important artist. Much appreciated!

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