The calling cards of any archive are preservation and access. Tom’s guest today is Grayson Dantzic. Grayson is an ASMP Board Member in the New York chapter, a photographer, and an archivist. As an archivist, he has been working with Tom to organize and assess the value of ASMP’s archives as a representation of the history of photography over the past 75 years. Grayson’s goal is to raise awareness about the roots of photography and the ASMP in order to shed light on the rich stories behind the people that have shared history through photography.

In this episode, we talk about…

Grayson’s journey to photography and photo archiving
Raising awareness about the roots of photography
How passionate the early founders were for what they were trying to do
Comparing the media saturation of today to the founding times
Putting together a rich tapestry of the history of ASMP
Surprising takeaways from looking at the archives
Connecting resources between different archives
Compensating for the loss of the human connective piece in photography
Building the archives from the ground up
Opportunities that are waiting in the archives
Establishing connections with different research and preservation institutions
Envisioning the desired digital archive presence and pool for resources

Links to resources:
Life Magazine

To donate to the ASMP archives go to: https://www.asmp.org/asmp-foundation/

To learn more about archivist and photographer Grayson Dantzic go to his website: https://www.graysondantzic.com/

To read about the Smithsonian traveling exhibition of Jerry Dantzic photographs of Billie Holiday that Grayson curated go to: https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/new-smithsonian-traveling-exhibition-shows-rarely-seen-photos-billie-holidays

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