Also, loose photographs, lantern slides, and dry plate glass negatives documenting extensive travel from 1890.
As well as black-and-white photographs there are some snippets of film and rare colour transparencies, rescued from the sinking Endurance by Hurley, who plunged into the icy water to grab the plate glass negatives.
Her manipulation of her predecessors' cumbersome baggage -- the collodion wet-plate glass negative that had to be developed immediately -- has produced a group of retro-looking, painterly photographs whose minimal but elegiac imagery has the charge of somber poetry.
It manages to present the glory of airplane technology and the fragility of glass in a single image (and brings to mind a photo of the Graf Zeppelin printed from a cracked dry-plate glass negative in 1929: flight and broken glass together).
He traveled with his box camera and dry-plate glass negatives to photograph children working in New England and Southern cotton mills, the Appalachian coal mines, the cotton patches of Texas and elsewhere.
Eastman had founded a company in Rochester to mass-produce gelatin dry-plate glass negatives, and after a few years he did away with the glass, inventing paper negatives that spooled onto a roll holder that fit into a standard plate camera.
At some point during their stay, they visited the studio of the London Stereoscopic Company to have group and individual portraits made on plate-glass negatives.
LONG known by authors and local history buffs, the Slater Collection, of 4,078 plate-glass negatives, which depict Ossining street scenes and social events from 1890 to 1934, has found a new home, at the Ossining Historical Society.
The art debate has its roots in Mr. Norsigian's purchase of the box of negatives, a rummage-sale find that took on a new light when he later noticed in an Adams biography that certain features of the plate-glass negatives he bought, which depict California landscape scenes from Carmel, Yosemite and around San Francisco, seemed to match events in in Adams's life.
Paper negatives, of course, were easier to transport than metal plates or glass negatives, making them ideal for tourists.
