Whenin Rome a few years ago, we came across the Santa Costanza, abeautiful 4th century AD church with the most amazing mosaics. But,when we tried to find pictures of them on the Internet afterwards, we drew ablank. Then and there we resolved to photograph the mosaics in their entiretyand put the results on linefor other people to enjoy. Thus SquinchPix.comwas born.
SquinchPix.comis our archival site for photographs of historical cultural artefacts inEurope, including archaeological sites, buildings, artworks—basically anythingthat has historical interest and looks great! We aren’t affiliated with anyinstitution or school: but, the more images we have captured, the more we havebecome convinced that the salient characteristics of digitalphotography—they’re easy (to take and upload), free and resilient—along withthe potential for the Internet to bring these pictures to a mass audience, mustbe leveraged to assist researchers and students.
The real transformative potentialof digital photography has yet to be fully realised. For example, whereaspreviously a single photograph of the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens was allthat the book publisher’s budget would allow, it's now possible to photographevery capital, every sculpture, every cut in the marble, and put it all onlinefor no increase in cost (for no cost at all, really). We also understand thatthe researcher needs clarity, so we exercise significant post-processing on thephotos to make enhance their quality. The result is that often even veryprosaic objects, such as column bases, can reveal a new and unexpected beauty. Ofcourse, we can always do better: but, as the technology improves, so do ourpictures.Protome of a griffin. Bronze cauldron attachment. Olympia, Greece. After 650 BC.
Yet, despite this breakthrough intechnology, there are many internet sites aimed at researchers where theproprietors still think like book publishers: what large-scale inclusionrequires is a corresponding increase in the sophistication of the userinterface. On SquinchPix every photograph is extensively tagged(keyworded). Currently our database holds a third of a million keywords forabout 21,000 photos, which enables powerful searching across and aggregation ofthe records. In addition, every search term can be displayed as a tag- orkeyword-map that shows what other terms on the site are associated with yoursearch term and with what frequency: a click of the button brings up the correspondingimage subsets. So, from finding one picture to relating a picture to manyothers—that has been SquinchPix’s journey.
You can read more about us here:
http://kbender.blogspot.com/2012/02/photo-archives-old-and-new.htm
http://www.wanderingeducators.com/artisans/lives-artists/exploring-classical-world-photographer-robert-consoli.html
The description above is from Pelagios.
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