Installation view of Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 10, 1990, to January 13, 1991
For decades, The Met maintained a Slide Library including 2 x 2 black-and-white and 35mm color slides, which were then digitized by the Digital Asset Management team (an offshoot of the Museum’s former Image Library). The slide collection once numbered close to 1.5 million slides, including objects in The Met’s collection, special exhibition gallery views, permanent gallery views, and shots of the exhibition banners hanging on the Museum's facade.
Among the images from the slide collection available through Digital Collections are photos of banners advertising exhibitions
Hundreds of special exhibitions were photographed in 35mm color slide film. For some, we only have a few photos, while others were photographed extensively. Over the course of my time at The Met, I have successfully uploaded more than fifty collections of images. These can be found in the special exhibition gallery views category of The Metropolitan Museum of Art images collection.
Exhibition view of Yves Saint Laurent: 25 Years of Design, held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from December 14, 1983, to September 2, 1984
Some personal favorites from this collection are the views of The Ceaseless Century: Three Hundred Years of Eighteenth-Century Costume, an exhibition that was put on by The Costume Institute in the fall of 1998.
Exhibition view of The Ceaseless Century: Three Hundred Years of Eighteenth-Century Costume, held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from September 9, 1998, to November 29, 1998
The exhibition documented a Rococo revival in eighteenth-century fashion. We have six images in this collection, which show the exhibition design and the fashions on display. But my favorite part is the fact that we have digitized the exhibition catalogue that was released to accompany the show. In the information under the images, there is a link to that catalogue.
Exhibition view of The Vatican Collections: The Papacy and Art, held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from February 26, 1983, to June 12, 1983
Looking only at the images or only at the catalogue, it is hard to delve too deeply into the exhibition. But with both, you can get a sense of what it was like to be there, while also learning about the content of the exhibition. Most of the image collections contain a link to their associated catalogues (if they have already been digitized). The hope is to make all of this information more accessible to everyone—researchers and interested parties alike!
