The Photographic Records Room

Fairsted's Photographic Records Room

The photographic records room is where the firm stored nearly 66 thousand photographs to accompany the 6 thousand landscapes the firm worked on. It’s interesting to think about how for a majority of the firm’s life, photo’s were being taken on an elaborate setup. It wasn’t simply just a point and shoot task but a real undertaking. Photos were often the first step in a landscape design project, because they were used as reference for engineers. Photography was used not only to show the evolution of a project, but also could be manipulated to show how certain placements of trees could affect views of the area. The drawers were used to hold not single photographs but albums, all relating to a certain landscape’s design process. The typewriter on the desk was used to label photographs as they were pasted onto album sheets. The numbers on each box represented cities, with 900 representing Boston, and 500 representing NYC. All the drawers have since been emptied, digitized, and put for storage in our vault, because, this is a wooden house, these are wooden drawers, not the best place to store our valuables.