Jessica Nelson, Curatorial Assistant

Following the rolled textile inventory, it became clear that just over a third of that collection, about 380 objects, had not previously been photographed. Working through our records, I developed a list of the textiles stored in this area and missing photos, and Thierry Gentis, Head Curator, added a few more pieces to the list, as this would be a rare opportunity to get high resolution images of some of the larger textiles from our collections. By the time we were done, the list had grown to just over 400 pieces, and we would be working with objects from 47 countries around the globe.
Once we had a list of all the rolled textiles to photograph in this project, it fell to me to organize pulling them from storage. In an effort to limit the frequency of camera adjustments in any given day, I tried to organize the textiles into groups by size, but this didn’t always work out, especially when object dimensions weren’t in the database yet. This would be an area for us to rectify when pieces were unrolled for photography.

When pulling objects for photography, each textile needed to be looked up for its location and then removed from its storage poll—easy, right? Not always! Our rolled textile storage is eight feet tall and up to four feet deep in several sections, meaning we have as many as twelve poles at some shelf heights. Pulling textiles in these locations often involved removing and relocating the poles in front of the one you needed, removing the object, and resetting everything so the poles were back in their proper spots. And since we routinely store two, three, four, or more, objects on a single pole, I needed to be careful to remove the correct object and to return other pieces to their correct locations on the pole throughout this process as well. Other times, I went spelunking in textile storage, diving in and amongst the poles to access the object we needed!  

Once the objects had been pulled from their pole storage locations, the Textile Team could bring them out from storage to our main workroom where the photography equipment had been set up.