(gentle music) (horn honking) (birds chirping) (trolley clattering) - [Margaret] The things that have taken me by surprise in this project are the everyday moments in time that Asahel Curtis captured.

(trolley clattering) (keys jingling) It's photos of families.

It's photos of people rowing on a lake.

It's people.

(keys jingling) (trolley clattering) We thought we would see the big buildings 'cause we heard those were there.

(door clicks) (trolley clattering) But those little moments of connections when you are witnessing a child's birthday party in a park where all of them are wearing puff sleeves and bows in their hair, and you can still visit that park today, but look at that moment in time with that family.

Those are the elements that I have been surprised at most as we've been doing this big project.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Old photos have mysterious qualities.

When we look at these images taken more than a century ago, we're seeing actual moments in real people's lives and we're capturing memories that would otherwise be long forgotten and buried.

To reclaim images like these is to create a memory bank of generations over time, collectively telling the story of these people and this place.

(gentle music continues) (keyboard clacking) - Photography is just a window to the past.

I think the further we get from these moments in the past, the harder it is to envision what it was like.

And when you have original photos, you have the ability to step into that world and to focus on the tiniest things.

You know, what were they eating?

What were they wearing?

And each of those things that you can see in a photograph tells you about their life.

- The Curtis Project here at the Washington State Historical Society is a broad project to provide access to 60,000 images that were taken between the 1890s and the 1940s by famed photographer Asahel Curtis.

(gentle music) Asahel Curtis passed away in 1941 after a prolific and long career as a photographer in Washington, and the state legislature provided the Washington State Historical Society with funds to purchase the collection from the family of Asahel Curtis.

About 3,000 of the images had been available to the public previously.

(gentle music continues) - In this most recent effort to digitize the remainder of those images started in November 2022.

We have 26,000 images digitized right now, and we'll keep going until we're done.

If we're going to really capture the beauty of these images, we need to digitize them now before there's any further degradation of the original negatives.

- And the more projects we can do like this to provide access to these materials, the more people will understand that we need to be preserving our history in this way.

Unfiltered, uncensored history, not generated by anything other than a man with a camera.

(gentle music continues) - [Narrator] Pouring through Curtis' photos, one is left with so many questions about the countless people he met, what they were doing at the snap of his shutter, and the many places he visited and documented.

The stories left untold.

The images invite us to explore our connection to the past, to what we can learn by looking back.

- For me, opening this drawer, I see endless possibilities of what can be here.

This drawer is a mystery and we get to unlock what that mystery is.

(gentle music continues) (gentle wistful music) - [Narrator] Asahel photographed a variety of natural landscapes in the Pacific Northwest.

This image of a cattle herd at Grand Coulee exemplifies the drastic changes of some of these areas over the last 100 years.

We wanted to see how hard it would be to capture an image like Curtis's with similar equipment.

So we asked photographer Daniel Carrillo, who uses old photo techniques to help us recreate one of these fascinating images under similar conditions.

- This where all the bellows and stuff are.

I brought a few lenses.

This is the rail for it.

- [Narrator] Daniel's camera has many different parts that have to be assembled on location.

This is no point-and-shoot.

- And the whole system is supported by this one rail.

I can get the camera up in probably about five minutes, so it's fairly easy to set up.

This one's on the front.

This is the 8 by 10 back.

(equipment clattering) I did bring an extra set of bellows.

The camera itself is just an empty box basically, but the bellows are what makes it light tight or, you know, from the front to back.

So this is a 300-millimeter lens.

And then it's ready to shoot.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Before plastic-based film was invented, photographers had to spread light sensitive emulsion onto glass plates.

The format gave Curtis high resolution images, but required precise timing and had a high potential for any number of environmental errors like dust on the negative or an overexposed image.

- So, I brought these dry plates.

This is how they go into the holder.

They're shoved in.

- [Narrator] Dry plate negatives, introduced in the 1870s, use a gelatin emulsion that can be prepared and stored before exposure, as well as delayed development that can take place in the more controlled environment of a dark room or studio.

- I've always liked the larger format.

It's really kind of a slower process, which I appreciate.

When you're composing a picture with a view camera, there's a lot of time to think about what you're doing and there's a lot of opportunity to adjust and sort of figure out exactly how you want the picture to look.

It's more satisfying.

(bright upbeat music) It was a lot of work to be a photographer back in the early 1900s.

They had to holler on all this stuff.

Those glass plates are super heavy.

It's kind of cool to think about the amount of effort that was put into these photographs.

(bright upbeat music continues) There's the rock.

It looks great.

You can actually see it.

Yesterday there was a lot of haze, and it was not good.

- [Narrator] The Steamboat Rock area was transformed from dry prairie land to a lush place surrounded by water.

That transformation didn't happen overnight.

- After the turn of the 20th century, irrigation experts said, "Wouldn't it be great if we can pump the water from the Columbia up into this big natural reservoir and create an irrigation system?

During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt started one of the largest construction projects in the west, in a place where there were virtually no people in the early 1930s.

(door slamming) So then in 1951, when the pumps are finished and they start pumping water, they fill up the coulee.

Steamboat Rock is a big basalt butte, 1,200 feet high, several miles long.

That's at the northern end of the coulee.

The environmental impact of Grand Coulee was amazingly huge, and some of it was really catastrophic and destructive and inhuman, almost genocidal.

Lake Roosevelt, which was the name for the bloated up river behind the dam, flooded all of the traditional Native American fishing places, and it also wiped out the salmon.

On the other hand, the consequences of the dam for the Pacific Northwest were equally amazing.

There's almost a direct line from the construction of Grand Coulee to the growth of Boeing to the Gates fortune, to Microsoft, to Amazon, and to the trillion dollar wealth around the Pacific Northwest.

They're very much interrelated.

(upbeat music) - There's something about having that image projected onto that ground glass that is very fascinating.

Because it's upside down, you don't really think about it as whatever it is you're shooting.

You sort of just look at shapes.

Okay.

So that's how Curtis viewed the world through the ground glass and upside down.

- [Narrator] At first, Asahel worked for his brother, photographer Edward Curtis, who had become famous for his portraits of North American indigenous peoples.

In the late 1890s, Asahel spent two years in the harsh Canadian Yukon dramatically documenting the Klondike Gold Rush.

But Edward and Asahel parted ways permanently after a bitter disagreement over the credits to the Yukon photos, which Edward had published under his own name.

Their bodies of work stand in marked contrast.

Edward's stylized romantic photographs were of people he called a Vanishing Race.

Asahel focused on a becoming people, the future.

He did the unglamorous work of documenting daily life.

His images opened a window into the ephemera of life in the early 20th century.

- I'm gonna do a hot take here and say Asahel Curtis was the lesser known, perhaps more talented Curtis brother.

The way that he approached landscapes in Washington.

This sort of natural beauty is really incredible.

I think you rarely find a photographer who touches on all of these different things, different industries, different people.

- [Narrator] In 1911, Asahel started a studio in Seattle, which was active for 30 years.

He was a commercial photographer documenting the agricultural, timber, mining, and fishing industries of his time.

Local businesses, organizations, and individuals hired him to take portraits and promotional photos.

- In some cases, we have really great documentation about who they were, and in other instances, he didn't get as descriptive in his note taking.

So we have sailors.

We have photographs of church choirs, photographs of schools.

They are a glimpse into what a typical day was like for a person in that time period.

A lot of other historic work is focused more on the big broader picture, the more important things, the men.

And Asahel Curtis saw it all, and he thought it was important enough to capture it all.

(soft music) (clock ticking) (soft music) - My grandparents, Anna and Henry Bohlke, moved to Grandview in the early 1920s.

And it was touted as a great opportunity for people who are willing to work on an agricultural area with irrigation.

And my father was a 7-year-old in the household.

He was the youngest of the family.

And their neighbor across the street was Mr. Curtis.

He was familiar with the family, a friend with my grandparents.

And one day, my grandmother heard someone knock on the door.

It was Mr. Curtis.

He said, "Anna, can I take a picture of Lloyd?"

"Oh.

Well, sure, but let me get him in to get some decent clothes on."

He said, "Nope, I want him just like he is."

And this is how he was.

(gentle music) He was collecting eggs.

That's kind of the context of that picture and other pictures that he took of our family during that time.

And he grew up.

My mom got a job in the steno pool, and she and my dad met and then they got married.

And she knew at that point that my dad had had a heart murmur as a child and probably wouldn't live beyond 2021.

Well, he lived to 46.

I was seven.

I was this age when he passed away.

And so all of us siblings who are all still alive really treasure this picture.

And our parents all did.

My kids know it's special to me too.

(gentle music fades) - I think connecting to our past is really about empathy and being able to see people in the past as real people and to empathize with what they experienced.

And through that empathy, to gain understanding into our own experience.

- It really is people's memories that we're getting to see.

(car horn honks) (people chattering) - This is great because I've never seen photos with this kind of clarity.

I've seen probably third, fourth generation images.

- [Edward] So, what does it say here?

- Three Japanese American women are photographed working in the Liberty Flower Shop owned by George Tanabe.

I think 80 to 90% of the farmers at the Pike Place Market before World War II and the incarceration were Japanese American.

And following the war, many Japanese Americans operated a lot of the floral shops in Seattle as well.

- We hadn't looked at this photo of the Chin Gee Hee Building for a long time.

- And usually what I look for is I look for the signs to see what businesses, and then I try to read the Chinese characters to figure out also kind of what the meaning is in Chinese and there might be additional detail about what goods are being sold and so forth.

A lot of it was housing for bachelor men, the laborers who came on the upper floors down below.

They had import-export businesses, and there are also family associations, which were the organizations that the Chinese men created as surrogate families because they didn't have women here 'cause of the exclusion law.

And so it's where they hung out and gambled and socialized and got support, finding jobs, and so forth.

Most of them didn't make a whole lot of money.

It's a lot of discrimination.

(gentle music) I came here as my grandfather did, and my father and uncles, 11, 12, 13 years old, they're like an adult, really needing to be self-sufficient.

You have to realize you're coming here.

There's no way to take care of you and you have to go to work.

Chinese, they operate a lot of the laundries, Chinese restaurants that used to operate in the frontier west.

They were given those skills by their mothers before they left for America.

- Sometimes the photos may be the only record of them being here because there was the incentive not to leave a paper trail.

The photographs are one of the last records we have.

- In 1885, there's an anti-Chinese uprising in Seattle, following the uprising in Tacoma, which I think was a previous year where vigilante groups and even some city officials were part of a mob that wanted to ask the Chinese, feeling that they were taking jobs away from white laborers.

And so the Chinese in Seattle were ousted.

Some of them were able to stay under the protection of some of their white patrons, but it wasn't that long after that the Great Seattle Fire took place and then it took down most of Seattle.

I believe the Canton Building's one of the first brick buildings built after Great Seattle Fire.

So irony of ousting Chinese and then needing them to come back to help rebuild the city.

We have the stereotype of Asian Americans as being foreigners.

These photographs are the evidence of the diversity of this place where we now live.

- It's always been a place where people come from all over the world to make a new home.

(gentle music) (birds calling) - [Narrator] Each of Curtis's glass plates and nitrate negatives holds knowledge and stories of our past.

(gentle music) The work of the archivists is delicate to keep these materials safe while using technology to provide access.

- Nitrate images are held in a temperature and humidity controlled chamber because they are flammable.

So if we don't keep them at this sweet spot, they're prone to spontaneously combust.

(gentle music continues) - All of the plates are in an archival sleeve and they each have their number and if we know the date that it was taken and that the subject matter.

And we had these cabinets made specifically for them because they're so heavy.

They take a very heavy 2D cabinet.

Asahel Curtis also kept handwritten note cards of everything that he took to go with every image that we have.

Depending on the size of the negative, scanning can take 5 to 10 minutes per image.

So it is a very time consuming process.

We can get through 100 scans per day per person who is scanning, but we don't do anything other than rotate and crop them because we are in the business of preserving history, not changing it.

- Our history hasn't always been diverse, but the people have always been diverse.

The stories are there if we look for them, and so the photos are just one more piece of evidence to support that.

- When I look at these pictures, I look at these people and then I wonder who these people are.

- There's so much detail that's captured in the moment.

A lot of times for historians, it's not even the topic of the photograph.

There's the detail in the background.

There's what people are doing and wearing, so they just draw me in.

- We have a pretty long and deep history.

And anytime we can recover some traces of that diversity, whether it's a small business sign that's in Chinese characters or some person from another country that you didn't realize actually was part of the settlement, then we reclaim what our true history is and then we allow an opportunity to push back against folks who say, well, they don't belong here.

(gentle music) - When we don't digitize things, they're invisible.

It's like the box in your Aunt Linda's attic, right?

If you don't know what's in it, it might as well not exist.

And so it's about bringing the box down, laying it all out, you know, making it available so that everyone knows what's there.

- We go through different stages in life where we either care or don't care about our relatives who live before us or even who are still living.

I think that, especially as we get older, your memories of relatives who've passed is that's the main way to connect with them.

At one point I wanted to make copies of this picture for my siblings and the staff was just so helpful and we got to see all these pictures that we'd never seen before.

(soft music) It was just astonishing to me that just in that one month, he had taken pictures in Seattle, some pictures at the University of Washington Husky Stadium being built for the first time.

He took pictures in Pasco and Kennewick area of a bridge being built across the river.

I'm looking forward to when they are completely digitized to really just going through them and seeing where he went.

(soft music continues) - That's a good boy.

Aw.

(picture rustling) Now, we're gonna develop the first set of exposures, the dark room.

See what we got.

Lights out.

(button clicks) (paper rustling) So the plates are usually in here, emulsion side down.

So that's how I know.

One side is just plain glass and the other side's got the coating on it.

(soft music continues) And it goes.

We'll start the development time.

It's five minutes.

So I agitate for the first, like, 30 seconds.

So this is a gelatin emulsion.

It's gelatin with silver in it and a halide.

This one's looking really good.

Well, they're not perfect.

There's lots of flaws.

There's lots of even dust or whatever environment they were coating these plates in.

We're not looking for anything that's perfect, just something that has a lot of character.

And we do a rinse with some water to stop the development and then it'll get fixed out for about five minutes and then it gets washed for, like, 20 minutes, 30 minutes to make sure we get any residual chemicals and silver out.

What's cool, as you can see, the wind sort of coming over the water, it's pretty cool.

It's a nice one.

I'd say this is probably the best plate.

(soft music continues) This is my fun time.

Very sort of rewarding too when everything lines up and works.

But that's few and far between.

There's a lot of mistakes.

This goes in here to wash.

But you have to be happy with the mistakes too and accept them as part of the process.

- I feel like I know Asahel Curtis, although I never met him, and I realized how much he contributed to the goodness of things in our state by recording and by getting involved in projects that benefited the people in the state itself.

Photography was a bigger deal for families in many ways than it is now.

To go get a family photograph taken became very much a matter of communicating with relatives around the world and preserving in time moments of celebration, weddings, that sort of thing.

So not so much now.

I think we are more apt to discard old photos.

- Today's day and age, we're dealing with things like artificial intelligence.

We're dealing with the ability to manipulate images.

No matter what, we will have this glass negative, this nitrate negative that shows the truth, and that truth is a primary resource and it will always be there.

- Every preservation TIFF we make from every nitrate negative or glass plate is a moment in history that can't be replicated with technology.

It's a slice in time that really captures what that moment was like.

- I think it's the closest thing to a time machine that we've invented to have this cache of photos, the Asahel Curtis Collection becoming available.

There's gonna be an explosion of discovery, I think.

(gentle pleasant music) - Since the birth of photography, it's just man's curiosity to sort of record what he sees for posterity or even just for the sheer beauty of, like, nature.

And men is a curious preacher, you know, and they want to be able to record what they see.

- We really can't wait to see everything that is here.

You can see how much work this is.

It's worth it because you don't know what treasure is going to be here and what's going to be the most important thing in 100 years.

We don't know.

That's why I'm here.

That's why museums exist and that's why this project is so important to us.

- [Jennifer] The act of keeping and protecting is really important.

I truly see it as sort of democratization of historical information.

- Photographs are a legacy.

All those photographs are our history.

People ought to be able to look into their history.

- Let's digitize all of it and let history decide.

- [Narrator] Each box in the collection has the power to teach us something about our past and perhaps about where we're going.

But the longer these negatives wait in storage, the more vulnerable they are.

There's so much to be gained by taking the boxes off the shelves and getting these photos out into the world.

It's imperative for their future and ours.

(gentle pleasant music)