The Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives is a research and reference center devoted to the collection, preservation and dissemination of visual materials that encourage and support the study of the arts, cultures and history of Africa. The archives collections contain approximately 500,000 items, including rare collections of glass plate negatives, lantern slides, stereographs, postcards, maps and engravings. The Elisofon Archives staff works with art historians, anthropologists, photographers, filmmakers and other specialists in acquiring and preserving these visual resources.
The Stephen Grant Postcard Collection Digitization Project
The Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives (EEPA), National Museum of African Art is pleased to announce The Stephen Grant Postcard Collection Digitization Project, a collaborative cataloguing and digitization project with the Smithsonian’s Digitization Program Office (DPO). We anticipate making this collection fully accessible to the general public in late 2020 or early 2021.
Collected by donor Stephen Grant, this postcard collection consists of over 7500 historic postcards from Egypt, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea and Senegal produced during the golden era of postcards, c. 1900 – 1920s. The collection features a range of subjects and provides evidence of early photographic processes and printing techniques that allowed the mass circulation of postcards inside and outside Africa. Many postcards carried stamps and hand-written messages sent to friends and family in Europe and the United States. Bearing the names of African photographers and studios long forgotten, these postcards have become key visual resources in excavating the hidden histories of African photography.
The EEPA Historic Postcard Collection consists of over 20,000 postcards from every country and region of Africa. We continue to build this collection with the support of individual donors like Stephen Grant. If you are interested in donating your old postcards of Africa to the National Museum of African Art, please contact us at elisofonarchives.si.edu. Thank you for your support!
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Access to Photographic Archives
Records of the collections of the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives are accessible online through the Collections Search Center.
Permissions to Reproduce
Image files from the National Museum of African Art (NMAfA) of the Smithsonian Institution (SI) are made available for noncommercial, personal or educational use only. Please read the Rights and Reproductions policy here.
Hours
Open by appointment only
Tuesday–Thursday, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.
Contact information
Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives
National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian InstitutionP.O. Box 37012 MRC 708
Washington, DC 20013-7012
202.633.4690
202.357.4879 (fax)
Email: elisofonarchives@si.edu
Location
National Museum of African Art950 Independence Avenue, SW
Washington, D.C. 20560
Pioneering Women Photographers in Africa, 1930s-1970s
Pioneering Women Photographers in Africa, 1930s-1970s
We are excited to announce a major project the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, is starting: In support of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, we will be digitizing and describing 14 collections created by women photographers in Africa! All of the women photographers were trailblazers in their respective fields and professions – art, anthropology, architecture, art history, geography, photojournalism, travel – and used photography as a tool for documentation, ethnographic field research, or ‘salvage photography’ to produce fleeting glimpses of what were perceived as rapidly ‘vanishing’ cultures and ways of life. These women exercised different cultural and social sensitivities when it came to photographing indigenous peoples in local and domestic settings.
Learn more about the project at SI.com