One reference request that did help get my mind off my frustration surrounding the treatment of workers and continued uneasiness about being onsite during the pandemic was from an individual working in costuming for a television show. They are working on wardrobe for an episode set at the museum during the 1980s and were inquiring whether staff working at the museum wore uniforms during this period, and what those outfits looked like if so. They were seeking reference images to help ensure historical accuracy, which I appreciate.
One of my favorite topics of the archive I manage are images of staff and staff at work. I think it’s important to make the work of museums more visible, to help visitors understand how their experience is the result of many hands and choices, not some singular, neutral entity. So I was keen to dive in and explore staff from this decade. I had some ideas on what jobs may have required or lent themselves to uniforms - security guards, housekeeping staff, and groundskeeping staff, for example - so I began by doing keyword searches in our databases for these terms to find unique identifiers corresponding to images. I also searched the much more generic term of “staff.” From these results, I narrowed the search to images created during the 1980s. Then I began looking in the archive itself for images with the selected unique identifiers, since few of the negatives had been previously digitized. Since most of the images are organized roughly chronologically, I also perused neighboring negatives to see if there were any other relevant images.
I found a variety of images that seemed to fit the request, so I digitized as many of these negatives and transparencies as I could while onsite. Staff who appear to have worn uniforms during this time included my original suspicions of security guards and housekeeping and groundskeeping staff. Included here too were facilities staff, carpenters, and some art handlers. Other behind-the-scenes office staff, including curators, collection managers, photographers, and editors, did not appear to wear uniforms; nor did docents.
Transparencies showing staff at the museum who wore uniforms around this time period.
I’m forever thankful that photographers captured what they did, and that the archive has kept these images safe. Even if some of these images were considered unimportant or even boring at the time - and some may still think of them that way today - they still hold value in functioning as a snapshot of the time. In this case, the focus was the clothing, but these images can tell many stories.