Ep 23 - ASMP Archivist Grayson Dantzic

The calling cards of any archive are preservation and access. Tom’s guest today is Grayson Dantzic. Grayson is an ASMP Board Member in the New York chapter, a photographer, and an archivist. As an archivist, he has been working with Tom to organize and assess the value of ASMP’s archives as a representation of the history of photography over the past 75 years. Grayson’s goal is to raise awareness about the roots of photography and the ASMP in order to shed light on the rich stories behind the people that have shared history through photography.

In this episode, we talk about…

• Grayson’s journey to photography and photo archiving
• Raising awareness about the roots of photography
• How passionate the early founders were for what they were trying to do
• Comparing the media saturation of today to the founding times
• Putting together a rich tapestry of the history of ASMP
• Surprising takeaways from looking at the archives
• Connecting resources between different archives
• Compensating for the loss of the human connective piece in photography
• Building the archives from the ground up
• Opportunities that are waiting in the archives
• Establishing connections with different research and preservation institutions
• Envisioning the desired digital archive presence and pool for resources

Links to resources:
Life Magazine

To donate to the ASMP archives go to:  https://www.asmp.org/asmp-foundation/

To learn more about archivist and photographer Grayson Dantzic go to his website:  https://www.graysondantzic.com/

To read about the Smithsonian traveling exhibition of Jerry Dantzic photographs of Billie Holiday that Grayson curated go to: https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/new-smithsonian-traveling-exhibition-shows-rarely-seen-photos-billie-holidays