The Lux Project

We started taking digital pictures of the Hetherington Collection in January. Armed with our trusty SLR, we presumed that lamps would not be all that difficult to photograph. After all, they don’t move, they’re not shiny, and they’re not very big. As it turns out, lamps are especially tricky to photograph, especially in the unflattering glow of the fluorescent lighting in the anthropology lab here at U of W. Val McKinley and Jodi Schmidt, the curator of the anthropology collection and the anthro lab technician, have graciously allowed us the run of the lab for our photoshoots and we’ve discovered that the best photographic equipment is often whatever happens to be close by at the moment.    Just right Our biggest challenge so far has been getting the lighting just right. (The irony being that lamps, as it turns out, are hard to light.) Our goal is to make the images we create representative of what we see with the naked eye. We have 3 priorities in this: to capture...

The Hetherington Collection contains lamps and other ceramics, as well as metal, and wood objects. At the moment Melissa and I are concentrating on the lamps, which are the inspiration for the Lux Project’s name. This is the first time looking into ancient lamps in any depth for both of us, and the process has actually been quite difficult. To start, what we know about the collection itself thus far is that some of the objects were collected by Albert Edward Hetherington, an alumnus and faculty member of Wesley College (the precursor to U of W), in 1928, while others have been added to the collection over time. Hetherington travelled through Egypt and Syria, and we know he kept a journal, but we have yet to locate it. These artifacts were poorly documented, which makes the process of identifying their provenance particularly challenging. In the mid-1990s the collection was catalogued and assessed by Belle Meiklejohn at the University of Manitoba and more recently, members of ...

Welcome to the inaugural blog post of the Lux Project: The Hetherington Online! We’d like to begin by telling you a bit about how it all got started, what the goals of the project are, and who we (Simone Reis and myself, Melissa Funke) are. How it all got started: As with many great research ideas (at least in Classics), the Lux Project began over a few beers, with a former U of W student and our intrepid chair, Matt Gibbs. They told me (Melissa) about the teaching collection of Egyptian antiquities held in the anthropology lab on campus and having been involved with the From Stone to Screen digitization project at the University of British Columbia, I immediately thought, “We need to digitize this stuff and make it available online, and why aren’t we using it more on campus?”. When I was teaching at UBC, we had a few serendipitous rediscoveries of teaching collections of epigraphic squeezes, Near Eastern antiquities, and Roman coins (stashed behind some old exams!). A group of...