The State Historical Society of North Dakota is offering a photo preservation workshop that will coincide with the society's annual Governor's Conference, Oct. 28-29 in Bismarck at the Heritage Center.
The focus will be on identification of negatives, of deterioration properties and different types of damages to photo negatives and prints.
Anyone wanting to participate can do so by logging on to its website at www.history.nd.gov ,
The workshop will be a hands-on affair with photographs in varying states of deterioration and need. Some that will be handed out are considered beyond restoration. They work however, as practice repair/conservation pieces, and show what deterioration looks like in old prints.
I attended the Midwest Art Conservation Center's workshop last year and it was well worth the time and money. These workshops are for professionals -- who work in museum and gallery conservation -- as well as people who just want to preserve photographic images from personal collections.
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The M.A.C.C. workshop is in conjunction with the 23rd Annual Governor's Conference and History Awards ceremony.
The theme for the 2011 weekend is water: "Too Much or Too Little: The Story of Water in North Dakota." The workshop is Friday, Oct. 28, and the water conference and awards ceremony is Saturday, Oct. 29.
Those who are considered experts in this subject, who have experienced both water extremes, will be addressing guests.
They include keynote speaker former U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan. Other speakers include Gov. Jack Dalrymple, Allen Olson, former governor, Gerald Baker, retired National Park Service superintendent, David Sprynczynatyk, adjutant general and former state engineer, Todd Sando, state engineer, and Murray Sagsveen, state flood recovery coordinator and former assistant attorney general.
Speakers also include former Fargo mayor Bruce Furness, four North Dakota State University and University of North Dakota professors and a discussion panel made up of five state and federal water use experts, which will be headed by North Dakota's Water Users Association Executive Vice President Mike Dwyer.
Lunchtime presenters on Friday and Saturday are cowboy poet Bill Lowman and Arch Ellwein, who will portray legendary steamboat captain Grant Marsh.
The awards ceremony will include the local historian award given to individuals who have demonstrated the need for and preservation of historic sites and the recording of a locale's history. Jamestown has had two recipients of the governor's awards.
Known to some as Jamestown's official historian, Mary Young received the governor's award in 1983 for her work with the Fort Seward Wagon Train and associated histories. She and her husband Ernie also had a major influence on the other recipient, Steven Reidburn, who in 2010 received the governor's individual history award.
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Reidburn's award was for more than three decades of preservation work at the Fort Seward site. He was then hired by SHSND and assigned to supervise the historic Fort Buford site, where in 1881 Sitting Bull and his band of Hunkpapa Sioux returned to the United States from Canada. Reidburn's year at Buford has showcased several Jamestown artists in the beautiful landmark rotunda at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers. To attend any of the events, please connect via the SHSND website to reserve a place at the governor's conference and awards ceremony.
If anyone has an item for this column, please send to Sharon Cox, PO Box 1559, Jamestown, ND 58402-1559.
