BY MEGAN ARNEY
Since November the Militant has been using its newly
established electronic photo archive. The staff of the
Militant and its sister publication in Spanish Perspectiva
Mundial set up the system working with Graeme Cookson, a
professional photographer from London, England, who
volunteered his help.
The digital photo files are shared with Pathfinder Press, enabling the book publisher and the socialist newsweekly to eliminate duplication of labor and save time in production while maintaining a digital archive of high-quality photographs that can be used for years to come by all those involved in publishing communist literature.
This is part of the transformation under way in the production of Pathfinder books and pamphlets. Volunteer workers in Pathfinder's printshop are now organizing to produce communist literature with less labor, and at a lower cost, using fully digital methods. More than 100 supporters of the communist movement around the world are putting the entire back list of Pathfinder's arsenal of more than 350 titles in electronic form and are sending them to Pathfinder on CD-ROMs, ready to be used for making printing plates with the printshop's recently purchased computer-to-plate system.
The Militant's photo archive spans its 70-year history, recording a visual history of working-class struggles for more than a century. It includes drawings from the Paris Commune and the Russian revolution, photos from labor battles that forged the industrial unions this century, and images of revolutionary leaders like V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Nelson Mandela, Ernesto Che Guevara, and Malcolm X. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, the Cuban revolution, the struggle for women's liberation, and labor battles up until a couple months ago are recorded in tens of thousands of photographic prints and negatives. Some of these images exist nowhere else. All new photos coming in will now be stored only in digital form.
For about three years, the Militant has been produced with electronic photos, replacing halftones produced from prints that required more labor and training to produce and paste up, and which put greater limitations on quality. But each image was scanned separately, and then deleted after the paper was printed. If the same photo was needed for a Pathfinder book, the print had to be rescanned. Sometimes the staff of Perspectiva Mundial would scan the photo again -all at different specifications. This created an enormous amount of duplicated work.
Photos in the archive are stored at a quality that can be used for anything from a newspaper to book covers, and posters. The standard for the digital archive is based on the professional quality needed for images in Pathfinder books and pamphlets, that is, high quality for long-term use. The main photo archive consists of high resolution images -electronic files of about 24 megabytes for a color photo and 8 megabytes for black and white. High resolution photos are saved on CD-ROM, a copy of which is kept off-site. A lower resolution version of the photo, adequate for use in the Militant and PM, is easily accessible for day-to-day use.
The archive will make the irreplaceable wealth of photos acquired by the communist movement over decades more usable and accessible. Photos in the archive can be looked up from several workstations in the offices of the Militant, Pathfinder, and the printshop.
An image database allows users to search for images by entering up to five keywords. A search using the words "Cuba," "women," and "cooperatives," for example, rapidly brings up thumbnail images of all photos with those words in the attached caption. A copy is then made that can be adjusted for a particular use, leaving the original intact.
The Militant and Perspectiva Mundial staffs have begun using the establishment of a digital photo archive to upgrade skills in manipulating photos - lightening, sharpening, and cropping - and designing ads and the PM cover.
Maintaining the system means daily political attention in editing, scanning, and captioning images that come in. In addition, members of the Pathfinder staff are scanning dozens of photos every week, which are then sent out to the volunteers who are converting the books into digital form.
Photos can be scanned and introduced into the archive from prints, negatives, or slides. When possible, negatives are used because more information can be captured from them, producing higher quality images. The Militant editors encourage correspondents to send in negatives of their pictures, or, if not, at least prints. If readers send photos or negatives together with a self-addressed, stamped envelope, they will be returned after scanning.
Sometimes there's not time to send in negatives to meet the Militant's weekly publication schedule. Correspondents around the world have been sending in scanned photos by e- mail for more than a year now. About half of the photos regularly used in the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial come in this way. Correspondents can keep doing this, but please also send the negatives or prints for the long-term archive. The box on the left gives some pointers.