The Geoffrey C Wood Proof Book Project
Geoffrey C Wood was a prominent 20th Century Nelson Photographer, well known for his portrait studio and his time as a photojournalist for the Nelson Evening Mail.
The Geoffrey C Wood Collection is Nelson Provincial Museum’s largest, comprising an estimated 650,000 negatives.
An amazing resource among this collection are the negatives from his time as a contract photographer for the Nelson Evening Mail, spanning the period of 1961 to 1978. Along with these negatives Nelson Provincial Museum also inherited the proof books Geoffrey and his family kept, which enabled photos to be more easily found amid this vast collection.
Proof books contain proof sheets, also known as contact sheets. These are printed positives of the negative strips. They are the same size as the negatives, which are mostly 35mm or 120 film – each image is like a miniature preview. Films and frames are numbered on the proof sheet so that the correct film can be retrieved and the right frames selected. The films themselves are kept in a temperature and humidity controlled cold store for their ongoing preservation.
159 proof books
12,737 pages
246,931 images!
We also have Wood’s written indexes but these comprise several different books and searching through them for a certain image can be quite challenging, especially if you don’t know the date and how it was captioned, and of course these lack the usually crucial visual reference.
Searching through the proof books with the images can still, however, be a veritable needle in a haystack especially if you don’t have details. This is why making an electronically searchable resource is such an important task.
