Voces del Prado

Digitalisation of the Photography Archive

José Luis Díez García, Head of the Department of Conservation of 19th Century Painting, 1988-2013

During my period as Assistant Director I had to take more direct responsibility for the organisation of the Photography Archive, which depended on me. At that time, the company “Prado Difusión” didn’t exist. This was a commercial service that was managed within the administration structure, because we were working during a period in which we were all waiting for things to operate in a new and different manner. And we really had a huge mass of files and images. These were mainly analogue files known as slides, which were of considerable quality here because they were made in 9 cm by 13 cm format. The first thing we had to do was to digitalise all of the slides we had, so that we had a good stock of material. All museums throughout the world were undergoing the same process, based on the use of new digital technology.
At the same time, we had to begin creating an entirely new digital archive from the very beginning, photographing Las Meninas again for the thousandth time. Because we only had analogue archives. Of course, we possessed some marvellous photographs dating from the nineteenth century, including positives and glass plates of Las Meninas, not to mention the slides that had been made and that I was familiar with. In the same manner, we had the layouts of our exhibition catalogues, which had been cut out with scissors.
Really, our work consisted of two processes: first, we had to put the Archive in order and digitalise everything we had; and then we had to create a completely new archive of absolutely everything, until we were able to present and use a digital archive of all of the collections.