A Museum is able to tell the story of the development of a country through objects. However, to help tell the stories a picture is worth a thousand words. Pictures show the people who made History, the events, the buildings, the industries and are an easy means to illustrate the changes that have occurred.
The Museum holds over 4000 images in its paper and slide photographic archive, dating from the 1860s to modern day. All images have been scanned at 300dpi and visitors may view the original images or the digitised images.
The Museum also holds over 4000 digital images, mostly modern ones. There are no paper copies of these images but they are available for viewing on the data base at the Museum.
Visitors to the Museum can see many of the images displayed in the Museum exhibits, and many have been used in the Museum Newsletter, Astrolabe. The photographs are filed by subject and are quickly accessible in our research building.
The collection does have limitations: the historic centres of Grand Turk, Salt Cay, and South Caicos are better recorded, as are the 1960s and 1970s. These limitations are historical: photographers were where the main populations were, or physical: Donors of the large collections were only present in the Turks and Caicos islands for short, specific times.
The Largest collections were donated by:
Ted Philippona (1960s)
Barbara Currie Dailey (late 1970s and 1980s)
Some of the photographic images held in the archive are used to illustrate this website. There is also a Museum Publication Turks and Caicos Islands in Old Photographs written by Nigel Sadler (published December 2003) which contains 40 pages of images from the Museum holdings. The publication is available from the Museum Shop.
Contents of this story:
Turks and Caicos National Museum
Nigel Sadler |
