Berenice Abbott's "Super Sight" at the MIT Museum

[Oren Grad]

Did the setup appear to be basically a camera oscura?

A diagram on the wall showed a projection lens as part of the setup.

If so, that would suggest the appearance of good DOF and hence apparent detail in the equivalent of a contact print. Was that your impression when viewing the images?

Many of the pictures were quite soft overall, and where there were areas of crisp focus, they often weren't optimally placed. I'd say that only one of the prints could arguably have passed as a decent contact print.

BTW, most of the prints were silver prints, though they weren't labeled as to which were contemporaneous and which made later. A few were labeled as inkjets; obviously those had a scanning step involved.

[Joseph Kashi]

Thanks for the information, Oren. Sounds like an interesting experiment but generally not a viable technique. No matter how convoluted the apparatus, you can’t add data that’s not in the original. We were most recently back in May 2022 and the new museum was not scheduled to open until later in the year.