The Hershenson-Allen Archive was formed in 1997 with the primary goal of establishing a vehicle by which scholars, professionals, movie lovers of all sorts as well as experts in film and media, art and graphic design, communications, popular culture, social history, and political science could forever study the motion picture industry.
Archive Facts
- Comprised of 41,987 movie poster images
- Covers 25,809 unique films
- All images are available digitally and physically (4″ x 5″ high-quality color transparencies)
- Physical transparencies currently stored in an environmentally-controlled storage facility for maximum preservation
- Includes images from 36 films deemed “lost”
- The collection spans from 1894 (“Faust”) to the films from the early 2000s, representing a large percentage of all films know to exist
- Image metadata is stored is a queryable SQL database
The Archival Process
The chemical photographic images are the heart of the Hershenson-Allen Archive. All of the photography was done by professional documentary photographers using stationary 4” x 5” view cameras, top of the line lenses (e.g. the excellent Schneider G-Claron 150mm f/9 enlarging lens), and professional film (e.g. Kodak Ektachrome Professional 64T and Fuji Velvia 50).
During photography, posters were mounted on a vertical vacuum table in order to assure complete flatness, with the film plane and table plane aligned to parallel. All images incorporated a manufacturer’s color calibration card for the film being used in order to guide accurate color rendition in scanning and printing.
Large format chemical photographic images created in this manner contain an extraordinary amount of detail, particularly when compared to digital photography. Ken Rockwell, a noted photographic expert, asserts that a quality 4” x 5” image contains over a gigapixel (one thousand megapixels) of usable information. By contrast, he says that “A digital camera with Bayer Interpolation would need to be rated at better than 2 gigapixels to see things that can be seen on a sheet of 4” x 5″ film.”
This then is what makes the Hershenson-Allen Archive truly unique. Other movie poster image collections exist, but none incorporate anything close to the extraordinary quality of the images in this Archive.