The Bayard Album: A Digital Re-Creation

In 2024 the Getty Museum presented the exhibition Hippolyte Bayard: A Persistent Pioneer, focusing on the work of an important yet lesser known pioneer of photography, Hippolyte Bayard. It featured a collection of his photographs, the centerpiece of which was a 192-page album, one of the earliest photo albums ever created. For conservation reasons the book no longer holds the fragile photographs. Thus, this digital interactive—a re-creation of the album with interpretation, presented in-gallery—offered visitors a unique opportunity: a chance to experience this historic object in its full richness, approximating how its creator and subsequent owners may have engaged with it before the album was later disassembled for preservation.

The Getty reconstructed the album digitally from separate elements, including images of the photographs and album pages. To do this, we leveraged image and data systems, along with the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), to build a digital reconstruction. The in-gallery kiosk experience offered interpretation. It conveyed how Bayard conceived of the album, how he presented his own photographs and those of other pioneering photographers in it, and how he and later owners used it. The interactive kiosk furniture and application were designed for accessibility in mind, with software interactions being in the lower third of the touchscreen for easy access to visitors sitting or in wheelchairs. Content for the presentation was available in English and Spanish.

Our digital interactive, presented in-gallery alongside the original, offered a full re-creation of Bayard’s album as it once was, with photographs amongst pages filled with inscriptions and other evidence of ownership. It allowed a “browsing” as well as a “guided experience,” enabling them to choose how to engage. An introduction explained the significance of the object and how users could interact. To browse, they could page through the album. For a guided experience, they could jump to a selection of page spreads to explore in-depth, with zoom capability and explanatory text.

Creating the digital album leveraged the expertise of diverse groups of staff and marked the first time we produced a project merging IIIF technology and content interpretation.