Tonight the University of North Carolina Tar Heel men play a game of basketball against UC-Santa Barbara.

My image scanning and processing this month has consisted of mostly basketball photographs,  and  according to a rough estimation they outnumber the usual celluloid suspects — bears, battleships, and pageant queens — by a significant margin. Therefore I have many pictures to choose from, and I feel slightly overwhelmed by all the options, all of which are excellent.

Thanks to a long tradition of basketball movies, I have been given the impression that basketball is about more than slam dunks and court-side gesticulations. Hugh Morton’s photos do not dispel this perception: in the collection there are a host of photographs from locker rooms, press conferences, dinner parties, and airplanes.

Here is an optimistic photograph, to begin with: a very backstage shot of a very sleepy men’s basketball team returning home on an airplane after their 1982 NCAA championship victory in New Orleans. (Note the young Michael Jordan two rows back on the left, and that looks like James Worthy in the front right, cuddling with his pillow).

Here is another off-court shot, of a very despondent, soda-drinking player in the locker room. The man, presumably a coach, assistant coach, or general father figure, is trying to encourage him in vain.

Moving on in the basketball summary, here is a highlight from the collection of on-court photographs. After seeing this, I wonder if maybe basketball really is just about slam dunks.

Carolina, in a game against Duke, is trailing slightly (36-42 according to the scoreboard), but I wonder, did this momentous dunk-in-progress by Michael Jordan change things? Was this one of the seminal Carolina-Duke match-ups, or merely another entry in the tally of this legendary rivalry?

My idea on this photo is that, because it was taken in the Greensboro Coliseum, it might be from the ACC tournament on March 10, 1984. If so, then Duke ended up winning, 75 to 77. But I can never be sure, as the photos I process often come to me in the form of loose, undated and unlabeled film negatives, and I have no context for the picture aside from embedded details (nametags and calendars are always welcome!). Can anyone help me identify the particular game?

To close, I have a photo from Hugh’s grandson Jack Morton, who has apparently inherited his Tar Heel photographer’s pass, and is documenting the exploits of current UNC basketballers. More of Jack’s photos from the Nov. 15 Carolina-Penn season opener can be viewed here. It is pretty neat to see the family continuity, isn’t it?

On an overcast November day in Yankee Stadium in 1949, UNC’s injured and idled All-American running back huddled to the ground and pulled his rain cape over his body.  Hugh Morton pulled out his camera and trained it on Justice—Charlie “Choo-Choo” Justice—praying undercover for the Tar Heels, who were leading Notre Dame 6-0.  It may be Morton’s most widely published photograph from that notable contest, whose final outcome was a 42-6 defeat for Carolina.

As I mentioned in my post on Friday, I just could not dampen the festive atmosphere for Saturday’s game by posting this photograph.  Justice’s prayer was shattered in New York, but the Tar Heel victory this past weekend in Chapel Hill was “just deserts.”

Today I found a few more negatives from the 1949 game and I have scanned several of those found thus far. I hope to put up a selection in the next day or two.

Tomorrow afternoon, Kenan Memorial Stadium on campus will be in the hub of excitement that accompanies UNC football, magnified by the mystique of its opponent, Notre Dame University.  Earlier this week I wrote a blog post for our sister blog, North Carolina Miscellany, featuring photographs in the Photographic Archives made by Bob Brooks in 1949 when UNC first played Notre Dame.  That game took place in New York City’s Yankee Stadium.  And if you didn’t already know or deduce . . . Hugh Morton was there.

I cannot bring myself to include in this entry Morton’s most memorable photograph from that contest.  It’s just too heartbreaking to post amidst the anticipation and excitement of tomorrow’s game.  I promise to publish it on Monday.  Instead, here’s a festive pre-game photograph made of UNC’s mascot Rameses and fans in the lobby of a New York hotel:

As usual, we’d love to hear from you with identifications if you can.

I spent a good portion of today tracking down negatives from the game (I’ve found some) and trying to confirm that a group of them are from Yankee Stadium.  The day escaped from me in the process, so I’ll post the game photographs on Monday.

As a recent Boston Globe article discusses, historians, archivists, and other cultural professionals are increasingly relying on the public to help provide information and feedback about the materials in their collections. These efforts have been hugely expedited by the internet—see, for examples, Flickr collections put up by the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, a “crowd-curated” photo exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, and this very blog!

In addition to our online efforts, we here at the library decided to experiment with “crowdsourcing” in person. A few weeks back, we hosted an event we called a “Hugh Morton Photo Identification Party.” Hugh’s wife Julia Taylor Morton (in white top above), Bill Friday, and some other guinea pigs we felt would have specific knowledge and experience related to various areas of Morton’s work were invited. We set up some unidentified Morton prints on tables labeled “Sports,” “People,” and “Places,” pulled together a slideshow, armed a few library staff with paper and pencils, and started recording.

The result, we think, was a great success—more than 300 previously undocumented images were at least partially identified!

The award for most efficient and prolific identification has to go to the “Sports” table (shown above), where former UNC men’s basketball coach Bill Guthridge and UNC sports reporter/historian extraordinaire Fred Kiger kept our own Jason Tomberlin’s pencil flying for hours.

They identified the shooter in the Morton image below as Dante Calabria, playing for UNC against the Texas Longhorns in the Smith Center. (I haven’t yet done the research to confirm the year).

The composition of this next Morton photo is simply amazing. The ID we got from Guthridge and Kiger was (in unknown order) Tommy Lagarde, Walter Davis, and Mitch Kupchak vs. NCSU, 1975 or 1976. Perhaps fittingly, they didn’t identify the NC State players. Can anyone help refine this description?

These are just a few basketball-related highlights from what may be the first of (potentially) several “Morton Photo ID Parties.” We’re thinking future events could be topically based—e.g., another one just for Sports, one on Morton’s nature/scenic photography, the Azalea Festival, etc., etc.

Let us know if you have ideas, or would like to host one!

This post was written by John Blythe, a Digital Curation Fellow in UNC’s School of Library and Information Science and a member of the Digital Libraries class just wrapping up their Morton project. Here’s a brief bio of John provided by SILS:

John Blythe, a native of Chapel Hill and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alumnus, came to the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) following an 18-year career in journalism that included stints as a Web editor, radio producer and newspaper reporter. His interest in digital curation and preservation grew out of an encounter with a box of old tapes made by his grandfather [LeGette Blythe] during a long career as a newspaperman and writer in North Carolina.

As a native Chapel Hillian, a UNC alum and a Tar Heel basketball fan, I was used to seeing Hugh Morton sitting cross-legged on the sidelines at the Smith Center (and at its predecessor Carmichael Auditorium) snapping photos of men’s basketball games. I also knew that Morton and his family owned Grandfather Mountain. On several occasions as a teenager, I joined the freckled and pale-skinned masses who mount an annual July pilgrimage to the mountain’s MacRae Meadows (which bears the name of Morton’s maternal ancestors) to celebrate all things Scottish at the Highland Games.

But it wasn’t until I joined with five of my library science school classmates in digitizing some of Morton’s photos that I realized how prolific a photographer he was. More than 500,000 images! I was also surprised to learn how long photography had been one of Morton’s passions. And what a chronicler of UNC he was. As we digitized we found negative after negative of UNC students, some candid and some posed. There was the series of photos taken either in McCorkle Place or Polk Place of a male student reclining in the grass joined by a changing group of women. Posed? Yes. They had the look of a clothing ad you’d find among the inserts in a Sunday newspaper. I thought, “Who is this guy? How did he manage to attract so many women? And why wasn’t I so lucky during my undergrad days?”

There was another negative. This one appeared to be candid. Taken of a dorm, it featured some young women lounging on the roof of an enclosed porch. The negative was overexposed and tested my newfound digitization skills. “Remember what Stephen said,” I told myself. “Increase the contrast here. Put a little more shadow there.” As I followed these steps, my mind wandered. I was taken back to the Chapel Hill of my youth. It was a hot summer day. We were driving home from swimming lessons at Bowman Gray Indoor Pool. And there, as I looked out the window, was the porch and the dorm. Was it Spencer dorm? Alderman? McIver? Kenan? The image wasn’t clear enough in my head. Briefly there was the nostalgia for the old, the dislike of change and the sentimentality for the Chapel Hill we used to call “The Village.” But the photo also summoned back happy memories. The relaxed feel of a six-year-old whose summer is filled with possibilities and few limitations. There’s the chance to play. And play again. There’s summer nights of “Kick the Can” and “No Bears Out Tonight.” And going barefoot all day.

As a budding archivist, I’m learning that documentation is important. We need to know what dorm is featured in the photo. We should provide the names of the happy couples reclining in the grass. Mr. Morton, it seems, liked to take photos more than he liked to record who was in them. As Stephen and Elizabeth have told us, they’re dependent on you (the reader) to help us with that documentation. That’s the professional speaking. But, speaking personally, as someone whose memories of Chapel Hill now span five decades, I’m just as happy to look at these photos and imagine. That’s the Hugh Morton I’ve now come to know—a man who’s provided the opportunity to get away from daily responsibilities and daydream.

—John Blythe

As I’ve been sorting through Hugh Morton’s negatives over the past few months, it’s been fun to keep an eye out for different technical aspects of his work—how he would occasionally experiment with various film types and lenses, lighting, focus, depth of field, etc. One trend I have noticed is his fondness for time exposures, or the use of longer exposure times (leaving the shutter open for multiple seconds, minutes, or maybe even hours) to convey motion in the images he created.

You’ll often see this technique used in photos of waterfalls, where a longer exposure gives the water a silky, almost foggy look. This isn’t the greatest example, but take it from me—Morton experimented heavily with waterfall photography. (Anyone know where this was taken?)

One of Morton’s best known time exposures is on page 41 of the 2003 book Hugh Morton’s North Carolina—the one where Morton got a security guard to drive his car up and down the road to Grandfather Mountain while he held the shutter open. (I would have included that image in this post, but I’m thus far I haven’t found the original!). NOTE: See update at end of post.

I love the image below, which I presume was taken at one of the ski slopes in the Boone area. (Anyone know which one? While I did grow up in Boone, I was not physically coordinated enough for skiing. Also, my mother worked for a while in the local emergency room, so I knew the possible consequences). The light trails create a wonderful and somewhat creepy effect in combination with the “ghostly” skiers at the bottom.

Here’s another striking example from Morton’s younger days—this one’s labeled “Rides, Carolina Beach,” and was taken sometime in the 1940s.

Finally, here’s an example of a time exposure gone wrong (or right, depending on your perspective—I think it looks cool). Believe it or not, this is a nighttime image of UNC’s Old Well, taken sometime around 1940. Perhaps he hadn’t yet invested in a tripod?

UPDATE 5/20/2008: Stephen’s been messing around with the new scanner, and I just happened to notice that he had done a test scan of one of Morton’s time exposure slides of the road up to Grandfather Mountain. Here it is:

In honor of the beginning of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament (in which UNC is the #1 overall seed, by the way), and since I’m just starting to sort through Morton’s basketball negatives, I thought I’d quickly share a few highlights from UNC basketball glories past.

The first image is from the 1946 tournament, which marked UNC’s first appearance in the title game, played at Madison Square Garden against Oklahoma A&M. Sadly, UNC lost to Oklahoma 43-40.

UNC’s first title win came in 1957, and while I’m fairly certain Hugh Morton would have photographed the tournament, I haven’t yet found the negatives to prove it. There are, however, some shots of the 1957 championship team in the library’s UNC Photo Lab Collection.

And then, of course, there’s the famous 1982 tournament, when a UNC team containing such legendary members as James Worthy (below, right), and a young Michael Jordan (center) defeated the Georgetown Hoyas, led by Patrick Ewing. (I scanned this image from a print, since I haven’t yet found the negative). Morton photographed this tournament heavily, collaborating with David Daly on the 1991 book, One to Remember: The 1982 North Carolina Tar Heels NCAA Championship Team, Then and Now.

Also legendary was the team’s coach from 1961 to 1997, Dean Smith, seen below on the sidelines during the 1982 tournament. Smith and Morton were close friends, and Morton provided many of the photos for Smith’s 2002 memoir, A Coach’s Life. The Morton collection contains hundreds of images of Smith, not only at games and press conferences but also playing golf, hanging out with bears at Grandfather, etc.

Hopefully, in a few short weeks, we’ll have some new, triumphant memories to add to this list . . .

I am fond of serendipity—rooted, perhaps, in the photographer part of me. Most of my personal photography comes from exploration, not from preconceptions. Serendipity is not, however, aimless wondering. You have to be “tuned in” to what may present itself.

Last Friday was the first day we had students from the School of Information and Library Sciences (SILS) digital library class here to scan negatives. For the material to be scanned, Elizabeth and I selected in advance Hugh Morton’s negatives made during his years as a student at UNC. We thought as students themselves they’d have some connection to the images, and it would give us a glimpse into student life on campus in the pre- and early World War II era.

While setting up the workspace on Friday morning, I wanted to walk through the work flow in preparation for the students arrival. I picked out a negative—the image above—that looked too challenging for them to scan right off the bat because the faces and lighter clothing were overexposed. Scanning it gave me some fits, so I decided to try again later. I did, however, recognize on the cover of a Daily Tar Heel newspaper (held by a woman who may be Olive Consecu, secretarial staff member of the student publication The Carolina Magazine) a scene similar to a Hugh Morton negative that I had scanned months earlier while “rummaging” (see below).

At the end of the day, I launched back into rescanning the negative. With a better scan in hand, I zoomed into the image to see if I could read the issue date, but all I could discern was that the month had a short name, presumably “May,” and that, with the exercising trainees in naval uniforms, it was likely after 7 December 1941. Then, without thought, I recognized that the picture to the left, on the back page, was another Morton negative that I had scanned during that same rummaging phase.

So off I went to the bound volumes of the DTH. At first I could not find the issue. The newsprint is very fragile, so I was carefully handling only the tops of the pages, looking for the full-bleed printed image. Every page was columnar. For each publication volume, however, there are three bound sets. One of the three bound sets was extremely fragile and detached from the spine . . . .

While gingerly turning pages . . . Voila! I uncovered a special edition smaller than the regular daily issues.

Entitled Your University—Servant of the State, the issue’s twenty pages feature UNC’s shifting roles within the war effort. As then DTH editor Orville Campbell stated, “This is your University. Those who run it for you know that you want them to do everything possible to prepare the youth of this state and nation for service. To that end they are working. We who are students feel that the story of how your University serves the state, the nation, and you needs to be told. To that end The Daily Tar Heel, the students’ newspaper, is publishing this special edition.”

The newspaper credits Hugh Morton, student photographer, for the cover photograph of “NROTC boys going though some physical arm conditioning exercises.” So while the negative above is not the same image as the photograph on the cover, both were very likely shot at the same scene.

A quick examination of the negatives we set aside for the SILS project revealed more images similar to those that appeared in the DTH special edition. Yesterday’s group of students scanned a negative of Sir Gerald Campbell, then British Consul General to the United States, surrounded by eager students (see above). Again it is not the same image as the one published.

The caption for the photograph on the back page of the special edition (pictured above) begins, “Penny and pound wise is Dan Martin, self-help senior who this year started a cooperative movement for the budget boys. . . .” Martin was an instrumental player in the first cooperative living project at UNC. He was one of a group of students who moved into a house on Mallett Street in an effort to “fight down rising costs of living.” A scan from a negative with Martin in a very slightly different pose follows.

To wrap things up, let’s go back to the negative that started all this. Note the “LET’S TALK CAROLINA” button worn by the fellow on the far right (detail below).

The front page of the regular May 10th edition of the DTH features an editorial, “Talk Carolina,” by Orville Campbell that described the university, confronting dropping enrollment for the fall in the face of war, as being “on the threshold of institutional pathopsychoneurosis.” He continued, “We are the doctors, the cure-all smart boys, if you will, that can change it to an electric magic portal.” Calling upon UNC’s 3,500 students to be salesmen for the university, he proclaimed “That war means clamps for Carolina if we don’t let our friends and their friends in on what we know about it.” The following day, the DTH reported that several campus organizations had rallied behind the idea and that buttons had been ordered for sale at cost. Roland B. Parker, Dean of Men, bought the first button on May 18th.

A trove of information serendipitously discovered . . . just because a negative looked to be a bit too challenging to scan!

I couldn’t let today go by without posting this image, A color slide made during a Duke—UNC basketball game circa 1957. Without time to research it today, I ask you: what game is it?

UPDATE 7 February 2008

Here’s a cropped detail to help with identifying the players:

One of the best aspects of working in an academic library/archive is the proximity of and access to students. For one, you can hire them to help with some of the more tedious and repetitive aspects of archival processing! But more importantly, they get on-campus access to valuable hands-on learning opportunities—and you get the benefit of their technological skills and expertise, not to mention the energy and fresh perspective they bring to projects.

Luckily, UNC-Chapel Hill boasts one of the top graduate schools of Information and Library Science in the country (currently tied for #1 in the U.S. News and World Report!). This is especially good news for us at “A View to Hugh,” because we’ll be working this semester with UNC SILS professor Jeffrey Pomerantz and the members of his Digital Libraries class (a few of which are pictured above) to begin developing an online presence for the Hugh Morton collection. Our (overly ambitious?) goal is to have a prototype up and running by the end of the semester.

The class has met a few times and have already split themselves into nine intimidating-sounding working groups: Project Management, System Administration, Digitization, Standards, Metadata, Information Architecture, Services, Evaluation, and Preservation. We’re very excited about the project and will post regular updates about how it’s going. Perhaps we’ll even hear from some of the students themselves on this very blog (if they want a good grade, that is . . .).