From a first glance of a digitized glass plate negative, hula dancers perform outside ʻIolani Palace during King David Kalākaua's coronation. Up close, you can see the intricate patterns of the dancers' kapa skirts.
The photo, taken sometime in the late 1800s, is part of more than 22,000 glass plates from the James J. Williams Collection that the Hawai‘i State Archives, a division of the state Department of Accounting and General Services, has acquired in the last few years.
The archives recently acquired another thousand plates that will be digitally archived.
“These are the most iconic, definitive renderings of yesterday,” said State Archivist Adam Jansen. “These images tell so much from just one single photo. The old saying ‘a picture is worth 1,000 words’ is incredibly true.”
The state Legislature approved funding in 1927 for the territorial archives at the time to purchase the JJ Williams photograph collection. Williams was an English-born photographer who lived in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi.
He had a distinguished photo studio in Honolulu from the 1880s to the 1920s, before his son took over the business, followed by his grandson and great-grandson, according to Jansen.
“What we didn’t know is we didn’t get the entire collection,” Jansen said. “They had kept back about 1,000 plates of the most iconic photos that they were using for postcards, calendars and travel books. We were fortunate enough to acquire these a couple months ago, and now we’re starting to digitize the remainder of that collection."
Williams was the go-to photographer when the royal family needed portraits.
Glass plate negatives were used throughout the mid-1800s to the 1920s and were the main medium for photos.
“That was the first technology that allowed a photographer to make multiple copies of a single image,” Jansen said. “Before that, they would put chemicals on a silver, copper plate or on a tin plate, and expose it to light. It would etch the metal, which meant you have one great photograph, but if you wanted a second, you had to sit for an entirely different photo.”
The glass plate negative can be found on the Hawaiʻi State Archives website.
