A seismic shift for Riverside’s fragile stereographs

The world capital of old-fashioned stereographic photos -- that is, the UC Riverside Museum of Photography -- just got richer.

Museum officials have landed a $500,000 federal grant to help build a more secure storage and display area for the Keystone-Mast Stereographic Collection, which includes nearly every known stereo card image printed between 1890 and 1940, some 350,000 prints and 250,000 of the negatives from which they were made, together making up the world’s largest collection of stereographs and stereographic materials.

Subjects, typically captured on detailed negatives, range from Mark Twain to American Indians to Afghanistan in the 1930s. The grant, from the National Endowment for the Arts, will be used to construct a seismically isolated storage system to help cushion the fragile collection -- the negatives are pieces of glass, each measuring 4 by 8 inches -- from the region’s frequent small (and occasionally large) earthquakes.

The museum stands at 3824 Main St. along Riverside’s downtown pedestrian mall. The Keystone View Co., founded in 1892, was based in Meadeville, Pa. But Gifford Mast of Davenport, Iowa, bought the company and its archives in 1963, and in the late 1970s the Mast family donated the archive to the fledgling Riverside museum.

With the grant money, officials say, they will move the stereographic collection from its current site -- atop one of the state’s three most active earthquake faults -- to a seismically isolated storage area. That storage area will be in the basement of the Rouse Building, a former department store next to the museum that was purchased by the university last year.

University plans also call for a creation of a multidisciplinary center for the arts there bearing the name of the Culver family, which put up $5 million toward the purchase. Museum officials say they expect the building’s conversion to take three years.

The Riverside museum also houses the Bingham Technology collection of 10,000 cameras and viewing devices, along with an interactive photo technology gallery and a collection of prints that includes works from Ansel Adams and Walker Evans.

-- Christopher Reynolds