About

Bill McLennan photographing a bentwood chest, ca. 1983. MOA Archives image a035999

The Image Recovery Project arose from the urgent need of current generations of First Nations artists and community members to gain access to the creative achievements of their ancestors and to build on the cultural knowledge that the old paintings could reveal. The ravenous collecting by outsiders of Northwest Coast artworks, coupled with devastating population decline and the suppression of traditional Indigenous ceremony and cultural practice, eventually left only a remnant of this rich material heritage in British Columbia.

In 1984, designer and curator Bill McLennan began photographing Northwest Coast painted boxes and chests with infrared film as part of his extraordinary Image Recovery Project at the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at UBC. The project’s goal was to use photographic techniques to “see” beneath the patina of age (“layers of time and grime,” as he called it) that obscures many of the painted images on objects and belongings now residing in museums and private collections around the world. His Image Recovery Project, carried out at MOA in collaboration with First Nations artist-researchers and students, offered revelatory access to the creative vision of the ancestors. The application of infrared photography helped to bring attention to the displacement of these artworks and bring the objects’ inventive compositions back into view, some for the first time in over a century.

Jacquie Gijssen photographing a bentwood box, ca. 1983. MOA Archives image a060327

Many of the images were first exhibited at MOA in 1992 in the exhibition The Transforming Image. In 2000, several hundred of the photographs were published with new research and commentary by McLennan and Karen Duffek in their book The Transforming Image: Painted Arts of Northwest Coast First Nations. In 2022, after the book had long been out of print and its images were increasingly difficult to access, MOA published a second edition. The book’s new edition gave impetus to expanding the impact of the Image Recovery Project by finding a way to make the full collection of infrared photographs available in digitized form for easier study, comparison, and enlargement. There are nearly 3,000 infrared negatives of over 600 artworks from the Image Recovery Project in the MOA Archives and these were systematically scanned to archival standards. Most of the negatives are infrared, but the project photographers also used high contract black and white film in combination with unique lighting to bring out details in some pieces. 

This site was developed in order to share this unsurpassed resource with Indigenous artists and community members as well as other researchers and scholars invested in the study and revitalization of Northwest Coast painting.

Learn more about the photographic techniques used in this project here.