If a picture is worth a thousand words, award-winning photographer Barbara Livingston has just dropped a couple of billion words’ worth on the Keeneland Library. As many of you are already aware, she has gifted a collection of some two million—yes, that’s million—negatives from photographs taken by Jim Raftery. The Raftery Turfoto collection contains photographs dating from the 1930s to the 1990s and was acquired by Livingston from Raftery’s family some years ago.
Livingston’s gift to the Keeneland Library will help ensure the preservation of this matchless visual chronicle of racing in 20th-century America. Equally important from a writer’s point of view, it will be a godsend in finding illustrations for books focusing on people and horses who were involved in racing during this period. The Keeneland Library has always been extremely helpful and generous in working with writers and researchers, and this donation will expand the resources at the Library’s disposal.
The benefits of Livingston’s generosity will not be completely available for years and quite possibly decades, as the Library has much work ahead in processing the collection and preparing it for both preservation in climate-controlled archives and digitization to make it more widely available. Nonetheless, I cannot think of a better steward for the splendid body of work created by Raftery during his lifetime and carefully kept by his family and then Livingston, or a better group of people to perform the labor of love that making these photographs available to future generations will be.
Livingston’s gift to the Keeneland Library will help ensure the preservation of this matchless visual chronicle of racing in 20th-century America. Equally important from a writer’s point of view, it will be a godsend in finding illustrations for books focusing on people and horses who were involved in racing during this period. The Keeneland Library has always been extremely helpful and generous in working with writers and researchers, and this donation will expand the resources at the Library’s disposal.
The benefits of Livingston’s generosity will not be completely available for years and quite possibly decades, as the Library has much work ahead in processing the collection and preparing it for both preservation in climate-controlled archives and digitization to make it more widely available. Nonetheless, I cannot think of a better steward for the splendid body of work created by Raftery during his lifetime and carefully kept by his family and then Livingston, or a better group of people to perform the labor of love that making these photographs available to future generations will be.