The UMass Amherst Libraries announce the acquisition of the Terri Cappucci Glass Plate Negative collection. The archive, from local photographer Terri Cappucci ’00BA,’03MFA, of 2,500-3,000 glass plate negatives that date back to the 1860s, was gifted to Cappucci in July of 2019. Cappucci donated them to the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center (SCUA) in July 2023. Cappucci, who received her MFA at UMass Amherst, is a documentary photographer, alternative process printer, and educator who has been producing her own nineteenth century-style photographs using the wet plate collodion process for many years.  

Most of the negatives in the collection are undated and have little to no information about where they were taken or who the photographer was. To address this, Cappucci created the “Somebody Photographed This” website and Facebook group. She also utilized her expertise to determine that the photographs in the overall collection were taken by several different photographers. While most of the collection is from Western Massachusetts, specifically Franklin County, there are also images from the coastal towns of Massachusetts. She then cleaned and digitized some of the most compelling images from the collection and posted them to the “Somebody Photographed This” Facebook page during the pandemic. Followers left comments to share locations, dates, and additional information about the photos. This led to Cappucci receiving additional glass plate negative collections from people from around the world, as well as articles about the project in the Boston Globe, Greenfield Recorder, Montague Reporter, and UMass Magazine, along with a televised segment on NEPM. Cappucci started a GoFundMe campaign and raised funds for the preservation supplies. 

In 2023, Cappucci approached SCUA to permanently house the collection amongst their vast holdings of photograph and manuscript collections that document life in New England from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. SCUA will make Cappucci’s scans available via Credo, their repository of digitized archival materials as well as continue Cappucci’s meticulous work of cataloging, preserving, and storing the photos, which will be available to the citizens of Massachusetts, and beyond, for decades to come.