Wesleyan project brings photographer’s archive to light

Thousands of Fernando La Rosa’s film negatives are being seen as positive images for the first time, bringing new life to the archive of the Peruvian photographer and longtime Wesleyan College professor.

Wesleyan and Michigan State University received a $349,605 National Endowment for the Humanities grant for the two-year project, which started in September of last year.

According to his wife, retired Wesleyan art professor Frances de La Rosa, college archivist Virginia Blake and undergraduate students are processing about 22,500 photographs and film negatives dating from 1965 to 2017. The work includes preservation, digitization, archival rehousing and metadata creation, and it will result in a public website hosted by Michigan State’s Matrix Digital Humanities Center.

The archive will digitally house La Rosa’s work, which documented everyday life and artists in Peru’s capital of Lima as well as in other Andean countries, including Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador. The photographer, born in 1943, also documented archaeological sites across South America.

Working largely in black and white, La Rosa was known for photographs shaped by shadow, geometry, architecture and poetic composition. He studied with American photographer Minor White in Boston in 1973 and later founded an art gallery, Secuencia Foto Galeria, where he exhibited works by famous U.S. photographers Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan.

Before moving to Macon in 1998 to teach at Wesleyan, he taught in Peru and throughout the U.S., with stints at Parsons School of Design in New York City and Tulane University in New Orleans. He taught at the college until his death in 2017.

Frances de La Rosa, who holds the copyrights to La Rosa’s work, is stewarding the project to completion as its project manager. She said the project employs more than 17 people across Wesleyan, Michigan State, consultancies and cultural institutions. She added that the project documents her husband’s long career and traces his growth as an artist.

She said there are many images La Rosa only ever saw as the raw, reversed negatives — never as the finished photographs we are now able to see.

Editor’s note: Rishika Rimal is a student at Wesleyan College, where she is majoring in both biology and neuroscience. She is also a participant in the college’s Local Democracy Lab, which helps students gain real-world journalism experience through collaboration opportunities with The Melody.