A Tower of Postcards
Zaha Hadid Foundation is the custodian of Dame Zaha Hadid’s personal collection with a large number of postcards and greeting cards. Apart from being one of her favoured methods of communication with her friends, family and colleagues, many of these cards came from varying parts of the world and are kept unused, suggesting her fondness in collecting them as travel memorabilia. As part of the Foundation’s collections inventory project, the Collections team has been working on auditing an approximately 1.7m tall tower of Zaha’s postcards and greeting cards.
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Starting in March 2024, we began this project by photographing the tower on all six sides and proceeded to individual photos of the cards in their original positions – removing one card at a time to keep track of the order of each stack and their locations in the tower. Taking these cards off the tower is also an important conservation endeavour, to give them a new more ideal home in our collection store, seeing that many of them were stuffed very tightly in the metal tower for nearly 10 years.
After spending around two weeks with the tower, we then continued with close-up photography of each card, capturing more details as to meet the Foundation’s long-term goal of providing an accessible digital resource of our collections. With more than 3000 images on our hands, we then fine-tuned them with colour corrections and file naming that corresponds to their new temporary collections number. This stage took us more than a month to complete.
The final and most meticulous process of this project was the inventory stage, taking four Collections Assistants roughly two months to finish. Referring to the processed images, we captured details of each card that includes its manufacturing details and other later-added elements like hand-written inscriptions. We also revisited the cards to label them with their temporary collections number, measured them and did our final round of condition checks.
Between other inventory projects that we were tackling throughout the year, this inventory project spanned over seven months, finishing in September 2024. It was a laborious yet very rewarding experience to see how these objects are now rehoused and accounted for in writing and visual forms. After a sweepstake between us in the Collections team, we can finally put the debate of the total cards amount in the tower into a close with the official number of 1067!