The Arquin Slide Project at Florida Atlantic University is pleased to announce the launch of the Florence Arquin Slide Collection, an online archive of photographs of Latin America taken in the mid-20th century. Florence Arquin was an artist, educator, scholar, and documentary photographer who was hired by the US state department to head the Kodachrome Slide Project. Under the direction of the US Government, Arquin traveled to Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Mexico to take slides of life, art, geography, indigenous peoples, and urban development. Arquin was also friendly with many Modern Mexican artists in the 1940s and 1950s. A significant portion of the collection documents the artists and their works from the time period. Eventually, over 15,000 slides were sold to Florida Atlantic University, where they remained unknown and unused for decades.
This NEH-Funded project has digitized the slides, attached pertinent metadata, and created a database for the images. Much of the metadata has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese, enabling scholars working in those languages to use the database, too.