Webinar: Beyond Coverage: Recording How Historic Places Are Understood
In preservation practice, visual documentation is often understood as a tool for recording conditions, tracking projects, or supporting communications. While these functions are essential, they do not fully account for what visual media can reveal.
This webinar explores how photography and film can capture how historic places are presented and understood in the present.
Drawing on cinematic and photographic examples, Elena Tibbetts will examine how meaning is articulated within a space, through voice, sequence, and spatial experience, and how these moments form a durable record of a site as it is experienced and interpreted.
The session will consider how this type of documentation complements traditional archival records by preserving not only what a place is, but how it is explained and encountered.
Through this lens, visual media becomes a way of recording the lived and interpreted condition of historic sites.
This webinar is free to attend!
REGISTER HERE
Elena Tibbetts is a filmmaker and photographer whose work focuses on the visual documentation of historic architecture and cultural sites. Her practice centers on recording how historic places are understood and interpreted in the present, with particular attention to continuity and change over time. Through cinematic and photographic work, Elena explores how visual media can extend traditional archival records by capturing the relationship between architecture and institutional voice. Her films are used by historic sites and cultural organizations to shape how these places are presented and understood, and are often incorporated into public-facing, interpretive, and fundraising contexts. She is the creator of The Architectural Guide of Washington, D.C., a photographic field guide highlighting the city’s historic built environment.
