The history of Texas isn’t just in books. It’s in your home movie collection, and the Texas Archive of the Moving Image needs your help to keep that history on the screen.
The 501(c)3 nonprofit ended the year just over $13,000 short of its fundraising target for the year, and so it’s now running a Give Lively campaign to fill that gap. It’s already raised an extra $1,500 towards that goal, and you can help reach that essential goal.
TAMI’s remit is almost unique among film preservation organizations. While most are dedicated to restoring and archiving conventional cinematic productions, TAMI looks after the edges of the A/V world – home movies and home videos, TV broadcasts, PSAs, locally shot commercials. It’s in these seemingly disposable items that they find the true culture and history of Texas. Whether it be newsreel footage of rescuers searching for bodies among the debris of the 1900 Galveston storm 8 (the archive’s oldest footage), schoolgirl Diana Estrada pummeling a piñata at her birthday in 1964, a 1990 interview with Austin graffiti artist Alfredo “Skam” Martinez or a 2021 tourism commercial for Boerne, if it was shot in Texas or by Texans, it’s in there somewhere. TAMI Managing Director Elizabeth Hansen explained, “The last thing we did was a furrier commercial from Waco in the Thirties, and it’s silent and it was this little girl in a fur shop, and it probably ran before a movie.”
A large portion of the collection comes via archives of news outlets around the state, including San Antonio’s KSAT and Houston’s KPRC. However, most of what TAMI is transferring has been donated by private citizens, often through their roundup events. These donations can contain some real surprises, as Hansen well knows. During the pandemic, she was carrying a stack of tapes “and one of them was labeled ‘Avenue A Party,’ and I lived on Avenue A. … I went back and watched it, and it was footage of someone in my apartment in the Eighties.”
The digitization is a complicated process, and TAMI is able to transfer everything from 8mm prints to VHS, Betamax, and even the ¾ inch U-matic format that was the default for most local TV stations. That means not simply sticking a tape in a machine, but maintaining that machinery, and often carefully cleaning and prepping the old media so it’s physically capable of withstanding being played for the first time in years. On top of that are all the labor-intensive regular demands of an archive, such as cataloging and storage, all of which costs money. “Space and people and equipment they don’t make any more, those are our biggest costs,” said Hansen.
To help keep the reels spinning at TAMI, you can make your donation now via givelively.org. To find out more about the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, and to dive into the massive video archive, visit texasarchive.org.