Einstein photos found in vault

“[There were] a lot of things in the vault that we didn’t know about, and these photographs were one of them,” Christine Di Bella, an archivist at the institute, said.

The photographs’ discovery was made possible by a $3.5 million grant from the Leon Levy Foundation, which publicly announced the award last week. The institute received the money last spring, enabling the commencement of a large-scale effort to completely catalogue its archives, which is made up of 700 linear feet of documents, notebooks, records and photographs.

The newly discovered images, which were taken between 1945 and 1950 by famed German fashion photographer Herman Landshoff, are particularly special to the Institute for Advanced Study in light of Einstein’s involvement there as one of the institute’s first professors. Following his flight from Nazi-torn Europe in the late 1930s, Princeton became his academic home.

“Whenever one sees new information on Einstein, who remains, of course, such a great figure here as for everyone, it’s a moving moment,” Institute for Advanced Study Director Peter Goddard told the Times of Trenton on Oct. 25.

The institute previously had a limited portfolio of the pictures, but the newly discovered images allow for much easier exhibitions to the public.

“These are actually single images, which can be put in different kinds of displays,” Di Bella added. “Besides, they are such beautiful pictures.”

The catalogue grant represented the largest of 20 grants that the Levy Foundation has awarded to the Institute for Advanced Study within the last three years. In the past, the Levy Foundation has also given sizeable grants to NYU and Harvard, as well as to museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Such grants are given to support the “passion for expanding knowledge,” according to the Levy Foundation’s website.

“Many institutions lack the resources to adequately preserve their most marvelous resources,” Fraser Seitel, spokesman for the Levy Foundation, told the Times. “Shelby White feels it is urgent, especially in the midst of a recession when people are cutting back on their giving, that the leading nonprofits be encouraged to safeguard their historic treasures.”

The photographs will be on display at the newly established Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center. Other items on display will include letters from T.S. Eliot, the employment contract for J. Robert Oppenheimer written by Oppenheimer himself, materials related to diplomat George Kennan ’25, numerous handwritten notes of many famed physicists and other documents related to the 80-year history of the institute. The grand opening of the archives center will take place over Fall Break.

Yet the grant and the cataloguing project will benefit more than just members of the institute. Only about a mile from Princeton’s main campus, the archive center will act as an excellent resource for students interested in the history of the institute or in the works of its members, Di Bella said. She added that she believes the archive center will now act as a much better resource for both serious researchers and those who are merely curious.

“Before the opening of the archives center, it was more difficult to serve those with a casual interest in our archives,” Di Bella explained. “Although we will primarily serve those with very serious research interests, [the archives center] will open up a lot more possibilities for people with casual interests.”

Archival Assistant Erin Mosner told the Times that the new center would also raise the quality of presentation of the documents to a level proportional to their significance in history.

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“We’ve worked with so many scholars, and they’ve become accustomed to working with the materials here in a casual way,” Mosner said. “This new center will help establish a sense of formality, of the special nature of the importance of these archival materials.”

“The archival space, once it’s finished, will speak for itself,” she added. “It will put an exclamation point on the history of these documents.”