#the burns archive
Burns is attuned to the finest of details, even going so far as to lay out the surgical trays to make sure they have the right instruments in the right order for the operation being filmed—a detail that probably goes unnoticed by the lay viewer, but has earned him praise in medical and historical circles.
If I had the memory for minutiae like this, this would be my actual dream job. This is honestly the coolest article I’ve read all week, having never heard of Stanley Burns before. Both consultant and collector, he’s about as close to a Victorian man of letters as you can get in real life (every time I tell people that my dream job is “man of letters” they laugh like I’m not dead serious). The link is tucked into the article, but definitely do not miss the photos in his collection, which include specific categorical groupings for photos of African Americans and Judaica.
Those collections are interesting for one thing, purely by the benefit of being rare, but Burns also tells the A.V. Club, “If you have a photograph then you have the truth of the event.” Photographs of Black Americans and Jews are therefore so important, and I’m so glad that he has those collections, because we still live in a world that distorts and devalues the importance of these groups and others today and in history. It’s upsetting that their erasure from history is a real risk, but it’s also heartening that those like Burns are dedicated to preserving them.
He also has a collection of (and wrote a book on) Victorian mourning photography, which explains why I love The Others so much (he was a consultant for the film). I’m still only a few episodes into The Knick, but if you can handle some gross medical stuff (and it does get both visually and conceptually disturbing) I’d definitely more than recommend it.
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