Casting blue and green images of medieval Buddhist sculptures and grottos into a space piled high with books, maps and papers, the five color photo negatives glowing on the light box in Sarah Fraser’s office provide only a glimpse into the art history professor’s latest excursion to Dunhuang, China.

Jet-lagged after returning from her seventh trip to photograph and study Buddhist wall paintings in the Gobi Desert, Fraser is nonetheless alert and passionate as she discusses the colors in the four-by-five photographs with James Prinz, a tall, goateed Chicago photographer wearing a black leather jacket and also shaking off the effects of recently being half a world away. Prinz is one of a team of 10 professional photographers, Northwestern undergraduate and graduate students working with Fraser to create a digital archive of 25,000 cubic meters of grottos in rectangular, temple-like “caves” cut into rock of the Gobi Desert during the Middle Ages.

Documenting the wall paintings in the cave is one part of a larger project, the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive, sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a New York-based supporter of museums, the arts and arts conservation. The $3 million Dunhuang project also will fulfill Fraser’s vision to bring other artifacts from the temples, currently scattered in museums and collections all over the globe, together in a digital medium.

The Dunhuang Archive eventually will be incorporated into ArtSTOR, a larger electronic archive being developed by the Mellon Foundation. Upon completion, ArtSTOR will be available as a scholarly electronic archive that will allow academic communities to access high quality electronic collections of visual art and related material.

Among the objects the Dunhuang project seeks to bring together are sacred Buddhist texts, sketchbooks of grotto artists and day-to-day objects that document life in medieval China from the fifth to 13th centuries, a time when the Silk Road connecting eastern China to the Middle East and Rome was more cosmopolitan than the 21st century’s North Michigan Avenue.

Fraser works with the Dunhuang Research Academy and the Mellon Foundation to decide which of the approximately 500 caves at Dunhuang and thousands of artifacts once there will be included in the archive.

“The whole point of the project is to reunite the archival materials found in the library with the wall paintings,” Fraser says. “The framework for the whole archive is that these objects have greater meaning if they’re connected back to their original location.”

All of the artifacts haven’t been in the same physical location since June 1900, when a Taoist abbot cleaning sand from some of the temple-like chambers found a hidden library with more than 50,000 Buddhist manuscripts inside, including financial records, historical documents and the entire Buddhist canon. The documents were gathered into the library from monasteries around the region in the Middle Ages, with the bulk of the materials coming from a monastery called The Three Worlds.

“Invasion by Islamic militants westward from 1002 to 1006 is one of the theories why (the library) was boarded up,” Fraser says. “It is a complete, very sophisticated gathering of information.”

Or at least it was, until the abbot’s discovery set off an archeological frenzy in Dunhuang. Disguising military intelligence operations as archeological research projects, teams of researchers from Russia, Britain and France came to the site, followed by groups from the United States and Japan, removing the library’s holdings piece by piece and distributing them by the end of 1907 to 60 museums and collections worldwide.

The artifacts still remain scattered around the world, and the goal of the Mellon Foundation project is to reunite them digitally. Current contributors to the archive include the British Library, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, the Lo Archives of Princeton in New Jersey and the Musee National des Arts Asiatiques Guimet in Paris.

The Mellon Foundation archive, expected to be available to the academic community a few years from now, will have text in both Chinese and English to make the archive equally useful to scholars on both sides of the globe.

“It’s the antithesis of a museum,” Fraser says, explaining that museums, as a result of physical space constraints, often end up pulling the pieces of cultures apart more than actually bringing them together.

And the collection slowly is coming together. Fraser’s team returns from each photo expedition with 10 to 15 gigabytes of raw data, the equivalent of 300 to 1,200 photographs per cave. Before the archive is complete, all of these photos will be sorted and classified.

Some of the photos will be digitally stitched together to create layered, high-resolution images of certain sections of the grottos. Complementing the detailed two-dimensional images will be lower-resolution, three-dimensional images able to be rotated 360 degrees on screen to simulate the feeling of standing in the center of the cave.

“The archive will do things that you can’t experience while you’re there,” Fraser, discussing the ability of the detailed archival photographs to reveal minutiae of the wall paintings invisible to the naked eye.

Because the cave’s interiors are so dark, many of the paintings’ details are hidden to Dunhuang’s 4,000 daily visitors. Lighting used in the photography for the archive will allow illumination of detail seen only by those closest to the paintings — their original designers.

“In the archive, we’re seeing, really, what the artists saw,” Fraser says. “The caves are a riot of color, deep cyan with gold gilding. There’s a great deal of pictorial finesse.” nyou