Photography Archive Conservation

well I'm Susie Clark I'm a photographic conservator um and I trained in paper conservation and originally worked for the BBC H and picture library as it then was and I've been a freelance conservator for about 20 years these have all been now rehoused in what we call Four flap envelopes that cruciform envelopes which have four flaps that come over so they don't actually use any glue which is very good conservation wise a few years ago probably when I started out most people were concentrating on the paper components of archives and not photographs and at that time relatively few photographic collections that had much specific attention over the years that's changed I would say probably most um important photographic collections have had a visit from a conservator at some uh some point um whether or how they choose to enact the conservatives recommendations of course is another thing but I think the situation has approved people are definitely more aware of how photographs should be treated you've got this is Phil film based material um it's certainly not ideal and it certainly will need changing um but it's not as bad as the original housing for the glass based material and one has to start somewhere there are particular issues with film which is why we've been going into the film uh in some detail because certainly film prior to 1950 maybe cellulose nitrate and whilst that's uh deteriorates not at too fast a rate um it can at relatively low temperatures about 38° Centigrade catch fire if it's in a very degraded condition so it's important to ascertain in a collection like this whether there is any cellulose nitrate we've also got these uh three examples here of different kind kinds of hanging files which you used in The Collection um or four examples um these are a problem some of the earliest ones we think might be PVC uh polyvinyl chloride which gives off hydrochloric acid and it contributes the and also plasticizers which contribute to the breakdown of the photographs um but gradually this one we think is PVC and when it has plasticizes in it it has a very sort of floppy sort of feel to it and then uh fortunately this is the only example so far we've come across like this but this is the sort of thing that turns up in museum and archive Collections and Library collections um where suddenly somebody comes across an odd drawer of material and it's completely mixed and that's another problem we try and separate out different types of material because you could get sort of cross contamination a very pragmatic level my mission would be to save as much of what is left of the original material as possible for the future I think when digitization came in there was a slight well more than a slight concern amongst conservatives that um archists and Librarians would see it as the Panacea and that people would say that they didn't need to be worried about the commitment of keeping the original collections but in time people discover that the more you give digital access the more people want to see the original collection so it doesn't actually work like that and uh I think people have more and more get used to accessing information digitally there's a sense of wonder that comes back about the original m material that you can't beat and uh I think that will continue to hold people's imagination really

Channel: SOURCE Photographic Review

Views: 10,856

Keywords: old photographs, photographs, conservation, archive, negatives, nitrate, film, decay, digitisation, preservation, stable, stability

Id: 9SwpVc3fKR0

Length: 4min 45sec (285 seconds)

Published: Thu May 10 2012