Monica Almeida/The New York Times Dusan Stulik at the Getty Conservation Institute in 2007.Analog photography may be going the way of the dinosaurs. But for the museums, archives, galleries and collectors who own and care for millions of pictorial artifacts bequeathed by more than 150 years of pre-digital photography, information about how film, paper, chemicals and metals worked to create pictures for all those years remains extraordinarily valuable.
As it turns out, it is also surprisingly hard to come by, more so as traditional film and camera companies have gone out of business and taken their trade secrets into oblivion with them, creating what many experts see as a looming crisis in photographic conservation and authentication.
After almost a decade of research, the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, is now beginning to rectify that situation. The institute announced Thursday that is releasing online “The Atlas of Analytical Signatures of Photographic Processes,†the first installment of a vast atlas of scientific data about pre-digital photography - including processes developed more than a century ago, like albumen, carbon and salt prints - that will be updated continually as new information is discovered.
“The ‘Atlas’ is the first photograph conservation research publication that integrates historical information and ‘inside the darkroom’ techniques of practicing photographers with modern scientific and analytical technology,†said Dusan Stulik, a senior scientist at the institute who has been working on the project with a researcher, Art Kaplan.
Grant Romer, a photo conservation expert for many years at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., said at the time the Getty project was getting underway: “In essence this can start to rewrite the history of photography. It’s already provoked a sort of crisis in the understanding of what we think we know about some photographs.â€
