Getty Museum Puts a New Focus on Conservation : Protecting old, rare or valuable photographs from fading or deterioration is a relatively new field that has practically become an art in itself

Old photographs never die, they just fade away. And crack, peel and turn yellow. By their very nature, photographic prints are susceptible to deterioration because the elements of an image--gelatin and small particles of metallic silver in black-and-white prints, organic dyes in color prints, and paper--are sensitive materials that react to the environment.

Like a silver tea set in your home, a black-and-white glossy is prone to tarnish. Color photographs fade more rapidly when exposed to light, but they pale when stored in the dark too.

It makes no difference whether you are an amateur photographer with a point-and-shoot camera or a professional with the finest equipment and the stature of Ansel Adams; everyone’s pictures are subject to change. Given clumsy handling, contact with poor-quality adhesives and mounts, and an unstable environment where temperature and relative humidity fluctuate, they become even more vulnerable to disintegration. Most photograph collections suffered that fate until recently.

Photography is more than 150 years old, yet photograph conservation is a relatively new field that did not come into its own until the early 1970s. “Conservation tends to start in the private sector and is attached to the trade and exchange of photographs and works of art as objects,” said Weston Naef, curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu. “Vendors, dealers and owners of things that are in the process of being sold want to make them look as good as possible.

“The reason it happened when it did is the market for photographs changed dramatically. Before then, they were nearly worthless. For the price of a meal at a hot dog stand, you could buy a great photograph that today could be worth six-figure prices. When photographs began changing hands in the early ‘70s, the prices went from $100 to $1,000 to $5,000 to $25,000 to $100,000 over a period of years. The field of photography conservation was fostered by the increased awareness that pictures were intrinsically valuable, not just of sentimental value,” he said.

“There also began an appreciation for the historical significance of the material,” added Deborah Hess Norris, assistant director of the Winterthur Museum Art Conservation Department at the University of Delaware. Norris, who now helps direct the program from which she got her degree, recently lectured on the structure of photographic prints at a Getty Museum symposium and is considered in photography circles to be a conservation guru. “The field is growing rapidly, and research is now being done at the National Archives, the Library of Congress and the Image Permanence Institute in Rochester, N.Y.,” she said.

In 1984, the Getty entered the photography field with a big bang by acquiring 30,000 prints from a handful of world-class private collectors here and abroad, including major holdings by renowned photographers such as August Sander, Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Weston and Walker Evans. Naef was at the helm.

“The first appointment I made in the department was someone to work in a conservational capacity,” Naef said. “Since 1984, conservation has been one of my highest priorities. It is the fundamental responsibility of our department to ensure the survival of what we have for the centuries to come.”

The Getty immediately determined that it would not make public anything from the collection until it was properly conserved. Every loan has been contingent upon the museum’s ability to surface-clean a picture and its mount, mend tears and remove residues of old acid from the print. The museum began its exhibition program by showing what it considers to be the most important photographs in an artist’s oeuvre and some of the rarest pictures. “That way we put first into the conservation pipeline the most important materials,” Naef said.

When the Walker Evans exhibit opens next year, Naef’s department will have accomplished the mission of showing and thereby examining and analyzing its key holdings to determine what is best in those collections and most essential to survive. “By establishing that we would treat first what was deemed high-quality, we tended to not overlook, but certainly not focus on, pictures that were in very poor condition.”

With one exception. The current photography exhibit at the Getty, “August Sander: Faces of the German People,” includes the eminent German photographer’s silver gelatin print, “Forester’s Child” (1931), that Naef said was the first case in the existence of his department in which a print deemed so important was in such wretched condition. “I didn’t think we would be able to exhibit it,” Naef said, but the conservation process literally brought the photograph back to life.

The print was found in the early 1980s in a barn in Germany. “It appears that insects caused the numerous losses in the gelatin emulsion layer that are visible as white spots in the image,” said Marc Harnly, an independent consultant conservator who treated the prints in the Sander show. “To compensate for the loss of color, we used two different media, reversible watercolors and pastels, returning the surface to its original color. We do a treatment like in-painting so that when people look at the photograph, they are not distracted by incidental damage and they can fully appreciate the image.”

Harnly also worked on prints for the Getty’s upcoming exhibit of Viennese-born photographer Lisette Model’s work. Model (1901-1983), who lived in Paris in the 1920s and moved to New York in 1938, had mounted a series of photographs on newsprint, juxtaposing the theme of the photo with the topic in the newspaper. For instance, she surrounded a blind beggar with a page of stock market listings, a young man selling peanuts with classified ads for employment.

“The conservation project is not to make new prints out of old prints; it is to preserve the history and structure and the aesthetic of the print,” said Anne Cartier-Bresson, a visiting conservator at the Getty from Paris and the niece of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. She was invited to the museum to treat prints by French photographer Eugene Atget for an upcoming exhibition.

In the photography field, Naef said, “there is cosmetic conservation, aimed almost exclusively at improving the appearance of a work, and structural conservation, where you don’t necessarily improve a print’s appearance but you work to increase its longevity by, for example, removing old hinges and adhesives from the backs of pictures. Most fundamental, though, is making sure that these pictures are stored under climate conditions that are as close to ideal as possible, and housed in containers that safeguard them from each other and when they are handled.”

The Getty’s storage facility is an incredibly protective environment. Almost 2,000 shelves line the room holding Solander boxes that contain 25 to 30 prints each. The boxes are specially designed to close tightly and restrict dust particles and even some pollutants from making contact with the photographs. Inside each box, the prints are kept in acid-free folders and handling mattes, separating them from one another. Conservation assistant Ernie Mack works diligently to maintain room temperature between 65 and 68 degrees and relative humidity in the 40% to 50% range.

Harnly said the conservation practices that the Getty and other museums follow can be adapted by someone who has a photograph collection at home. His recommendations:

* Keep your photos in the room that has the most stable environment. “Changes in humidity and temperature affect the lifetime of photographs,” Harnly said. “When those two things are kept stable, you’re more likely to preserve them.”

* Store prints in a box made of acid-free alpha-cellulose or rag fibers. Harnly prefers a box to a wood cabinet or drawer because wood gives off formaldehyde that is bad for photographs. This is particularly true of particleboard furniture. “A box is better even if it goes in a drawer,” he said.

* It is essential that the material next to the picture be acid-free paper or an inert plastic such as Mylar. “Paper is preferable in areas of high relative humidity--say if you live by the beach--because it absorbs moisture. Plastic may allow moisture to get in-between it and the print, and you run the risk of those two materials sticking together.”

* Never use adhesives such as rubber cement or white glues when mounting pictures. Rubber cement stains, and white glues can be irreversible and cause bulges. “Those are the things that keep us conservators in business. What might be a slight stain one day will be much darker later on. For mounting, we recommend wheat-starch paste or photo corners made from a good quality paper or plastic.”

* Don’t put pictures in “magnetic” photo albums, those in which you peel back the plastic cover, stick down the photo and put back the cover. “The adhesives used in those albums degrade, migrate into photos and can severely stain them as they age. These effects can be irreversible over time and often accelerate the deterioration of silver in black-and-white photographs and dyes in color prints.”

* When displaying photographs, keep light levels as low as possible, especially for color prints. Use incandescent light and avoid fluorescent light or direct sunlight. Special glass that filters out ultraviolet rays is readily available in frame shops. When placed over a picture, it can make a big difference in protecting it.

* Watch your fingers. “Fingerprints carry oils that are abrasive and inalterably change photographs. Years down the road, you’ll see those fingerprints in place.”

Nancy Kapitanoff writes regularly about art for Westside/Valley Calendar.