Photographic Processes Research

As digital photography replaces chemical photography, knowledge of traditional photographic processes is at risk of decline—and with it, understanding of how to conserve photographic collections. This project is developing and sharing new tools to identify the processes used to create photographs, which is essential in making decisions about storage, exhibition, and conservation treatment.

• A case study using the work of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson to determine the applicability of quantitative baryta layer analysis in authenticating and provenancing black-and-white, fiber-based photographs
• The analytical methodology and testing procedures developed in the project are used in Getty’s work as well as in selected collaborations with museums, archives, and photographic collections, to provide scientific information for conservation treatments of photographs. They are also used to advance knowledge of artist techniques and practices, and to support provenance and authentication studies related to photographs and photographic material.
• As part of a collaboration with the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the project team designed, tested, and installed a new protective enclosure for the world's first photograph, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's View from the Window at Le Gras (1826).
• Development of a decision tree for identification of photographic processes, process variants, and postprocessing chemical treatment of photographs that, together with an atlas of analytical signatures of photographic processes, will aid photographic conservators, conservation scientists, and curators of photographic collections and archives in identifying photographs in their care
• The Baryta Layer Research Symposium, a one-day event at the Conservation Institute in 2006, was attended by seventy-five participants including conservators, conservation scientists, dealers, appraisers, and curators. The focus of the event was a discussion of results from the ongoing collaboration between the project team and Boston-based independent conservator Paul Messier to characterize certain features of 20th-century photographic paper.
• A two-day conference in 2010 at the National Media Museum in Bradford, England, attended by more than 130 art historians of photography, conservation scientists, conservators, curators of photographic collections, scientists, photographers, and students of art history and photography, as well as the interested public, focusing on the first scientific investigation and analysis of three photographic plates created in the 1820s by French pioneer of photography Joseph Nicéphor Niépce
• Ongoing development of an archive of knowledge and materials from the era of classical photography to serve as a reference collection for photo conservators and scholars, allowing them to research and authenticate works from the classical photography era.
• Publication of eleven chapters of the Atlas of Analytical Signatures of Photographic Processes
• Contributed research expertise to an international team of scholars, researchers, and scientists at the University of Évora in Portugal studying three surviving photographs by French-Monégasque inventor Hercule Florence in 2022. Research included analysis of the prints to determine their chemical makeup, the composition of their paper supports, and any chemistry indicating how the images may have been stabilized or fixed.

The shift from chemical (classical) to digital photography could result in the loss of crucial information about past artistic, commercial, and experimental photographic processes and technologies. In response, the Conservation Institute and the Image Permanence Institute (IPI) in Rochester, New York, organized a meeting of experts in 2000 to discuss the most important research issues of photographic conservation. The consensus was that there was a need for an advanced methodology to identify photographs and photographic materials as a prerequisite for further development of treatment and preventive treatment of photographic material.

Conservation Institute: Art Kaplan Project Manager, Associate Scientist; Michael Schilling, Senior Scientist

J. Paul Getty Museum: Victoria Binder, Sarah Freeman

Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage at Yale University, Paul Messier; Instituto Hercule Florence, Antonio Florence; Instituto Moerira Salles, Millard Schisler and Sergio Burgi