It Isn’t That Images Fade, It’s That They Can Vanish
Source: The New York Times
Written by Ian Austen
GATINEAU, Quebec–THE preservation center at Canada’s national archive here might have the last word when it comes to keeping the color in color photography.
A four-story concrete building, which is enclosed within a second protective building, holds two warehouse-size vaults where negatives, prints and film are kept in the dark at 0 degrees and 25 percent relative humidity.
Before anything in the collection can be examined, technicians must put it into an acclimatization chamber that resembles an oversize stainless-steel refrigerator, where it is warmed up over a 24- to 48-hour period.
Henry Wilhelm, an American researcher on photographic preservation, says the complex and costly system is worth the trouble.
“Those images should last thousands of years,” he said from his office in Grinnell, Iowa. “Imagine seeing photos of the building of the pyramids.”
But even officials at the archive are uncertain how to manage the medium that now dominates photography: inkjet prints.
“We really need to figure out what we have to do with them,” said Tania Passafiume, senior conservator of photographic records. “This is the history of photography: things change.”
Despite years of talks among researchers like Mr. Wilhelm, inkjet makers and scientists, the International Organization for Standardization has yet to produce a criterion for testing the permanence of inkjet prints and interpreting the results.
Consumers buying inkjet printers to make prints of their digital photos therefore face a difficult task, said James M. Reilly, director of the Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “There’s too much variety in the inkjet marketplace to give general advice,” he said. “It’s also evolving very, very quickly.”
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