Care and repair of Photographs

       By Janet Hovorka 

The visual history of your ancestors is an im­portant part of your family history, because it is the part that breathes life into the stories and vital statistics. While searching for past family history, you may have come across some pictures, but no matter what you have accumulated, you definitely want to make sure the images last for the generations to come.

All of the items listed in this article are available at University Products <www.universityproducts.com>, or Hollinger Corporation <www.hollingercorp.com>, or Gaylord Library Supply Company <www.gaylord.com>.  You might call and ask for a catalog from any of these companies.   Their catalogs are very informative about the latest archival techniques. If you need the help of a professional conservator for an especially damaged photo check the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, Inc. <aic.stanford.edu>.

Before you start

   The first thing you want to do whenever you are dealing with photographs is wash your hands and get some white cotton gloves. By far the most damaging thing you can do to your photos is love them to death.
Besides fingerprints, the oils on your fingers can do damage, even when you are careful.  A soft brush is also helpful to remove the dust and loose dirt, if the collection  has been sitting a while.

   If you are lucky enough to find a collection of pictures be sure to preserve the order of the collection.  Clues about unlabeled pictures – such as where they came from and in what order the were accumulated – may be in the other items around them.

   An easy way to preserve the order is to take several digital photographs as you initially unpack the collection. That way, you will have a digital record to go back to when you need clues about the subject matter of the pictures. 

When you are going to work on a collection of photos, it is best to set up a work space where you can leave things out until your project is completed. Initially, you will want to go through the collection to get an idea which families and what time periods are covered in the pictures. You can temporarily slide pic­tures into polypropylene sleeves to reduce the handling while you organize and identify everything. Separate the items that need to be taken to relatives for identi­fication and anything that may need to be taken to a professional conservator. Then you can start labeling, boxing, and indexing each piece. From the very beginning, make sure that any treatment you do is completely reversible.

Restoration you can attempt

   There are some things you can do at home to preserve and protect your visual history. But mostly the rule is don't do too much. Many well-meaning people have done irreversible damage to their pictures when they would have survived beautifully if just left alone. To understand what you can do to take care of your pic­tures, you need to understand a little about the history of photography.  All historic photos consist of 1) an emulsion layer, 2) a base, and  3) an adhesive. The emulsion layer is the chemicals that make the lights and darks show up in the picture. The base is whatever holds the emulsion together. And the adhesive is another chemical com­pound that lies in between the emulsion and the base, holding that emulsion to the base.

     If you are really lucky, you might have a daguerreo­type, ambrotype, or tintype. A daguerreotype (ca. 1839-50) is mirror-like. It is a copper base with a silver coating and is usually found in a case. The daguerreo­type was the first commercially successful type of photography. An ambrotype (ca. 1854~70s) has a glass base with black behind it. These images are also usually found in some sort of case. Tintypes (ca. 1856~90s) are on a thin sheet of metal and are often found in cases. Don't take any of these types of images out of the cases or attempt to repair an original. The emulsion and adhesive are usually extremely sensitive and can turn to dust at a touch. If repair is desired, definitely take any of these types of photographs to a professional.  

Card photographs and carres-de-visite (smaller cards) were very popular from the 1850s to the end of the 1800s and were produced even until the 1950s.  These are created on a paper base and mounted to hard cards so that the base wouldn't curl.  The cartes-de-visites (CDV) were used in the nineteenth century as visiting cards-kind of like today's business cards. People collected CDVs of their friends and visitors and displayed scrapbooks of them in their parlors. They were also made into postcards and stereographs. You don't want to remove these from the cards, even if the card is acidic, because removal will usually damage the photograph. You can brush off any dust or dirt with a soft brush.

   The strongest restoration I would recommend would be to use a little Filmoplast to mend the back of the card. Filmoplast is a very thin tape with a light adhesive that is removable. Never use anything like Filmoplast on the front of the print or it will lift off the emulsion layer.

As we come forward to the present, we come to resin-coated papers (ca. 1960-present) . Unfortunately, the closer we get to today, the less archival the materials were that were used to create photos. Resin-coated papers will discolor from the gases that the paper gives off and they easily crack when subjected to temperature fluctuations. In some of them, the emulsion from one color or another will deteriorate faster than the other parts of the emulsion, causing them to go yellow or red.  With these photos, you want to protect the negatives so that you can reprint pictures-sometimes the negative' will last better than the photographs. Only recently has preservation become an issue. When developing picture' now, be sure to ask for fiber-based papers without resin coating. These pictures can also be supported on the back with a little piece of Filmoplast and can be brushed off with a soft brush.

If your family took lots of Polaroid’s (ca. 1947 ~pres­ent), the best I can suggest is to copy and get the images out of that format. Polaroid’s will fade in as little as five to ten years and there are no negatives to make other copies. They will even fade when kept in a dark, dry place.  Cutting into a Polaroid will release the chemicals in the photo and make deterioration even quicker.

There are a few things you should do with any photographs  you have. First, remove any staples, paper clips, rubber bands, or string that can create creases or rust lines.  You also want to take any uneven pressure off each picture so that there aren't any pressure points creating creases or folds. Never apply tape to the emulsion side of any picture or regular tape to any part of a picture, and never apply tape to negatives or transparencies. And of course, never fold or roll any important pictures. 

How to store your most common or most precious photos

   When storing your photographs, you will want to decide which photographs are the most important to you and  store them differently than the rest of your collection. You should spend a little money to make sure that your great-grandmother's wedding picture is well taken care of, but the thirty-fourth picture of you and your dog may not be important enough to warrant such an expensive treatment. With all pictures, you want to protect them from temperature fluctuation, humidity, light, handling, insects, dust, and gases from other acidic storage materials. The best way to keep them from most of these problems is to keep them in the living area of your house.  The temperature that is most comfortable for you is also the best for your images.

   With the most important photographs, you first want to digitally copy the image so that you can archive the original.  You can scan or take a high-quality digital camera image to create an electronic copy, but keep the copying to a minimum because of the light danger involved.  Believe it or not, making a good old-fashioned negative of the picture can still capture more details the best digital scans.  A two inch or larger negative can still be blown up very large with great quality.  If you have a good copy in one location, than you can put the original in a safe place where it will be protected from too much handling.  Again, loving a picture is usually the most damaging thing that will happen to it.

   Once it is copied, take your most important photos and lay them flat, interleave with unbuffered tissue paper in short archival photo boxes the size of the picture.  Keep like-sized photos in the same box and have several different sized boxes for each size of picture, so that a smaller photo doesn’t leave uneven pressure marks on a large photo that it is stacked with.

    Label the outside of the boxes to keep handling to a minimum when you are looking for a certain picture. And keep daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes in their own separate boxes. Archival, four-flap envelopes are also good for protecting each photo from the others around them and give you lots of space to label on the envelope while protecting the picture from uneven pressure .

With less important photographs, you can mount them to acid-free, lignin-free paper with photo corners, and store them in albums in polypropylene or polyester (mylar) sleeves.      University Products offers binders that close completely like a box, thus protecting further from light and dust. If you do keep your pictures in regular binders, a table runner placed across the top of the shelf can protect light and dust from permeating the tops of the pages. Be sure to alleviate as much uneven pres­sure as you can by avoiding the buttons, and doodads popular in scrap booking, you will end up with a nice button indentation on the picture on the opposite page. Use cute decorations like that in fun scrapbook projects with your extra copies.

If you have an antique scrapbook you want to preserve, it is  sometimes hard to decide how to take care of  it. A scrapbook can be an archival item in and of itself. A friend inherited two scrapbooks from her great-grandfather. The first was a series of card photos tucked into cuts made in black acidic paper postcards that he had sent home from a trip to Europe at the turn of the century. The second was a scrapbook he had made for his oldest child as a gift for his first Christmas. The pictures in the first scrapbook were easily removed and had writing on the back that she wanted to be able to see, so she took that scrapbook apart. The second scrap­book was glued together and a sweet memoir of the grandfather's love for his new son, with the grandfather's handwriting. She decided to leave the second intact.

   You can interleave the pages of an intact scrapbook with tissue paper to help protect the pages from each other if the additional tissue paper doesn't stress the binding. And storing the scrapbook in an archival box will also help it last longer.

If you have scrapbooks that you want to take apart, sometimes getting the pictures out can be a challenge. The electrostatic scrapbooks with stripes of glue that were popular in the '60s and '70s can be especially challenging. My mother's life's pictures are in such scrapbooks. While we have been unsuccessful in getting. my mother's picture out. other people have had suc­cess with non-waxed dental floss, heating the glue with a blow dryer, and using a sharp blade. In my mother's situation, we have just had to copy and get them out or that format, as the glue is creating stripes in the actual pictures.

Another important part of archiving is to protect the negatives. When you have good negatives, you can actually send two copies of the picture into the future so that one is more likely to survive. Again, you can store them in polypropylene or polyester sleeves, or if they are more important, in archival, four flap envelopes in an archival box. Several years ago, when my washing machine flooded our house, water rained down on the bottom floor right on top of my family-history negatives. When I opened the soaked archival box, I was thrilled to find the negatives and four flap enclosures completely dry.  Needless to say, I was more than happy to spend $30 on another box.

Sometimes you might consider donating your collection to an archive. Archives can provide a safer home. An archivist usually wants to see a collection before it is organized but you can usually help identify items as they are archived. Most archives will want you to trans­fer ownership and copyright privileges before they will invest the money and labor in archiving your collection.  If you do decide to donate your collection, make sure the contract states what you want them to do with any discards and be sure to get an appraisal for tax-deduc­tion purposes. And if possible, accompany your dona­tion with a monetary gift to take care of the collection. Whether you donate the originals to an archive or not, be sure to share electronic and paper copies with Web sites and your family so that there are many copies to survive into the future.

Digital restoration and archiving

   When it comes to digital restoration and archiving, the most important thing to remember is that digitizing is not archiving. Digital copies are good to have for repairing the image, sharing, and copying, but your paper copies are much more likely to survive longer into the future. Paper, though fragile, will usually last one hundred years or more; microfilm lasts about one hundred and thirty years; CDs will usually not last longer than twenty years depending on quality; audio and video tapes will last ten to twenty years; and floppy disks will only last about three years. In twenty years you may or may not be able to find a computer that will be able to read the data from CDs and disks. So with all digital files, you need to have a migration plan – that re-copy all your genealogy files every year or two to the new computer, to make new copies, or to the new medium that is becoming popular.     When you digitize your pictures, be careful of the type of file and resolution of the image. TIFF files are the biggest and contain the most information for the highest quality reproductions. JPGs are smaller and do well for inserting into documents or sending over the Web.  Both can be saved in higher or lower DPI (dots per inch). Computer screens are usually 72 DPI, regular home inkjet printers usually print at 300 DPI and professional printers print at 600-1200 DPI. Doubling the DPI of a picture quadruples the size of a file. With each amount you want to enlarge a picture, you will need more DPI, and you never know what you might want to do with an image in the future. So, with the most important pictures, you will want to save a copy of the picture in a large, high DPI TIFF, and another in small, lower DPI JPG. That way, you'll be ready for several kinds of uses.

For scanning, the obvious first step is to make sure the scanner glass is clean. Then you just have to play with your type of pictures. Sometimes color scans best preserve the tone of black and white photos, and sometimes grayscale scans can best preserve fading color prints. Grayscale files are usually much smaller.  Be sure to save in several different formats.  Photos can be restored and edited using numerous photo-editing tools. Adobe Photoshop  <www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/family/ ?promoid=B PDEK> is the industry standard allowing you to create amazing effects. Photofiltre is a free program <http://photofiltre.tree/download_en.htm> that allows you to do many editing tricks as well. Photo restoration is really an art that takes a lot of time and patience. You can play with contrast, brightness, hue, and saturation to make faded images reappear, and the clone and healing tools are useful for repairing flaws. Be sure to save each edit as a new copy and keep the original scan separate.

When you are ready to make copies, printing with the wrong ink and paper may cause your new copy to go bad faster than the original. Look for printers that use pigment ink, DuraBrite inks, and Ultrachrome inks and papers.  In this area you usually get what you pay for. Inexpensive inks and printers are usually not archival. At Generation Maps, we have found good success in printing antique photos on canvas giclees. The texture of the canvas covers the flaws of blowing up a small picture or a copy of a copy, because your eye doesn't expect the print to be as crisp . And the ink sinks into the canvas, producing a more archival print. We have tested giclees in the washing machine and outside during temperature fluctuations light, and snow and have seen no noticeable difference. Picture is put away to protect against light and dust, you still want to keep copies out where you can enjoy them. Displaying your family history in your home can inspire you and create a wonderful atmosphere. Above all, make sure you enjoy your heritage.

Janet Hovorka received a B.A. in Ancient Near Eastern Studies and a Master's in Library Science from Brigham Young University . She accepted teaching and Library positions at BYU and Salt Lake Community College before having her three wonderful children. She and her husband, Kim, own Generation Maps, an online genealogy chart and canvas giclee printing service. She can be reached at <janet@generationmaps.com>

 

Credit -- Article was published in the NGS April-June, 2008, Volume 34, Number 2 NewsMagazine.  Permission was granted by the NGS (www.ngsgenealogy.org ) to include the article on the HGCS web site.  Permission was also granted by Janet Hovorka to reproduce her article on the HGCS web site.