How a 90-year-old photograph is professionally conserved

• Monique Fischer is a senior photograph conservator with the Northeast Document Conservation Center.
• She shows us how to restore a 90-year-old photograph.
• This includes cleaning the photograph, mending tears, inpainting, and flattening the photograph.

Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: My name is Monique Fischer and I'm the senior photograph conservator here at the Northeast Document Conservation Center. So today I'm going to go through with you how to conserve a nearly 100-year-old photograph. The photograph is a panoramic format, and these usually are taken for groups at conferences. Here we see a boys camp. The biggest problem is that it's tightly rolled, and you can't really access the information.

I have created a humidification chamber, and the first thing we need to do is unroll it to do any other types of treatment to it. Once I feel it gets a little limp then I start to unroll it.

The next part of the treatment is surface cleaning. There's going to be surface dirt on these photographs. They've been sitting in an attic or basement. On the back we are using some dry-cleaning techniques. The weights that we use are actually steel I-beams cut to size and put on there, and they're actually used in construction. The white wedge there that you see is a cosmetic sponge actually, and the surface is nice and soft. In addition to the cosmetic sponge, there are things like a polyvinyl eraser to get more inground dirt to remove that. The powder that you see here, it's really not powder. It's shredded polyvinyl eraser, and again, it's a more gentle way of cleaning the surface dirt on the back of a photograph.

Those dry-cleaning techniques that I was using on the back of the photograph could be problematic to the emulsion. Here's some cotton swabs with water and alcohol to remove some of the surface dirt there. The cloth that is used is Hollytex, it's a woven polyester and it's a nonstick surface. The most thing you need to be careful about is, again, the emulsion. It can get wet if the emulsion's been compromised because it's been exposed to light or been sitting in the attic for years. The emulsion can get very soft and lose the image at the same time.

Prior to mending, I'm wet-tearing the Japanese paper. I want soft edges along the paper. I want to make the mend as invisible as possible. We are straining the wheat starch paste that we use. Everything that we do in this profession is supposed to be reversible. So we use wheat starch paste. We don't use any kinds of tapes, we don't use archival tapes. I take the brush, paste out the Japanese paper on a piece of paper that helps absorb it, and then put the Japanese paper on the back of the tear to mend it. And even just a little bit of paste and you know, small pieces of Japanese paper can really strengthen the tear. It needs to be flattened, putting it kind of in a sandwich between Hollytex, blotting paper, and then some weights on it so it can dry and flatten.

With tears, you try your best to put it together perfectly, but because this is an old object, there are going to be losses in the emulsion or within the image. And here we have an inpainting technique. The paint brushes are actually fine-point brushes that are used to paint dolls' faces. I like using the Gamblin Conservation Colors because you can use isopropanol to wet up the color. I'll put some color on my brush, paint it out on the blotting paper there, and then when I think the color is good enough, I will then paint the object. And so you blend it all in, so that your eye when you're looking at the panorama doesn't go right to the tear.

So once these techniques are done, we need to flatten it over all so that you can handle it. The photograph, that paper support has a memory. So you want to be able to reduce that memory by humidifying it and putting it under pressure. So you can add humidification, but you're not getting the object wet. You don't want to get the object or the photograph wet. It will start to feel limp, and then we put it under light pressure. Usually it stays under weight for about a week. It's with a thick blotting paper that helps absorb the humidity, because if you put the photograph or the gelatin right against the blotting paper, it will stick, and then you're in trouble.

So once the photograph has been flattened, we want to create a preservation housing. And the preservation housing in this case is we're creating a polyester L-sleeve. But if you have a unique format like this panorama, you're going to have to make it yourself. So I'm putting the two pieces of polyester together, welding it on the short side and the long side. And once that housing is complete, I trim it so it looks nice, and then put the photograph in there, and then return it this way to the client, who can easily handle it and look for their loved one in the panorama.